“YES, THAT is him,” says Zoya Merchynskaya, peering into the drain where her husband’s body had been dumped. “You can see his tattoo.” She steps away and covers her face. She returns and looks down again. Hennadiy Merchynskyi, aged 44, was slumped in a sitting position, immersed in dirty water up to his waist; murdered, it seems, by Russian soldiers. His torso was naked. A black strap was fastened around his neck. “They did not take his ring.” She sounds relieved.
During weeks of fighting, Russian troops in the territory around Kyiv have been pounded by Ukrainian forces. As they fell back from farmsteads and up-and-coming suburbs like Bucha and Irpin, they left behind the wreckage of tanks and armoured cars as well as loot that they could not take with them. But the Russians also left behind evidence of summary executions and random murders—war crimes on a terrible scale. On April 3rd Irina Venediktova, the Ukrainian prosecutor-general, said that the bodies of 410 civilians had so far been found around the capital. Nobody doubts that the final toll will be much higher.
Mr Merchynskyi was killed in the village of Motyzhyn, 50km to the west of Kyiv. He had been a member of the volunteer Territorial Defence Force. Mrs Merchynskaya said that he had been arrested by Russian troops along with an old man who was later released, and that she believed they had killed her husband after finding photographs of destroyed Russian tanks on his phone.
The Russians occupied Motyzhyn on February 26th and left on March 28th. Villagers there say that, during their month-long occupation, some soldiers had been sleeping in a big unfinished villa, in the garden of which Mr Merchynskyi’s remains were found. Two hundred metres away in a wood is a sandy pit where they buried Olha Sukhenko, the mayor of Motyzhyn, her husband, her son and one other man. Locals say the mayor had been arrested on March 23rd.
Their bodies were exhumed soon after Ukrainian control was restored. All appear to have been blindfolded. Ms Sukhenko’s earrings, a ring and her bloodied chest were visible. A local security official said he believed that Russian troops had tried to get the mayor to cooperate with them. When she refused, they murdered her and her family.
General Sir Richard Barrons, who commanded Britain’s joint forces until 2016, says that the evidence of civilian abuses by Russian forces “reveals a failure of leadership at all levels, a collapse in morale, a failure of training in the most fundamental rules of war, and probably above all a failure of collective and self-discipline in the face of the staunch resistance.” The outcome, he says, will be militarily and diplomatically counter-productive: “to redouble Ukrainian resistance, spur on Western military support for sanctions and military aid, and significantly reduce the space for dialogue.”
Russia’s ministry of defence declared that the accusations about Bucha were fake, issuing a statement which said that “all the photos and videos published by the Kyiv regime in Bucha are just another provocation”. It branded them a “hoax” designed to mislead the Western media. But going by Russia’s conduct in recent wars, the killings in Ukraine are all too familiar.
Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister, retorted that: “Putin's rampant violence is wiping out innocent families and knows no bounds. Those responsible for these war crimes must be held accountable. We will tighten sanctions against Russia and…support Ukraine even more in their defence.” Charles Michel, president of the European Council, has promised yet more sanctions on Russia and more support for Ukraine. Tony Blinken, America’s secretary of state, called the photographs of Russian atrocities, “a punch to the gut”. The Washington Post has quoted officials in the Biden administration who intend to respond to the outrages with tougher sanctions, too.
The killings cast yet more doubt on the nature of Russia’s military modernisation. In the 1990s the country’s armed forces were a post-Soviet wreck, starved of resources, bedevilled by corruption and infected by bullying. Conscripts were still stripped of dignity and abused. That was supposed to have changed after years of reform following the Russo-Georgian war of 2008. The size of the army shrank, and it contained more professional soldiers.
None of that supposed progress was to be seen on April 3rd in Bucha, in the north-western outskirts of Kyiv. The barricades get bigger the nearer you get to former Russian positions: sand, tyres, concrete, then cement mixers. An upturned digger stands at the entrance to the suburb, daubed with the message “Welcome to Hell”. Opposite, lying by the roadside, is the corpse of an elderly bearded man who went shopping at the wrong time. The contents of his shopping bag are strewn over the verge. Assam tea, yoghurt, wine glasses, green peas—a glimpse into the life of a man cut short by an incoming missile.
