Ukraine accused Russia of committing war crimes in Bucha, a suburban town close to Kyiv, with reports from news agencies claiming that Russian forces killed civilians and committed war crimes.
Bucha and Irpin are Ukrainian suburban towns close to the capital Kyiv. An AFP report says that Bucha was captured by Russia two days after Russian president Vladimir Putin declared a ‘military operation’ in Ukraine. Ukrainian forces say that they have only captured the city on April 1 and on capturing the city they have found bodies of civilians strewn about on the streets of Bucha and some hurriedly buried with their hands and feets protruding from the makeshift graves.
A Reuters report says that its correspondents saw bodies lying on the streets of the town, which is 37kms from Kyiv. The correspondents reported that those bodies were strewn about a church in the suburban Ukrainian town. Hours later private satellite company Maxar released pictures of a 45-foot-long trench dug into the grounds of a Ukrainian church. The Reuters report could not verify whether the bodies and church shot by Maxar’s satellites were the same one their correspondents in Bucha visited.
Speaking to the Economist, General Sir Richard Barrons said that the atrocities show that the Russian soldiers who were stationed in Bucha reveal a failure in leadership and a loss of morale. He said that these acts will be counterproductive and reduce the space for dialogue, paving way for more military support from the West for Ukraine.
Bucha has again cast a blow to the peace talks between Ukrainian and Russian delegations. Russian state media RT.com said that Russia will convene an extraordinary meeting of the UN Security Council over the incident. Russia put the blame on Ukrainian radicals and said that the event was staged to force the Western media to claim that Russia was committing war crimes.
French president Emmanuel Macron, Polish president Mateusz Morawiecki and United Nations secretary-general António Guterres all voiced their protests. Macron even said ‘the Russian forces will have to answer for their crimes’. Others have called for an independent inquiry.
Serhiy Kaplishny, a coroner in Bucha, who spoke to news agency the New York Times, said that his team collected more than 100 bodies during and after the fighting and the Russian occupation. Kaplishny told the news agency that he arranged for a local backhoe operator to dig a mass grave in the yard of an Orthodox church, according to the NYT report. He said that the morgue was intolerable and more so because of no electricity and refrigeration. It remains unclear if these three western media outlets visited the same churchyard where bodies lay, hastily buried, with legs, arms and fingers protruding out of the mud.
Russian forces also suffered during the attack in Bucha. Station Street, a part of the suburban city, was littered with destroyed Russian tanks and armored vehicles. Beside them lay Russian soldiers who died after coming under a drone attack.
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