Bucha Deputy Mayor Taras Shapravskyi said 50 of the dead residents found after Russian forces withdrew from the town late last week were the victims of extrajudicial executions by Russian troops, and those responsible accused Moscow of war crimes.
The Russian Defense Minister said in a statement on Sunday that all photos and videos released by Ukrainian authorities alleging “crimes” committed by Russian Buca troops were a “provocation” and that no Buca resident had suffered violence from Russian troops.
Reuters was unable to independently verify who was responsible for killing the dead residents.
But three bodies seen by Reuters reporters on Sunday – the corpse with its hands tied and two others whose hands were not tied – bore bullet holes in the head matching what Bucha mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk and his deputy said described as executions.
In all three cases, there were no signs of other significant injuries elsewhere in the body. The three people who were shot in the head were male and all three were dressed in civilian clothes.
On the body of the person whose hands were tied, there were powder burn marks on his lips and face. Such marks can mean that a person was shot at point-blank range.
The cloth used to bind the man’s hands appeared to be a white armband. Russian troops, when they were Bucha, required local residents to wear these armbands to identify themselves, according to a woman who still wore hers.
Reuters sent questions to the Kremlin and the Russian Defense Ministry about the bodies its reporters had witnessed, but received no immediate response.
The Russian Defense Minister, in his statement on Sunday, said: “During the period when the Russian armed forces controlled this settlement, not a single local resident suffered from violent actions.” He added that before withdrawing on March 30, Russian troops delivered 452 tons of humanitarian aid to civilians in the kyiv region.
Shapravskyi, the deputy mayor, said some 300 people were found dead after the Russian withdrawal. Of these, he said authorities have so far recorded 50 executions carried out by Russian forces. Reuters could not independently verify these figures.
The others were killed in crossfire, where their deaths are so far unexplained.
“Any war has rules of engagement for civilians. The Russians have demonstrated that they knowingly kill civilians,” said Fedoruk, the mayor, showing Reuters reporters one of the bodies.
SHALLOW TOMB
Reuters also spoke to a local resident who described a person found dead after Russian troops arrested him, and another resident who described two people found dead with a single gunshot wound to the head.
Reuters was unable to independently verify the descriptions provided by residents.
Sobbing as she gestures towards her husband’s shallow grave, a glass of vodka topped with a cracker resting on the freshly dug earth, Tetyana Volodymyrivna recounted an ordeal at the hands of Russian troops in this town 37 km (23 miles) ) northwest of Kyiv.
She and her husband, a former Ukrainian marine, were dragged out of their apartment when Russian troops set up their command center in their building. The soldiers held them prisoner in the building where they lived.
She said that the Russians, when they arrived in the city, asked people who they were and demanded to see documents.
She said a Russian forces fighter who she said was from Russia’s semi-autonomous region of Chechnya warned he was going to “cut us up”. She did not say how she knew he was Chechen.
Reuters sent a request for comment to the office of Chechnya leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a Kremlin loyalist, but received no response.
Tetyana, who identified himself by name and surname but did not give his surname, was released after being detained for four days. Her husband was nowhere to be found for several days, until she was told that there were bodies in a basement stairwell of the building where she and her husband lived.
“I recognized him from his sneakers, his pants. He looked mangled, his body was cold,” she said. “My neighbor still has a photo of his face. He had been shot in the head, mutilated, tortured.”
Reuters reviewed the photo, which showed the face and body were severely mutilated. The news agency could not determine if there was a gunshot wound.
After recovering her husband’s body, she and some neighbors buried him in a garden plot near their apartment building, just deep enough “so the dogs wouldn’t eat it”, she said.
Another corpse still lay in the stairwell where her husband was found, a Reuters reporter saw. Local residents covered the body with a bed sheet as a sign of dignity.
“A SHOT IN THE LEFT HE”
Around the corner, another grave contained the remains of two men, a resident told Reuters. She said the men were taken away by Russian troops. She did not witness their killing. When the bodies were found, both had been shot in the left eye, she said. Six other residents gathered near the tomb declared his account to be correct.
One of the residents said she recognized one of the dead men as a tenant of the apartment complex, who she said was a retired member of the Ukrainian military.
Bucha was captured in the days immediately following the February 24 invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces that surged south, seizing the disused Chernobyl nuclear reactor and heading for the capital.
Bucha and the northern outskirts of nearby Irpin was the point where the Russian advance from the northwest was halted after encountering unexpected fierce resistance from Ukrainian forces.
The area was the scene of some of the bloodiest fighting in the battle for the capital, until Russian forces withdrew from northern kyiv. In late March, Moscow said it was regrouping to focus on the battles in eastern Ukraine.
On Saturday, Ukraine said its forces had recaptured all areas around kyiv and now had full control of the capital region for the first time since the invasion.
Bucha’s roads were littered with unexploded ordnance on Sunday. Rockets erupted from the tarmac near burnt-out tank wrecks. Some residents have chalked “Caution, landmines” on their walls after finding booby traps or missiles in their homes.
A resident, Volodomir Kopachov, said Russian troops planted a rocket system in a vacant lot next to his garden. When a Reuters reporter visited, boxes of ammunition and used shell casings were strewn on the ground.
Kopachov, a Ukrainian dog breeder, was in mourning.
He said his 33-year-old daughter, her boyfriend and a friend were shot dead by Russian troops after firing a party banner in their direction days before the withdrawal. Kopachov’s wife said they pulled the banner as a gesture of defiance, not with the intention of hurting the soldiers.
“It’s so hard to go through all this,” said the 69-year-old, as 10 Alabai, a prized breed of Central Asian sheepdog, barked in his garden.
Kopachov said he had not ventured beyond the gates of his house for a month. “They were killing [les gens] on the spot. Nobody asked: ‘Who are you, why are you outside?’. The men were just downcast.”
The Kremlin denies invading Ukraine, saying it is carrying out a “special military operation” to degrade Ukraine’s armed forces and that it is targeting military installations rather than carrying out strikes on civilian areas.
Speaking in Hostomel, near Buca, on Sunday, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said: “This is not a special operation, these are not police actions… These are inhumans who simply committed crimes against civilians.”
(This story corrects spelling in paragraph 3).