From Boutcha to Kramatorsk, Ukrainians pay homage to their dead
“Remembering Russian Crimes” : in Boutcha, a city near Kiev hard hit by the Russian occupation, or near the front, in Kramatorsk (East), Ukrainians paid tribute on Friday to the victims of the war which broke out a year ago. In the church of Saint-André de Boutcha, a small photographic exhibition recalls the dark hours experienced by this martyred city in the north-western suburbs of the Ukrainian capital.
It is next to the building, still partially under construction, that a mass grave had been dug to hastily bury the victims of the occupation before its liberation by the Ukrainian forces, at the end of March 2022. “We are gathered to remember Russian crimes, terror”declares an Orthodox priest during a ceremony “for peace in Ukraine and its defenders”in front of a hundred parishioners who came to meditate.
Butcha is a symbol of Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine; the latter announced that they had discovered hundreds of corpses of civilians there.
Read also: In Boutcha, a martyr city on the outskirts of kyiv, the slow return to life
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“We stayed there with my wife for a month, during the occupation. We did not move, we saw all these horrors”says at the exit of the church, the reddened eyes, Serguiï Zamostiane, a professor with the retirement of 62 years. “In the cemetery, more than fifty of our soldiers are already buried, and 450 civilians [que les Russes] shot (…). For what ? Explain to me, why? »questions the sexagenarian, who says he believes “in victory” Ukrainian.
He says he lived in Yablonska Street, where the bodies of about twenty civilians had been discovered, immediately after the end of the occupation.
Nearly 700 kilometers east of Bucha, Kramatorsk also buried its dead. This town in Donbass is located very close to the front and Bakhmout, where Ukrainian forces have been resisting the assaults of the Russian army for months. Under a gray sky, Mykhaïlo Sikirine was buried in a coffin in the yellow and blue colors of Ukraine. A member of the national guard, the 30-year-old soldier was killed on February 18 during a bombardment while he was in a trench in Chypylivka, in the Luhansk region. “He died for the independence and sovereignty of Ukraine”declares the priest at the foot of the tomb: “It is the greatest sacrifice to which any man aspires”, he adds. In unison, three comrades of the buried soldier then fire three shots in the air each. “It is thanks to the actions of these soldiers that we are here safe and alive”says the priest, watching Ukrainian flags flutter above twenty-one other graves dug in a recent cemetery.