In Bucha, grisly work begins of gathering evidence of atrocities

The body of Olga Sukhenko, mayor of the village of Motyzhyn outside Kyiv, lay partially covered by sand, smears of blood visible on the clothing around her neck. Tape had been used to seal off the pit where she had been dumped.

The local official was killed and apparently buried in haste alongside her husband and son during the Russian occupation, according to Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister. Investigators feared Sukhenko’s daughter would be discovered in another grave nearby.

The family are just some of the hundreds of civilians found dead after Russian forces withdrew from around the Ukrainian capital after a month of fierce fighting.

The grisly tour on Monday was designed to show foreign journalists the horrors that Ukrainian forces have uncovered in recent days before investigators remove the bodies and begin the painstaking work of gathering evidence of possible war crimes by Russian troops.

This forensic process will be necessary to counter the Kremlin’s insistence its forces are not responsible for the deaths of civilians — Moscow has instead insisted the atrocities were either staged or perpetrated by Ukrainian forces.

Gerashchenko said the Sukhenko family appeared to have been tortured before being killed.

“The occupiers suspected them of collaborating with our military and giving them co-ordinates on how to aim artillery,” he said, without elaborating on how he knew these details.

The investigators would unearth the bodies completely and dig further to see if others were buried deeper in the pit, Gerashchenko added.

Images and reports of atrocities committed in towns around Kyiv have drawn condemnation around the world. Ukrainian authorities hope it could mark a turning point in the western response to the full-blown invasion of Ukraine launched by Russian president Vladimir Putin on February 24.

European leaders have vowed to impose more sanctions against Russia’s economy and its elite, describing the images as “unbearable” with French president Emmanuel Macron saying “there are very clear indications of war crimes”. US president Joe Biden on Monday renewed his call for an international investigation into war crimes.

The discoveries have also amplified western calls for an embargo on Russian energy and coal, as well as for the supply of more offensive weapons to Ukraine.

Touring Bucha, the town north-west of Kyiv where images that emerged of streets littered with corpses first sparked international outrage, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, wearing body armour, sought to seize on the international demonstrations of sympathy and anger.

“It’s important to show all over the world what the Russian Federation and what the Russian army did here . . . which was just unimaginable,” he told journalists on Monday. He said the killing of civilians qualified as “war crimes” and even “genocide”, a term western leaders have so far refused to use.

“Children were killed, women were raped, and all of this is their [Russian] responsibility and they will be held to account for the acts they perpetrated,” Zelensky said. As he spoke, bodies were still being picked up off the streets, some put into black bags.

An elderly lady and her son insisted on showing two dead bodies in the backyard of their neighbours’ blown-out house. The Russians “are just here on our land”, weeped the woman. “We just want peace.”

Ukrainian authorities showed five bodies found that day in a children’s summer camp in the town’s main park, which the Russian army used as a base. Still visible were the trenches Russian soldiers had built to protect themselves and their armoured vehicles.

Taken out of the basement for a forensic examination, all of the bodies showed serious lesions to their heads and four had their hands tied behind their backs.

“We are starting investigative actions, recovering all the bodies to record how they were killed. Every crime will be investigated,” Gerashchenko said. He added: “We have a lot of interceptions of the occupiers’ conversations about how they say they killed civilians.”

He added that the investigation will be run by the office of Ukraine’s prosecutor-general. “I think we have enough strength here, but if we need some expertise, of course anyone could help us,” he said, expressing scepticism about the effectiveness of international war crimes tribunals.

Iryna Venedyktova, Ukraine’s prosecutor-general, said 410 bodies of civilians had been recovered from areas surrounding Kyiv over the weekend and 140 of those had already been examined by prosecutors while specialists had taken DNA samples.

“On the cleared territories of the Kyiv region there is important evidence of the brutal war crimes of Russia,” she said.

Ukrainian authorities said that more than 50 national police staff and prosecutors are now involved in the investigations in the areas of Kyiv and Chernihiv reclaimed from the Russian forces. The Office of the Prosecutor General said it will increase the number of “investigative operatives to ensure maximum rapid and efficient collection of evidence of war crimes”.

Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, on Monday cast “serious doubt” on the reports of hundreds of murdered civilians in Bucha. “From what we have seen, the video materials mostly can’t be trusted, because specialists from the defence ministry found signs of video manipulation and some fakes or others.”

But Gerashchenko suggested the number of victims to Russian forces might actually end up being much higher. “This is just the beginning,” he said.