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Ukraine Struggles to Identify Bucha Massacre Victims, Five Months On


BUCHA, Ukraine – It was supposed to be the bright spot on a grim day. Of the dozens of unclaimed bodies recently buried at the Bucha City Cemetery, one has just been identified. The deceased’s family was present and was able to proceed with a full burial. His grave will be marked with his name instead of just a number.

But there is one obstacle. No one could find the body.

In a grisly TV series, as the entire family withers to death at the graveyard in the August heat, grave diggers climb over smelly body bags in the back of a truck, checking the tags. Find the missing body. As they pushed the bodies aside, the deputy mayor, clutching a stack of papers, peered in in silence.

“Somehow, we stepped over him,” said Vladyslav Minchenko, 44, a volunteer grave-collector, shaking his head.

When Russian troops withdrew at the end of March from the area around the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, they left behind traces of more than 1,200 bodies. At least 458 people died in and around the suburban town of Buchalying on the streets, in buildings and gardens, in cellars and in makeshift graves.

In the five months since, cemetery workers and City Council officials in Bucha have carried out their worst duties: collecting and burying the dead after one of the worst massacres. in war. Dozens of bodies remain unidentified or unclaimed.

The scale of the atrocities discovered in Bucha has attracted a great deal of international attention and support. International war crime experts have arrived to help document the killings, and new uniforms have appeared, among them a white hazmat suit and jacket emblazoned with the words “criminal prosecutor” war” in English.

However, for all the outside help, the hard work of collecting and burying The bodies were left to morgue and cemetery staff and a small number of volunteers. The country is still at war, and people are working under air raid sirens and nighttime curfews, with minimal equipment, after the destruction and looting of the Russian army.

There was no electricity or running water for weeks in the suburbs, so Bucha’s morgue was out of business. Once the bodies were collected, they were distributed to five morgues around Kyiv. There are no computers operating on the ground, the data is compiled by hand, on paper.

The job didn’t get any easier.

Mr. Minchenko said more than 50 unburied bodies were in a terrible state of decomposition, Mr. Minchenko said in an interview earlier in August. He complained that after the last queue, he did not He couldn’t get rid of the stench from the white truck marked “Cargo 200” that he used to collect the bodies.

“They should just bury them,” he said.

Bucha City Council finally did so in mid-August, persuading investigators to release more than 47 unclaimed or unidentified bodies from the massacre. They were buried for several days, in three rows at the end of the city cemetery.

On the second day of the burial, mortuary workers in white protective suits pulled 11 bags of bodies out of a refrigerated truck and moved them into flimsy government-issued coffins. . The grave diggers hung the coffins on ropes, and with a little bit of ritual, without practicing respect, they lowered them into the grave.

An Orthodox priest lit incense to bless the graves, as grave diggers bent over the fence, coughing and spitting, heads hanging. Then they closed the truck door and drove off.

Each body is given a number. Bucha deputy mayor, Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivska, said investigators took pictures of each person and took DNA samples so that families could retrieve their loved ones.

“Every number is a person,” she said. “We want to remember everyone. We don’t want anonymous graves.”

Ms. Skoryk-Shkarivska was one of the main keepers of Bucha’s list of the dead. As deputy mayor, and also a war widow – her husband was killed in 2014 during the fight against Russian-backed separatists – she is determined to help families, journalists and war crime investigators find the information they need.

Her team matched the family of Oleksandr Khmaruk, 37, with one of the unclaimed bodies, number 153. Her office arranged for the morgue to set aside the body and let the family come. buried in the area of ​​the cemetery dedicated to the victims of war.

But as the family waited on a bench in the cemetery, flowers in hand, the grave diggers could not find the body bag number 153.

Svitlana Khmaruk, a frail, gray-haired, hijab-wearing elderly woman, said she knew her son had been killed since March. For five months, his body was left in the morgue, the details of his death were incorrectly recorded.

She said the last time she spoke to him was on March 11, when he said there was a shelling so loud that he was lying on the floor most of the time. She begs him to leave but, as a former soldier, he refuses. At the time, she said, it was almost impossible.

When they could not reach him again, she began calling her friends for the news. “They said, ‘Sasha is gone,’ she said. “There were witnesses who saw how he was killed, and the next day people covered his body.”

Her son was killed by Russian troops on March 20 in the center of town. Some time later, his body was dumped near the woods, she said. So many families have put themselves together.

The search for his body took longer. Family members did a DNA test, and then a second one. Khmaruk was eventually sent a photo of his body to her mobile phone and was told he was in a morgue just north of Kyiv.

The morgue told her that Mr Khmaruk had died of a heart attack and that he was found in Vorsel, a western suburb of Bucha. That’s not correct, she said. “He died in Bucha. He was shot in the head,” she said firmly. “I found people there who closed their eyes after death.”

Ms. Skoryk-Shkarivska says the errors are not unusual. A former journalist, she knows from experience the hardships of fighting the Ukrainian government. She said that her husband’s death certificate was incorrectly recorded.

She put mistakes down in the fog of war and the inexperience of some morgue technicians in dealing with casualties on the battlefield.

Despite the mistakes, Ms. Skoryk-Shkarivska said she was confident about Ukraine’s ability to gather evidence and build cases to prosecute war criminals. But the urgent need is to build a national database of war dead and get rid of the paper lists.

“My dream is to digitize all of this,” she said, waving a stack of papers listing the day’s burials. “If we had more computers and iPads to scan and check authenticity, it would speed things up.”

At this point, the mortuary workers reopened the truck and dropped a bag with no tags. Ms. Khmaruk said she wanted to see the body before the coffin was sealed.

The truck driver overturned. He said he put the bag aside that morning and made sure the unmarked one was number 153. The deputy mayor, holding Mrs Khmaruk in his arms, said she supported his request to see his body. grandma. The grave diggers adamantly refused.

Out of her view, behind the truck, they had unlocked the bag. “One hundred and fifty-three, the card is inside,” they exclaimed in relief. “Glory to God.”

The process followed quickly. The coffin was loaded into a van. As family and friends gathered at the graveyard, still holding their flowers, the men took off their hats and the women crossed themselves.

“Shall we pray?” asked the priest.

Oleksandr Chubko contribution report.



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