The bodies of many civilians have been found in this city near Kiev, where Russians are accused of war crimes. After being deposited in a mass grave, the remains were presented to the population for identification.
After the atrocities, another ordeal: that of identification. A week after the discovery of the Boutcha massacre and the mass graves, near Kiev, the bodies of the killed civilians were presented to the residents of the city to be identified and buried with dignity. Vova is one of these horror witnesses. This Ukrainian, met by BFMTV, recognized his brother, aged 32, among twenty corpses presented by the scientific police on Friday.
“They killed him for nothing, he was just walking down the street. But why?” he complains to our camera.
The corpses of civilians found in the town of Boutcha, recaptured a little earlier by Ukrainian troops from the Russians, were buried on March 10. The district is now working on naming each of its dead after removing them from their mass grave.
“How will my mother bear it?”
The bodies lie on the floor in plastic bags, a simple number makes it possible to distinguish them. “It’s the fourth, you can close the bag,” Vova told a member of the scientific police.
The Ukrainian has just identified his younger brother among the bodies. Slumped, he quickly walks away, his face disfigured by pain. Out of modesty, he steps aside and is comforted by a woman.
“How am I going to tell my mom? How will she handle it? And her 7-year-old daughter? She’s just a kid,” he laments, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Buried in the grounds of a church
The bodies of civilians found in Boutcha will be placed in a cold store after discovery and are now entitled to a burial.
“The morgue was full of corpses, with no electricity. We could no longer keep them in the cold store, so we had to bury them,” said Andriy, a priest of Andriy Pervozvannyi Church.
“The cemetery is outside the city, we couldn’t get to it because of the bombings. We had to find a temporary place, it was the park of our church that was chosen,” he specifies.
A long work for the scientific police
The prosecutors’ men take the bodies out of their suitcases one by one and try to find elements to identify them and find out the circumstances of their deaths.
“The first six bodies have signs of gunshot wounds, the other has shrapnel. Sometimes there are only body parts, they were killed in the street or when they tried to flee in their car,” said Bucha’s prosecutor Ruslan Kravchenko.
Identifying the bodies could take several more days. Hundreds of bodies remain in the mass grave.
Many bodies of civilians were found in Boutcha in early April, sometimes tied up on the streets of several towns on the outskirts of the capital. A massacre described as “war crimes” by Volodymyr Zelensky.
