The Wall Street Journal documented the carnage Russian troops left behind as they withdrew from the Kyiv suburbs last week. The Journal’s report from Bucha, where Ukrainians are discovering corpses of civilians strewn across the city, conveys the sheer horror of Russian-perpetrated war crimes just being unearthed:
“There are six dead people in my yard,” said a woman. “They were buried because we were not allowed to take them somewhere.”
Onto a rise past a grassy basketball court, a row of bodies was visible in a hole in the ground through a slit in a concrete carapace, eight or nine torsos wrapped in plastic, faces newly lifeless, yet to gray in decay.
A man looking on said that he and others had found a woman dead behind her bullet-riddled apartment door.
Down the road from city hall, behind St. Andrew’s Church, a hole held a pile of bodies, thrown any which way. From the dirt tossed upon them appeared an elbow, a knee, the sole of a running shoe. One body was wrapped in a plastic shopping bag, white with red roses.
The WSJ also published gruesome images of the scene: an incinerated corpse, Ukrainian volunteers moving bodies in plastic bags, the bodies of an elderly couple buried partially by Russian troops.
The Journal’s dispatch is only one report from the area, and other horrors have yet to be fully accounted for. The number of people executed by Russian forces is in flux, though early reports said that some 280 people were buried in a mass grave.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, surveying the aftermath on a visit to Bucha yesterday, said that Russia’s actions amounted to “genocide,” a call that Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki echoed. President Biden, speaking to reporters this morning, rejected that label but said that Russian president Vladimir Putin should face trial for war crimes.
Already, revelations of the mass killings are spurring some renewed action by Western countries, including some European countries’ expulsion of Russian spies and a U.S.-led campaign to suspend Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council.
Ukrainian officials say what they really need are weapons with which to liberate Russian-occupied territory. As more Russian atrocities are unearthed, transferring tanks, planes, and other weapons requested by Kyiv might become more politically feasible.
And more Russian atrocities are certain to be unearthed, as bodies are found in cellars and other sites where Russian forces murdered ordinary people.
Ukrainian prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova said on Ukrainian television today that despite the horror of what took place in Bucha, the death toll in the city of Borodyanka, another Kyiv suburb, is even worse.