Neither electricity nor gas
Mayor of Bucha asks for help
04/05/2022 10:58 am
“If you can, come back!” With these words, the mayor of Butscha turns to doctors and employees of aid organizations. In a video message, he also describes how the streets of his city “turned into a concentration camp”.
A few days after the massacre of civilians became known, the mayor of the devastated Ukrainian town of Bucha asked for help. In particular, he is asking doctors and employees of various utility companies to return to Bucha, Anatoly Fedoruk said in a video message.
There is currently neither electricity nor gas in the suburb of the capital Kyiv, but this critical infrastructure should be restored as quickly as possible with the help of specialists. “If you can, come back!” The pictures from Bucha, where many bodies of residents were found on the streets after the withdrawal of Russian troops, have been causing horror around the world since last weekend.
Ukraine is convinced that Russian soldiers committed serious war crimes in the small town. “My people were shot for fun or out of anger,” Fedoruk told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. “The Russians shot at everything that moved: passers-by, people on bicycles, cars with the inscription ‘Children’. Bucha is the Russians’ revenge for the Ukrainian resistance.” Because Russia hadn’t made any progress militarily, “a safari to civilians was organized,” he said. Parts of the city had been “converted into a concentration camp” with no food or water. “Anyone who ventured out there to look for food was shot.”
Moscow denies this and claims to have left the city on March 30th. Russia accuses Ukrainians of cover-up. Fedoruk, for example, did not mention the many bodies in his first message on April 1 about the liberation of Bucha. “Absurd,” said the mayor to “Corriere della Sera”.
“The city was sealed off from the outside world for weeks. It wasn’t until we freed it that we could see what happened and understand the scale of the horror. As soon as I saw it, I told it.” On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj Bucha visited and spoke of a “genocide”.