They were all victims of Russian troops in this village outside the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. Their temporary caskets were together in a tomb. Volunteers dug them up one by one on Sunday – two weeks after the soldiers disappeared. This spring is a bleak season for planting and replanting in towns and villages around Kyiv. Corpses buried in hasty graves during the Russian occupation are now being retrieved for possible war crimes. More than 900 civilian casualties have been found so far. All four bodies here were killed on the same street, on the same day. This is what the local who provided their boxes says. He bent down and kissed the forged crosses of the cemetery as he walked towards the makeshift tomb. The volunteers tried to dig with shovels, then gave up and called an excavator. As they waited, they secretly narrated their work of burying corpses during the monthly Russian occupation and then retrieving them. A young man recalled being discovered by soldiers who showed him weapons and told him “Do not look up” as he dug a grave. The excavator arrived, passing by the wooden house of the cemetery. Soon the smell of fresh earth was heard and the murmur: “Here it is”. A woman appeared crying. Ira Slepchenko was the wife of a man buried here. No one told her they were digging him up now. The wife of another victim arrived. Valia Naumenko looked at the grave and then hugged Ira. “Do not collapse,” he said. “I need you to be well.” The two couples lived next to each other. On the last day before the Russians left the village, soldiers stormed a house. Valya’s husband, Pavlo Ivanyuk, opened the door. The soldiers took him to the garage and shot him in the head, apparently without any explanation. Then the soldiers shouted, “Is anyone else here?” Ira’s husband, Sasha Nedolezhko, heard the shooting. But he thought the soldiers would search the houses if no one answered. He opened the door and he was shot by the soldiers. The men’s coffins were raised with the others and then opened. The four corpses, wrapped in blankets, were placed in body bags. The white lace lining on each coffin was painted red where the head was located. Ira watched from a distance, smoking, but stood next to the empty boxes as the others left. “All this land is in blood and it will take years for it to recover,” he said. She knew her husband was here. Nine days after his temporary burial, he came to the cemetery scattered with picnic tables, following the local custom of spending time with the dead. He brought coffee and cookies. “I want this war to end as soon as possible,” he said. The other corpses were a teacher and a local living alone. No one came for them on Sunday. At home next to the cemetery, 66-year-old Valia Voronec cooked local potatoes in a room heated by wood, without water, electricity or gas. A small radio was playing, but not for long because the news is becoming very depressing. A plate of freshly cut radishes was leaning against the window. A Russian soldier once came running and pointed his gun at her husband after spotting him climbing onto the roof to pick up a cell phone signal. “Will you kill an old man?” Myhailo Scherbakov, 65, replied. Not all Russians were like that. The Voronets said she cried with another soldier, just 21 years old. “You are very young,” she told him. Another soldier told her they did not want to fight. However, he was afraid of them all. But she offered them milk from her only cow. “I felt sorry for them in these circumstances,” he said. “And if you’re good with them, they might not kill you.”
Follow the AP coverage for the war at
