Bucha: Russian Retreat Reveals Putin War Crimes

Photo by Yan Boechat/VOA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

My God:

Dead civilians still lay scattered over the streets of the Ukrainian country town of Bucha on Saturday, three days after the invading Russian army pulled back from its abortive advance on Kyiv to the southeast.

The smell of explosives still hung in the cold, dank air, mingling with the stench of death.

Sixty-six-year-old Vasily, who gave no surname, looked at the sprawled remains of more than a dozen civilians dotted along the road outside his house, his face disfigured with grief.

Residents said they had been killed by the Russian troops during their month-long occupation.

To Vasily’s left, one man lay against a grass verge next to his bicycle, his face sallow and eyes sunken. Another lay in the middle of the road, a few metres from his front door. Vasily said it was his son’s godfather, a lifelong friend.

Bucha’s still-unburied dead wore no uniforms. They were civilians with bikes, their stiff hands still gripping bags of shopping. Some had clearly been dead for many days, if not weeks.

…

Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk said more than 300 residents of the town had been killed, and a mass grave at one church ground was still open, with hands and feet poking through the red clay heaped on top.

The claims coming out of Bucha are horrific, including claims that the Russians simply executed any man between the ages of 16 and 60. Even if you think those claims are exaggerated, the pictures tell the story. Unarmed civilians dead in the street, some of them with their hands tied behind their backs. Entire city blocks destroyed. A city absolutely ravaged by Putin’s illegal war.

And it’s not like we haven’t seen this before. We saw in Grozny how Putin would flatten a city and deliberately kill civilians and retreating soldiers. We saw in Syria how his puppet would flatten cities and murder civilians. We’ve seen it in Mariupol. We’ve seen it in the attacks on marked civilian targets and suppose evacuation corridors. Now we see the most extreme example of it so far.

Putin’s attack on Ukraine has never been about denazification, liberation or NATO expansion. It’s been about conquering and subjugating a nation he wants to own. And if he needs to murder every last Ukrainian to get it, he will.

For the moment, the Russians have pulled out of Kyiv to concentrate their efforts in the East. It’s possible they’re looking for something they can claim as a victory so that they can end what has turned out to be a disastrous war. But as we move forward, let’s remember the bodies in Bucha. And Mariupol. And Kharkiv. And keep in mind that this won’t be the end for Putin. Once this ends, however it ends, he will turn his eyes to his next atrocity. Maybe a second attack on Ukraine. Maybe Georgia again. Maybe Kazakhstan. Maybe a NATO member.

Because a murderer is who Vladimir Putin is. That is who he has always been. That is who he always will be. And I’ve lost my patience with those who want to pretend he is motivated by anything other than power and bloodlust.