A mother killed by a sniper while walking with her family to fetch a thermos of tea. A woman held as a sex slave, naked except for a fur coat, locked in a basement before being executed. Two sisters killed in her house. Her corpses spent weeks lying on the floor.
In Butcha, a city located a few kilometers west of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, was the largest civilian population victimized by the Russian attack since the first day of the war, 24 February. Russian special forces who arrived on foot, through the forest, shot at cars on the road. An armored column approaching the city shot at a woman in her garden, killing her.
But these initial cruelties are insignificant compared to what followed.
When the Russian advance on Kiev met fierce resistance and stalled, civilians said, enemy occupation of Butcha turned into a campaign of terror and revenge. When the defeated and demoralized Russian army finally withdrew, it left behind a grim picture: bodies of dead civilians strewn across the streets, in basements or backyards, many with gunshot wounds to the head, some with their hands tied behind their backs.
New York Times reporters and photographers spent more than a week with city officials, medical examiners and dozens of witnesses in Butcha, uncovering new details of atrocities committed against civilians. The NYT documented the bodies of nearly three dozen people at the very places where they were killed — in their homes, in the woods, set on fire in an empty parking lot — and uncovered the story behind many of the deaths. The newspaper also witnessed more than a hundred body bags in a mass grave and in the city’s cemetery.
Evidence suggests that the Russians killed in a frenzied and sometimes sadistic way, driven in part by a thirst for revenge.
Unsuspecting civilians were shot down as they carried out the simplest of everyday activities. A retired teacher known as Tia Liuda (Liudmila) was shot dead on the morning of March 5 when she opened the door of her home on a small side street. More than a month later her body was still on the floor, across the door.
Her younger sister Nina, who was mentally handicapped and lived with her, was dead, lying on the kitchen floor. It was unclear how she died.
“They took the territory and kept shooting, so that no one came close,” said a neighbor of theirs, Serhiy. “What would someone kill a grandmother for?”
Welder Roman Havriliuk, 43, and his brother Serhiy Dukhli, 46, sent the rest of their family out of Butcha as the violence escalated, but they themselves insisted on staying. They were found dead in their backyard. “My uncle stayed for the dog and my father stayed for the house,” said Havriliuk’s son Nazar. The body of an unknown man lay on the ground near them, and the family’s two dogs were also riddled with bullets.
“They couldn’t defeat our army, so they killed ordinary people,” said Nazar, 17.
Butcha was one of Kiev’s most prized suburbs. Nestled between pine forests and a river, the city had modern shopping malls and new residential complexes, as well as older-style summer cottages nestled among gardens and trees. Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov had a summer house in the city.
Days after Russian troops entered Butcha, the Ukrainian army fought back, attacking a Russian column and setting fire to tanks and armored vehicles. Up to 20 vehicles were consumed by a massive fireball that set houses on fire along one entire side of the street. Some Russian soldiers fled, crossing the forest with their wounded.
A few days later Russian reinforcements arrived, already in an aggressive mood. They set up their base in an apartment building behind Escola No. 3, the main secondary school, on Vokzalma Street (Station Street), and posted a sniper on top of a building under construction. They set up their headquarters further south, in a glass factory on the Butcha River.
The residents of Butcha had been sheltering from Russian missile and artillery attacks, many of them sleeping in basements and basements, but some venturing outside every now and then to fetch water or look at the damage. The shelling had been sporadic, and much of the Russian artillery fire had passed over Butcha and was aimed at Irpin, the neighboring town.
On March 5th, a Russian sniper began shooting at anything that moved south of the school.
Aunt Liuda was killed in the morning. That afternoon, a father and son opened the gate of their home to walk down their street, Iablunska, or Apple Tree Street. “My son was shot,” said his father, Ivan. “I was beside him. It would have been better if they had shot me.”
He asked that only his first name be published. After weeks under Russian occupation, many residents of Butcha were terrified and asked that their names not be published, fearing reprisals at a later stage.
Yablunska Street, where they lived, became the deadliest stretch for civilian passersby. In early March, a man on a bicycle was shot down by gunfire from an armored vehicle, as a video recorded by Ukrainian forces showed. Satellite images showed that as of March 11 there were at least 11 bodies strewn across the streets and sidewalks.
It didn’t take long for it to become clear why the bodies had been abandoned for so long.
Soldiers began to search the houses and forbade residents to leave. “They were going from yard to yard,” said mechanic Valeri Yurchenko, 42, who lived near the river. A Russian commander recommended that he not go out on the street. “We have orders to fire,” the commander said.
Ukraine’s human rights commissioner, Liudmila Denisova, said she has recorded appalling cases of sexual violence committed by Russian soldiers in Butcha and elsewhere, including one in which a group of women and girls were held captive in the basement of a house for 25 days. . Nine of them are now pregnant, the commissioner said.
Denisova speculated that the violence was committed as revenge against the Ukrainian resistance, but also that Russian soldiers use sexual violence as a weapon of war against Ukrainian women.
In the last week of March, Ukrainian forces mounted a counterattack to retake Kiev’s northwest suburbs. Fighting intensified heavily at Butcha, and Russian units prepared to leave.
One of his last acts was to execute his inmates or anyone else who got in his way. In a clearing on a street, police later found the dumped and burned bodies of five members of the same family, including two women and a child.
In accounts that were corroborated by a local military commander, residents of Butcha said that a Ukrainian ambush in which a Russian armored vehicle and supply truck were blown up led to a wave of Russian violence against civilians.
In the days following the retake of Butcha by Ukrainian forces, police and cemetery officials began to collect corpses scattered around, placing the bodies wrapped in black bags in a white van. Officials scrawled “200,” a word used in Soviet military slang for war dead, on the back door of the van.
By April 2 they had collected over a hundred bodies, and by Sunday the number of bodies had risen to over 360 in the Butcha district. Ten of the dead were children, officials said.
Among those 360, more than 250 were shot or killed by projectile fragments and were included in a war crimes inquiry, Ruslan Kravtchenko, regional prosecutor in Butcha said in an interview. Many other people died of hunger, cold and lack of medicines and medical care, among other reasons.
Russian brutality has revolted most of the world and hardened the West’s resolve to oppose President Vladimir Putin’s bloody invasion.
“The degree of brutality of the Russian Federation’s army of terrorists and executioners knows no bounds,” wrote Commissioner Denisova. She appealed to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to “take into account these facts of Russian war crimes in Ukraine”.
According to local residents and investigators, some of the worst crimes, including torture, rape and execution of detainees, were committed by soldiers stationed at the glass factory in Butcha. Regional prosecutor Kravtchenko said investigators had found a computer server left behind by the Russians that could help them identify those responsible for the violence.
“We’ve already drawn up lists and data from the military,” Kravtchenko said. “That’s over a hundred pages of data.”
Ukrainian investigators also have a huge body of information from organizations, citizens and journalists who have posted more than 7,000 videos and photos on a government internet hub, warcrimes.gov.ua, according to state prosecutor Irina Venediktova.
“What’s important here is that they’re done in such a way that they constitute admissible evidence in a court of law,” she said. “There are 7,000 documents with video evidence, in photos.” But there is still a long and laborious identification process ahead.
