“I felt like I was running away from a concentration camp”

Taras Shevchenko says it was like watching a movie. At 6:00 a.m. on Feb. 24, from the kitchen of his fifth-floor apartment, he saw about 20 Russian helicopters floating in his field of vision as they dispersed paratroopers on the runway at Hostel Airport. “I felt like I was in the movies, you know? I saw all the helicopters, I even picked out the faces of those paratroopers. ”

It was then that the war for Bucha began, 35 miles northwest of the city of Kiev, which is fast becoming synonymous with the most horrific brutality of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Shevchenko, 43, said what happened in the following days was incredible. Tank-overturned bodies became “human carpets” as soldiers shot at anyone standing in their way, including the elderly. Russian snipers fired at men trying to escape into the fields. There are reports of girls being raped and murdered – information that has not yet been independently verified – which puts fear in the bodies of those left behind.

But after the return of Bucha to Ukrainian forces, the allegations of war crimes spread by the occupying Russian troops seem very real as more witnesses to the corpses on the roads and new photographs emerge.

The Ukrainian army this week released images of a torture chamber in the basement, barracks in the adjoining room. A row of corpses was found tied and bound in front of the wall.

The military said one of the victims had a bullet in the knee from a firearm.

After the initial discovery of 20 bodies along the road on Saturday, a mass grave containing 280 bodies was discovered around the city. “They shot all these people,” said Bucha Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk. The Prosecutor General’s Office this week identified the bodies of 410 civilians who had so far been found in the northern suburbs of Kiev after the withdrawal of Russian troops.

The illusion of normalcy

Shevchenko, a kindergarten martial arts coach, lived in North Bucha with his 77-year-old mother, Evdokia Shevchenko. Both remember, everything was silent for three days when Putin’s soldiers arrived. Shevchenko and his mother wondered what to do if they fled. Most of his neighbors living in the building seemed to have an overreaction to those who fled the city on the first day of the invasion.

The normality with which this first 72 hours passed is an illusion.

“We saw the Russians on the third day, in a mass shooting near our building against Bucha’s territorial defense. I decided to stay again because I thought: Where did I go? I had nowhere to go. There was fear, you know. Second, we are not rich enough to completely change our lives in one day. On the third day I realized it was too late to run away anywhere or change anything because the war was literally out of my house, on my street. Tanks were spinning on my street. ”

On the fourth day panic spread. “Everyone was looking on the Internet, in Telegram or Viber chats, for a way out. They ran away with their own cars, risking everything. There are 69 apartments in our building and there are only four families left. ”

Frightened by the fight at her door, her mother Eudokia moved into the cold, damp basement of the building, barely 20 square feet in size. Illuminated by candlelight alone, he joined eight families, including a three-year-old boy and an 86-year-old woman. Evdokia lived there for the next 13 days and nights, with only a toilet bucket. Shevchenko said the older woman might still be in the basement. “He was hugging the relic, he was hugging the relic right there.”

On the fifth day, the gas supply to Bucha was cut off. “People realized that somehow they had to boil water, or boil soup, or something, and we prepared something like an area next to the entrance to the building, only a fire with two bricks on one side.

“We were not allowed to move the corpses”

In a conversation on the edge of the fire, they talked about the recent casualties. “The corpses were lying in the streets, they did not allow us to move.

Shevchenko recounts a murder that could not be independently verified. “Grandpa was walking with his wife. They were about to cross the street and were stopped by several Russians. You know what it’s like for these old people who love to talk and so on. So they shot him and said to the woman: Keep walking. She ran to her husband crying and the soldiers said, “If you want to lie down next to her, shoot us too.” He told her to take the body, but they said, “No, keep walking.” And he kept walking, crying and walking. It happened next to McDonald’s, about 30-40 meters from my house. ”

The bored woman approached Eudokia and the others. It was hard for her to hold her breath to say what had happened to her, to restore the corpse of her desperate husband.

“The old man said something aggressively to the soldier and was shot, and the woman was ordered to leave,” said Evdokia. “I do not know their names, but I used to visit familiar faces in the city, in the shop, in the market; When he was shot, I was outside and heard gunshots. It came out of the basement to get air. ”

Shoot the fugitives

On March 9, Shevchenko concluded that they should leave, but were trapped. “I started looking for all possible ways to escape, but I am glad that I did not try it then, because more brave people than me ran and were shot. Some returned wounded, while others remained in their cars forever, dead. ”

A day later, the Russians agreed to create a humanitarian corridor for the evacuation of civilians. A speech followed, but the Russians said they would only allow women and children.

“We had neighbors downstairs, there was a man among them and I heard that he managed to come out, I thought, if he managed, why not me? On March 11, I woke up at 6:00 am and charged the phone. I found the place of the charger. At least, up to 6% or 7%. Then I ran to the basement to pick up my mother. I remember very well, it was 8:45 in the morning, I ran and shouted, mother, I’m going to run away. We heard gunshots at that time. ”

The first thing his mother came up with was a family pet. “He said, ‘Get Mary?’ I said, ‘Yes, this is on my coat.’ He is a small, fluffy dog ​​that weighs just four pounds. We decided to take my mother out into the corridor and I joined the other men on foot in Romanivka, about 12 miles from Bucha, but there the river and peat bogs were crossed and the temperature that day was -9 ° C.

At 10:00 in the morning Shevchenko started walking. He was walking not on the road but in the fields and with twenty other men. The whistling of bullets between them began. Some were hit and injured. Shevchenko and others tried to hide from what the snipers thought.

“We could not even help the wounded, because when you approach someone who is down, you can be shot,” he said. “It simply came to our notice then. I looked back and to the pages. We neither cared for each other nor paid attention to each other. We were only aroused by some animal instincts that mastered us. I felt like a person running away from a concentration camp. ”

The route took them to Irpin, another city where Russian retreat also left traces of alleged atrocities. Shevchenko headed to Irpin Central Cemetery, crossed the forest, and returned to his hometown of Stoyanka, Romanivka.

“The mayor of Irpin said in advance that they had collected 17 bodies,” Shevchenko said. “I can not say that there were only 17, there were many more. Many of them were sitting in cars. Many were lying on the sidewalks. Many were crushed by tanks. Like the rugs of that animal’s skin, with an unbearable smell. They slept like this for 10 days, more or less.

Shevchenko fled, walked and hid for seven hours in the hope of achieving safety. “Then we saw our soldiers, they knew we were refugees, they asked us to show them our passports and they showed us the way, buses were waiting for us.”

He still does not know how many of the twenty men who left succeeded. “Not only did he not look, but he forgot how he breathed,” he said. “I literally forgot that I was breathing through my nose, I was breathing through my mouth and my heart was pounding, my dog, in his coat, was nervous and stressed.”

He was taken by bus to Kiev’s main railway station, where he met his mother. “When I got to a safe place and some time passed, I felt it was a joke,” Shevchenko said. “He can not be just 15 kilometers away and be calm. I felt like I was in a movie Matrix. It was as if someone had pulled my hair and I was in it for 16 days Matrix And watched how he behaved. Then they pardoned me, took me out of there to a peaceful world, slapped me on the head and told me, okay, survive.

Translated by Francisco de Zarate.

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