On March 5, Russian troops re-entered and occupied Bucha, a town in the northern suburbs of Kyiv. From that moment until the liberation of the city at the start of April, the civilians of Bucha experienced probably the greatest ordeal in their lives. The once thriving city is now in ruins, with burnt military equipment and hundreds of civilians killed right on the streets.
Russians killed just like that, for no reason – judging by the photo evidence, they just shot cars and cyclists on the streets. The bodies laid for weeks unburied. Moreover anyone could be killed for trying to remove them. They also killed by order, according to the preliminary plan. They sought by lists (for activists, veterans, representatives of local authorities), or simply by subtle signs and tatoos, by Ukrainian symbols. They can kill you just because you are Ukrainian. Before the murder, they often tied their hands.
Tatiana, a woman about 60 years old, from an ordinary village house, there are dozens of them on the street. She witnessed how the Russians killed her neighbors. First, an older man was shot, he was under 70 years old, who could see almost nothing without optics, was almost blind. The Russian military deliberately went around all the yards and killed according to plan, looking for specific people or outward signs. The man’s fault was that the occupiers saw him in camouflage pants from his son, who worked as a security guard.
The military continued to search the house, found something, and shot the man in front of the woman. However, they did not stop there, they took the grandson, a 16-year-old teenager. Despite the woman’s request that he was still a child, the Russians took him anyway. A woman was looking for him nearby, among the eight dead bodies lying down the street. In fact, the Russians shot the teenager, tried to burn the body and buried him under the landing.
Another woman, Nadezhda, a little older than Tatiana, lives on the street nearby. She told how she was upset that she witnessed the murder of a neighboring family and cannot prevent it. She does not even know the reason, a Russian soldier forced her with his gun to sit in her yard and not move. Her neighbors who came to her half an hour earlier were shot dead.
After Bucha’s deoccupation, people have no choice but to continue living.
Tatiana says that she will not go to Kyiv to visit her daughter, because of her garden. “I love the garden. It needs to be planted. The onions is already growing.” – she says. The living ones will try to overcome the horrors that will come to them for many years. And the dead are no longer afraid of anything.