Ukraine: in Boutcha, “when I was able to go out, there were body parts everywhere”

Russian tanks entered the city, 25 km north of the capital Kyiv, on Sunday. The Ukrainians managed to resist, but the victory remains precarious, the enemy artillery is only three kilometers away.

Apart from a few rare automatic weapons fire and intermittent explosions in the distance, loud enough to drown out a discussion but not enough to panic the few passers-by, the town of Boutcha, 25 kilometers north of Kyiv (Kiev), is calm. That in itself is a feat. Russian troops almost seized it on Sunday, the fourth day of the invasion. If they had succeeded, they opened a road, wide and fast, towards the capital.

They were repelled after fighting involving drone strikes and Ukrainian soldiers on the ground. Boutcha has suffered, but, for now at least, the city is holding out. In the central square, surrounded by bars of buildings blackened by artillery strikes, Alexandre, a volunteer armed with a shotgun and a dagger, has the debonair appearance of even temporary victors. “There are no more Russian troops here. Only soldiers hiding in buildings or infiltrators who failed to escape. We catch them every day.”

Russian tanks targeted by drone strikes

Andreï, an engineer in his thirties, was at his window early Sunday morning when the first two Russian tanks arrived in the central square. With his old mobile phone he took a picture of one of them, a painted tank of a “V” white and equipped with a heavy machine gun. “They immediately started shooting at the top floors of the buildings, probably because I…