Ukrainian authorities have accused departing Russian forces of committing war crimes and leaving behind a “scene from a horror movie”. Bodies with bound hands, close-range gunshot wounds and signs of torture lay scattered across a city on the outskirts of Kyiv after Russian soldiers withdrew from the area.
As images of the bodies, of people whom residents said were killed indiscriminately, began to emerge from Bucha, a slew of European leaders condemned the atrocities and called for tougher sanctions against Moscow. So far, the bodies of 410 civilians have been found in Kyiv-area towns that were recently retaken from Russian forces, Ukraine’s prosecutor-general Iryna Venediktova said.
Associated Press (AP) journalists saw the bodies of at least 21 people in various locations around Bucha, north-west of the capital. One group of nine, all in civilian clothes, were scattered around a site that residents said Russian troops used as a base.
Ukrainian officials laid the blame for the killings, which they said happened in Bucha and other Kyiv suburbs, squarely at the feet of Russian troops, with the president calling them evidence of genocide. But Russia’s defence ministry rejected the accusations as “provocation”.
The discoveries followed the Russian retreat from the area around the capital, territory that has seen heavy fighting since troops invaded Ukraine from three directions on February 24. Troops who advanced from Belarus to the north spent weeks trying to clear a path to Kyiv, but their advance stalled in the face of Ukrainian defence forces.
Moscow now says it is focusing its offensive on the country’s east, but it also pressed a siege on a city in the north and continued to strike cities elsewhere in a war that has already forced more than four million Ukrainians to flee their country and many more to leave their homes. Russian troops rolled into Bucha in the early days of the invasion and stayed until March 30.
With the invading forces gone, residents gave harrowing accounts on Sunday, saying soldiers had shot and killed civilians without any apparent reason. One resident said that Russian troops went building to building and took people out of the basements where they were hiding, checking their phones for any evidence of anti-Russian activity and taking them away or shooting them.
Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, said scores of residents were found slain on the streets of the suburbs of Irpin and Hostomel as well as Bucha, in what looked like a “scene from a horror movie”. “This is genocide,” Mr Zelensky told CBS on Sunday.
But Russia’s defence ministry said in a statement that the photos and videos of dead bodies “have been stage-managed by the Kyiv regime for the western media”. It noted that Bucha’s mayor did not mention any abuses a day after Russian troops left.
Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko called on other nations to immediately end Russian gas imports, saying they were funding the killings. “Not a penny should go to Russia anymore,” Mr Klitschko told German newspaper Bild.
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