Why wasn’t it blown up in February? Antonivka Bridge after the July 20 shelling. Further hits made the Russians’ most important supply route in Cherson impassable.
Image: Imago
Cherson fell to the Russians in the first days of the war. Ukrainian soldiers in a forest were slaughtered. Those affected assume that the Russians knew about them beforehand. A reconstruction.
Dhe four-minute, 13-second video begins harmlessly: you can see a wet road and a sparse forest, the ground is covered with a thin layer of snow. There are large branches on the road. “Here were ours,” says a man’s voice, “here it crashed.” The camera moves into the grove. A bottle is leaning against a trunk. “There’s a Molotov cocktail next to every tree,” says a woman who walks up to the end of the film. The camera pans wide through the grove. Many trees have been splintered, figures lie next to them, lifeless human bodies can be sensed. “Oy, oy, oy,” moans the man. He keeps moving through the grove, filming corpses up close. Some appear complete, one is missing the head, another almost the entire upper body. The camera focuses on the leaf-covered ground. “There are body parts here,” says the male voice from the off.
The footage has been shared on Ukrainian and Russian Telegram channels since March 2. The dead men seen on it belonged to the Ukrainian territorial defenses in Kherson. All sides agree on how they died: On the morning of March 1, Russian troops moved into the city in southern Ukraine. A Territorial Defense group had hidden in the group of trees on the outskirts of town known as Lilac Park. Some of the men had rifles, most were armed only with Molotov cocktails.