Corpses are still scattered over Bucha’s streets, two days into a police operation to collect them. The local authorities say that at least 280 have been buried in a makeshift mass grave. About 30 bodies, some in black bags, were still left exposed.
A day earlier, reporters had seen bodies, apparently of civilians, littering the roads, up to 20 in one street. Locals say that Russian troops had shot them for no reason.
The Economist was able to verify reports of what appear to be summary executions. Nine bodies lay at the side of a builder's yard, and another two on the road linking Bucha with Irpin. All had puncture wounds to the head, the chest or both. At least two of the bodies had their hands tied behind their backs. From the smell of the decomposing bodies, they had been there for some time–giving the lie to Russian claims that the killings were carried out by Ukraine, which liberated Bucha on April 1st. Serhiy Kaplichny, director of the municipal burial service, says he knew one of them. His friend worked as a driver. “He wasn’t in the army or anything,” he says, fighting back tears. “His only crime was not immediately accepting Russky mir [Russian World].”
There are those in Bucha who say that the Russian soldiers were polite. “Some of them even said sorry,” says one. However, an elderly woman queuing for food and medicine at the central hospital on Energetykiv Street cries as she remembers the five-week occupation. “We tied white ribbons to our arms so they wouldn't shoot,” she says. Nelya Lytvynenko, aged 82, branded Russian soldiers “Nimtsy” or “Germans”. “What else would you call them?” she hisses.
The Conflict Intelligence Team, an investigative group, says that the Russian units involved in Bucha were likely to have come from Russia’s Eastern military district, or from one of the other formations involved on that axis: the VDV airborne forces, the Rosgvardia (the Russian national guard) or troops loyal to Ramzan Kadyrov, a Chechen warlord. Mr Kadyrov has long been accused of human-rights abuses, including assassinations, in Chechnya.
Indeed, the atrocities in Ukraine have disturbing echoes of Russia’s wars in the 1990s and early 2000s. In one incident in February 2000 Russian riot police and soldiers entered Novye Aldi, a suburb of Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, and went from house to house executing civilians,, according to eyewitness accounts gathered by Human Rights Watch, an NGO. Brutal sweeps like these became known as zachistka, or “mopping-up” operations.
Elena Racheva, a social anthropologist at Oxford University who reported on the war in Ukraine in 2014 for Novaya Gazeta, says the cult of violence continues partly because of the shadow of such wars. Some 620,000 Russian soldiers fought in Afghanistan, with the loss of 15,000 lives and 50,000 casualties. Another 140,000 fought two wars in Chechnya, which cost 11,000 lives and 37,000 casualties. Afterwards, they received little psychological help for their trauma.
Instead the Kremlin has fostered a cult of aggression, which has been growing in Russia since Vladimir Putin took power in 1999. Encouraged by state television, soldiers look to a father or a grandfather who fought in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45 as their role model. “The aim is to legitimise senseless military campaigns,” Ms Racheva says. “Many of them deliberately emphasise their ability to commit violence.” One veteran of the Chechen war told her: “I always had principles. My principle was not to leave enemies alive.”
On April 1st the Russian defence ministry released a video featuring Aleksei Shabulin, commander of a battalion that carried out a zachistka in the “Hostomel-Gucha...Bucha-Lozero direction”. “My great-grandfather went through the entire second world war and up to the year 1953 chased the fascist devil called Bandera fighters through Ukrainian forests,” he said. “Now I am a glorious successor of this tradition. Now my time has come and I will not disgrace my great-grandfather—and I will go all the way.”
Jack Watling, a military expert at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think-tank, who was in Ukraine in the weeks before the war, was warned by a senior security official that there would be killings by the Russian forces massing in Belarus. “Anyone saying that Bucha is the result of brutalisation or rogue behaviour is wrong,” insists Mr Watling. “This was the plan. It was premeditated. It is consistent with Russian methods in Chechnya. And if the Russian military had been more successful, there would have been many more towns like it.”
Image credit: AFP