Bucha 'Massacre' Aftermath: Over 300 Civilian Bodies Recovered From Battle-Scarred Town | 10 Points

Ukraine on Sunday alleged that Russian forces carried out a "massacre" in Bucha. Images of dead bodies of people lying on the streets of Bucha are being circulated on the internet.

The view of a burnt and destroyed street in Bucha, a suburb north of Kyiv. | Getty Images

New Delhi: Ukraine on Sunday alleged that Russian forces carried out a "massacre" in Bucha, a suburb north of Ukraine's capital, Kyiv. Images of dead bodies of people lying on the streets of Bucha are being circulated on the internet. According to the residents of Bucha, these people were shot by Russian soldiers. 

However, Russia's defence ministry denied Ukraine's allegations, and said that the footage and photographs showing bodies in Bucha were "yet another provocation" by the Ukrainian government, according to a report by news agency Reuters. 

After Ukraine said on Saturday that its forces had reclaimed control of the whole Kyiv region and liberated towns from Russian troops, the images from Bucha started appearing. 

The President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said in a video address on Sunday that it is time to do everything possible to make the war crimes of the Russian military the last manifestation of such evil on Earth, according to media reports.

Denying allegations of invading Ukraine, the Kremlin said that it is carrying out a "special military operation" to degrade the Ukrainian armed forces and that it is targeting military installations, according to media reports.

Bucha Massacre Aftermath

1. The mayor of Bucha, Anatoily Fedoruk, on Sunday accused Russian forces of deliberately killing civilians during their month-long occupation of Bucha. According to a Reuters report, Fedoruk showed a team of the news agency two corpses with white cloth tied around their arms.

The mayor said residents were forced to wear this by fighters from Chechnya, a region in southern Russia. Chechnya has deployed troops to Ukraine to support Russian forces.

According to the report, one dead body had its hand bound by the white cloth. The person appeared to have been shot in the mouth.

Quoting Fedoruk, the Reuters report said that any war has some rules of engagement from civilians. He added that the "Russians have demonstrated that they were consciously killing civilians". 

Fedoruk also said that corpses of executed people still line the Yabluska street in Bucha. He said their hands were tied behind their backs with white 'civilian' rags, and that they were shot in the back of their heads.

The mayor said on Saturday that more than 300 residents of Bucha had been killed.

2. According to a CNN report, the lifeless bodies of at least 20 civilian men line a single street in Bucha. Some were lying face down on the pavement, while others collapsed on their backs.

One man had his hands tied behind his back with a piece of white cloth, while another man was tangled up in a bicycle by a grassy bank, according to the CNN report. A third man was seen lying in the middle of the road, near the charred remains of a burnt car. The report said that the images of the carnage were captured by news agency AFP.

The main body of Russian troops and armour advancing from the northwest was halted at Bucha and the northern outskirts of Irpin, after meeting with unexpectedly fierce resistance from Ukrainian forces, the Reuters report said.

Bodies in civilian clothes were seen lying on the streets of Bucha, or half-buried in soil on Saturday.

Ukrainian soldiers took pictures of each other next to incinerated Russian armoured vehicles. According to the report, hands and other bodies were seen poking out from the soil. 

Bodies were seen lying beside the bicycles people were apparently riding when they were killed. 

3. Aléxander Syrsky, the Ukrainian general in command of Kyiv's defence, said that the prosecutor's office, police, and other agencies were working to de-mine the regions from which Russian forces had withdrawn, to identify bodies and "to identify those who committed these crimes", according to the Reuters report.

4. On Sunday, Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov said at the newly recaptured Hostomel airport that "these are inhumans who simply committed crimes against civilians, raped, killed, shot them in the back of the head. The whole world needs to know about this". 

5. The New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a statement on Sunday that it had found "several cases of Russian military forces committing laws-of-war violations" in Russian-controlled regions such as Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and Kyiv. HRW cited Bucha as one location.

HRW said that it had documented allegations of war crimes in the occupied areas of the Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Kharkiv regions, according to media reports.

The human rights advocacy group said that the allegations include "a case of repeated rape; two cases of summary execution, one of six men, the other of one man; and other cases of unlawful violence and threats against civilians between February 27 and March 14, 2022."

HRW further wrote that in Bucha, Russian forces rounded up five men and summarily executed one of them on March 4.

According to the CNN report, a witness told HRW that soldiers forced the men to kneel on the road and pulled their shirts over their heads, before shooting one of the men in the back of the head.

6. Western leaders are calling for war crimes investigations and increasing sanctions on Russia. United Kingdom Foreign Secretary Elizabeth Truss said in a statement on Sunday that "indiscriminate attacks against innocent civilians during Russia's illegal and unjustified invasion of Ukraine must be investigated as war crimes."
European Union Council President Charles Michael said that further sanctions would be imposed on Russia.

7. The CNN report said that people in Bucha attempted to locate the bodies of their lost loved ones at a mass grave located in the grounds of the Church of St. Andrew and Pyervozvannoho All Saints on Sunday. 

The residents told CNN that the bodies were first buried in the grave in the first few days of the war, and that they believe 150 people are buried in the site. Many of them were civilians killed in the fighting around Bucha, the residents believe.

At least a dozen bodies in body rags piled inside the grave were seen, with some being partially covered, according to the CNN report.

Maxar Technologies said that the first signs of excavation for a mass grave at the church were seen on March 10, according to a Reuters report. Satellite images revealed a 45-foot-long trench dug into the grounds of the Ukrainian church. 

9. On Sunday, Ukrainian presidential advisor Oleksiy Arestovych said that reports emerging from towns in the Kyiv region revealed a "post-apocalyptic picture" of life under Russian occupation, according to the CNN report.

He said this is a special appeal aimed at drawing the world's attention to those war crimes, crimes against humanity, which were committed by Russian troops in Bucha, Irpin and Hostomel. "These are liberated cities, a picture from horror movies, a post-apocalyptic picture," he added.

He further said: "Victims of these war crimes have already been found, including raped women who they tried to burn, local government officials killed, children killed, elderly people killed, men killed, many of them with tied hands, traces of torture and shot in the back of the head. Robberies, attempts to take gold, valuables, carpets, washing machines. It, of course, will be taken into account by the Prosecutor's Office of Ukraine and law enforcement agencies and international criminal courts."

10. Western nations have reacted to the images of dead bodies in Bucha with calls for new sanctions against Moscow. 

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for an independent investigation. 

United States Secretary of State Antony-Blinken described the images as "a punch in the gut", media reports said. 

"You can't help but see these images as a punch to the gut," media reports quoted Blinken as saying on Sunday.

After the massacre in Bucha, Blinken said that the State Department would help document any atrocities the Russian military committed against Ukrainian civilians.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Twitter that the "Bucha massacre was deliberate". Bucha, which lies in a strategically significant cluster of towns on the northwestern outskirts of Kyiv, was captured in the days immediately after the invasion by Russian forces.