The 39th day of war: mass grave of executed civilians in Bucha

UKRAINE - In Brief 03 Apr 2022 by Dmytro Boyarchuk

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Shock and fury. Russians withdrew from Bucha and Hostomel, two satellites of Kyiv which faced the hottest fights in the battle for Kyiv. But little joy was derived from this withdrawal. The horrors Ukrainian soldiers saw when they entered the towns would make you shudder. Corpses of civilians with tied hands shot on the streets. Cars with dead children and women – they tried to escape this hell. Late in the night there was an official report about a mass grave of executed civilians with almost 300 bodies. People had talked a lot about atrocities of Russian barbarians in occupied territories – execution of civilians, rapes and widespread looting. But these sounded like “special cases”. The scale of Russian crimes left millions of Ukrainians speechless when the photo evidence from Bucha became public. The West still mistakenly believes that Vladimir Putin is the only author of this war. One even could blame the Kremlin for bombing the Drama Theater in Mariupol with 1500 civilians hiding in it. But the mass execution of civilians in Bucha – this was on the level of field commanders and soldiers. When you read polls about Russians admiring Stalin and treating the dictator as the greatest leader of all times – it sounds like some theoretical fallacy. But this fallacy in millions of brains eventually translated into the mass execution of civilians. And the worst news for all of us – Russians believe they are right and they have right to commit all these crimes. Russian chats and social nets nowadays are the windows to hell, with common people sorrowing that Ukraine was not destroyed that fast as promised initially. Evidence from Bucha gives negligible chances for peace talks...