The corpses of at least twenty men wearing civilian clothes lay on Saturday in a street in Boutcha, a town northwest of kyiv that Ukrainian soldiers have just taken back from Russian forces, an AFP journalist noted on the spot.
• Read also: LIVE | 38th day of Russian invasion in Ukraine
• Read also: “We see the Russian military massacring humans every day”
• Read also: “Rapid withdrawal” of Russian forces from the north of the country
One of the men had his hands tied and the bodies were strewn for several hundred yards.
The cause of their death could not be determined immediately, but one person had a large head wound.
In recent days, Russian forces have withdrawn from several localities near the capital after the failure of their attempt to encircle it.
Ukraine announced that Boutcha had been “liberated”, but this city was devastated by the fighting: AFP journalists could see gaping holes caused by shells in apartment buildings and numerous carcasses of cars.
Sixteen of the twenty corpses discovered in a street in Boucha were on the sidewalk or on the edge of the sidewalk. Three were in the middle of the road and another in the courtyard of a house.
All of the dead men were wearing winter coats, jackets or tracksuit tops, jeans or jogging bottoms, and sneakers or boots. Two of them were lying next to bicycles, another next to an abandoned car.
Some were lying on their backs, while others were on their stomachs.
The skin on the faces looked waxy, suggesting that the corpses had been there for at least several days.
“All these people were shot”, “they (the Russians) killed them with a bullet in the back of the neck”, for his part assured AFP the mayor of Boutcha, Mr. Anatoly Fedorouk.
He added that among the inhabitants of his city who perished there are “men and women of all ages”; “What shocked me the most was a boy who was maybe 14 years old.”
Several people found dead have their hands tied with a strip of white cloth, the same one they had used to show that they had no weapons, said Mr. Fedorouk.
“In the street, there are always cars with whole families killed: children, women, grandmothers, men,” he said.
According to him, some were “trying to cross the Boutchanka (a river, editor’s note), to reach the territory” under Ukrainian control.
“As long as the deminers have not come to check them, it is not recommended to pick them up” because they can be trapped, Mr. Fedorouk said on the phone, speaking of the bodies, stressing in passing that “these are the consequences of the ‘Russian occupation, actions’ of the enemy.
“In Boutcha, we have already buried 280 people in mass graves, because it was impossible to do so in the three cemeteries of the municipality, all within firing range of the Russian military,” he added.