The Bucha massacre reveals Russian war crimes in Ukraine to the world
Rights — di Luigi Mastrodonato
Bucha was in Russian hands for weeks. Once liberated, stories emerged of arbitrary executions of civilians, torture and mass graves.
The Bucha massacre reveals Russian war crimes in Ukraine to the world
Bucha was in Russian hands for weeks. Once liberated, stories emerged of arbitrary executions of civilians, torture and mass graves.
- On 1 April, Ukrainian forces recaptured Bucha, a strategically important small town on the route to Belarus.
- When Ukrainian authorities and journalists entered the town, they found streets covered in bodies and mass graves filled to capacity.
- The international community condemned the war crimes and announced new sanctions. Russia cries conspiracy.
For the past few days, events in the town of Bucha have, justifiably, dominated coverage of Ukraine. The small town a short distance from Kyiv has been liberated from Russian occupation, and both the journalists who rushed to the scene and the Ukrainian authorities have been able to piece together what these weeks of living under the occupier were like for the local population.
Torture chambers, dozens of bodies of civilians who died in the street, mass graves. A growing body of evidence and testimony confirms that in Bucha the Russians carried out a massacre that falls squarely within the definition of war crimes. And comparisons of considerable weight have been invoked, such as that of Srebrenica in Bosnia.
The Bucha massacre
Bucha is a town of 30,000 inhabitants located in the western suburbs of Kyiv. Like Irpin, the municipality it borders, Bucha's position is strategic, as it lies along the route from the Ukrainian capital to Belarus, one of the countries from which Moscow launched its invasion. To reach Kyiv, one must pass through Bucha, and it was precisely this town that was one of the first to be seized by the Russian army at the end of February, serving as a staging post from which to advance further into the country.
The vast majority of the local population managed to flee in time, but several thousand remained, and with telecommunications cut off it was practically impossible for weeks to receive any news from there. Then at the end of March the Ukrainian counteroffensive began, which first led to the full recapture of Irpin, and then to the retaking of Bucha itself on 1 April. The arrival of the Ukrainian authorities and journalists, however, revealed a stark reality: a indiscriminate massacre of civilians had been carried out in Bucha. And there are fears that the same is happening in territories still under Russian control.
A video released by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence shows Kyiv's military vehicles entering the town and weaving between numerous bodies lying lifeless in the street. Similar images have been gathered from across the town and show people in civilian clothing dead and abandoned in the street, in some cases with their hands bound and their heads hooded. According to the findings, the great majority of them appear to have been killed at close range, in what look like outright executions.
Mass grave in #Bucha, where apparently 280 people are buried. It appeared because Russians occupied the area around cemetery and morgue, locals say. There were so many bodies and they needed to be buried somewhere. Two rows: one for Russians, the other Ukrainian civilians.
Outside an Orthodox church, a large mass grave was discovered, visible even in satellite images. According to statements by the mayor of Bucha and the testimony of several journalists, it contains approximately 280 bodies, either uncovered or wrapped in bags, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. The American newspaper the New York Times spoke with a local doctor who recounted how, in the early days of the Russian occupation, he had requested that the mass grave be created because the morgue could not accommodate all the bodies, also due to refrigeration problems caused by the power outage. Moreover, of the 57 bodies buried in the town cemetery during the first days of the Russian occupation, only three were soldiers.
A martial arts teacher told the British newspaper the Guardian of elderly people killed by the Russian occupiers simply for having left their homes without permission, while the Ukrainian army published images of a torture chamber set up in a basement, inside which was a row of lifeless bodies propped against the wall with their hands tied. The British newspaper the Economist reports on bodies of civilians found with full shopping bags at their sides, apparently killed for the sole reason of having gone out to look for food in a town that had been without gas or electricity for weeks.
International reactions
The international community and non-governmental organisations are following the situation in Bucha closely. As written by Pierre Haski, "sometimes, in the course of a war, there is one massacre too many, the one that changes the course of history." What happened in Bucha could be one such moment and lead to a stronger response against Moscow.
Human Rights Watch has released a document containing evidence that Russia committed war crimes in Bucha (and elsewhere). In particular, it refers to an incident on 4 March in which Moscow's soldiers forced several hooded civilians to kneel before shooting them in the back of the head in the middle of the street. Amnesty International, through its Italian spokesperson Riccardo Noury, called for an independent investigation, evoking "the worst images of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in the early 1990s." In recent hours, an increasingly insistent parallel is indeed being drawn with the Srebrenica genocide, when in 1995 thousands of Bosnian Muslims were killed and thrown into mass graves by the army of Ratko Mladić, the "Butcher of the Balkans".
The word genocide in relation to the events in Bucha was used in no uncertain terms by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who described Russian soldiers as "murderers, torturers and rapists." The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, said he was "deeply shocked" by the images circulating, while NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg spoke of a brutality against civilians not seen in Europe for decades. And from French president Emmanuel Macron to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, as well as European Council President Charles Michel, new imminent sanctions against Moscow and independent investigations into ongoing war crimes have been announced. And an intervention by the International Criminal Court is awaited, which could lead to an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin.
Could Putin be held personally responsible for alleged war crimes committed in Ukraine?
“In principle, yes,” @KenRoth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, tells @MehdiRHasan. WATCH:
“In principle, yes,” @KenRoth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, tells @MehdiRHasan. WATCH:
For its part, Russia has dismissed all international indignation over the events in Bucha as mere Western propaganda, denying the authenticity of the videos and going so far as to claim that the individuals shown in them are simply actors.