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Mass grave with 57 bodies in Bucha: Ukrainian official
"Here in this long grave, 57 people are buried," said Serhii Kaplychnyi, who identified himself as head of the rescue services in Bucha and who was organising the recovery of the bodies.
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Bodies lie on a street in Bucha, northwest of Kyiv, as Ukraine says Russian forces are making a (AFP/Ronaldo Schemidt)
F
ifty-seven people were buried in a mass grave in Bucha, a town outside Kyiv recently retaken by Ukrainian forces from Russian troops, a local official said Sunday as he showed AFP the slit trench where the bodies lay.
"Here in this long grave, 57 people are buried," said Serhii Kaplychnyi, who identified himself as head of the rescue services in Bucha and who was organising the recovery of the bodies.
The mass grave is behind a church in the town's centre. Some of the bodies were either unburied or partially buried in the earth.
The mayor of a Ukrainian city on the northern outskirts of Kyiv on Sunday showed journalists dead bodies in an area that, he said, Chechen fighters controlled during the month that Russian forces occupied the city.
The mayor, Anatoliy Fedoruk, showed a Reuters team two corpses with white cloth tied around their arms which - the mayor said - was what residents were forced to wear by fighters from Chechnya, a region in southern Russia that has deployed troops to Ukraine to support Russian forces.
One corpse appeared to have his hands bound by the white cloth, and to have been shot in the mouth.
"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.”
Reuters, which was taken to the scene by Ukrainian authorities, was not immediately able to verify the mayor's allegations.
Russia's defence ministry in Moscow did not immediately reply to a request for comment when asked on Sunday about the bodies found in Bucha.
The Kremlin has denied war crimes in Ukraine. It says its "special military operation" aims to degrade the Ukrainian armed forces and is targeting military installations rather than carrying out strikes on civilian areas.
Asked about separate war crime allegations on March 1, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a conference call with reporters, "We categorically deny this". He dismissed allegations of Russian strikes on civilian targets and the use of cluster bombs and vacuum bombs as fakes.
Defence Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said on March 21 that Russia's operation was being carried out by a professional and well-armed forces and denied Ukrainian claims that Russian forces had hit any civilian objects.
Bucha lies 37 km (23 miles) northwest of Kyiv city centre.
