– I’m in shock, – said UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths, who on Thursday visited Bucha near Kiev. Griffiths saw a mass grave in which people were buried who were killed by Russian troops driven out of the city a few days ago.
Griffiths, the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, concludes his two-day visit to Ukraine on Thursday. On Thursday, among other things, in Bucha, where he met with local authorities and examined the mass grave at the Church of St. Andrew and All Saints, where people killed by Russian troops are buried.
Local officials told Griffiths that some of these people lay on the streets for a long time until the Russians agreed on a grave “somewhere in the center.” About 300 people are buried here. The UN representative was also shown a video of the excavation of the grave with a telephone, which shows that some of the victims’ eyes were burned by a cigarette.
International investigation
A UN spokesman said he was “shocked” and an international investigation was needed. He expressed hope that representatives of the local community would come forward as witnesses.
Among those who told Griffiths about the events of the Russian occupation of Bucha was a man who, he told a reporter, was distributing drugs around the house. However, he was caught by the Russians, they tied our hands behind our backs, blindfolded us, and took away our phone. He already thought that he would be shot, but for some reason this did not happen, although he lay on the street for a long time with his hands tied behind his back.
The elderly man also watched the visit of the UN Under-Secretary-General. He said that when the Russians entered Bucha, he was at home with his wife and son. My son just came to visit them because he had problems with his job. When the Russians entered their apartment, they immediately declared that the son was definitely a military man and they took him away somewhere. What happened to his son after that, he does not know. On Thursday, for the first time since the departure of the Russians, he decided to come to the mass grave in the church of St. Andrzej – this place was visited by a UN delegation.
Liberation of Bucha
Podkievska Bucha was liberated last Friday by Ukrainian forces. From the next day, representatives of the Ukrainian authorities and the media reported the discovery of numerous bodies of civilians killed by the Russians who had previously occupied the city.
Some of the victims, found not only in Bucha, but also in other cities near Kiev, were to be tortured before death. According to Wednesday’s findings, 320 civilians were killed in Bucha during the Russian occupation. Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, 36,000 people lived in the city.
Nevertheless, despite the destruction of some houses, Bucha is slowly reviving – on Thursday, the first passers-by could be seen on the streets, which was not the case on Monday.
On the other hand, in neighboring Bucha Irpin, the damage is much greater. There, on the main street, there are still fragments of a burned-out Russian armored column, which makes it difficult to travel around the city. In some places, corpses still lie on the streets.
“Life Returns to the City”
Huge traffic jams on the access roads, caused, incl. the fact that the high-speed road towards Zhytomyr is partially destroyed and all traffic, incl. to Bucha or Irpin goes along the side roads.
However, if on Monday their trip to Bucha did not pose a problem, and the only problem was frequent checks at checkpoints, on Thursday, due to huge traffic jams, the road from Kyiv to Bucha took the PAP correspondent four hours, although in a straight line, Bucha is located far 24 km from the center of the Ukrainian capital.