Bucha Massacre: At least 57 people were reportedly buried in a mass grave in Bucha, a town on the outskirt of Kyiv recently retaken by Ukrainian forces from Russian troops.
“57 people are buried here in this lengthy grave,” said Serhii Kaplychnyi, who identified himself as the head of Bucha’s rescue services and was in charge of recovery of the bodies of the Bucha Massacre.
The mass burial site is located behind a church in the heart of the town. Some of the bodies were either unearthed or just partially buried.
On Sunday, the mayor of a Ukrainian city on the outskirts of Kyiv showed journalists dead bodies in an area that, he said, Chechen fighters controlled during the month that Russian forces occupied the city.
Anatoliy Fedoruk, the mayor, showed a Reuters team two corpses with white fabric tied around their arms by fighters from Chechnya, a region in southern Russia that has sent troops to Ukraine to help Russian forces.
One of the bodies appeared to have been shot in the mouth and had his hands bound by the white fabric.
“Any war has some rules of engagement for civilians. The Russians have demonstrated that they were consciously killing civilians,” Fedoruk said.
“They practically got a green light from (Russian President Vladimir) Putin for a safari and they were shooting Ukrainian people.”
When questioned about the bodies of the victims of Bucha Massacre discovered in Bucha on Sunday, Russia’s defense ministry in Moscow did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Kremlin has denied any involvement in Ukraine’s war crimes. It claims that its “special military operation” is aimed at degrading Ukraine’s armed forces, and that it is targeting military installations rather than civilian areas.
“We strongly refute this,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on a conference call with reporters on March 1 when asked about other war crime charges.
He denied claims of Russian strikes on civilian targets, as well as the deployment of cluster and vacuum bombs, as fabrications.
Igor Konashenkov, a spokesperson for Russia’s Defense Ministry, claimed on March 21 that the operation was being carried out by a competent and well-armed army, denying Ukrainian assertions that Russian forces had targeted any civilian targets. Bucha is 37 kilometers (23 miles) northwest of Kyiv.
This article was originally published in thejakartapost.com with the title “Mass grave with 57 bodies in Bucha: Ukrainian official – Europe – The Jakarta Post”. Click to read: https://www.thejakartapost.com/world/2022/04/03/mass-grave-with-57-bodies-in-bucha-ukrainian-official.html.
