Steph Deschamps / April 8, 2022
The situation in Borodianka, a town northwest of Kiev recently retaken by the Ukrainians from the Russians, is much more horrible than in Boutcha, where civilians were massacred, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday evening.
There are more victims in this small town than in Boutcha, also northwest of the capital, Zelensky added in a video message. Every crime will be solved and every executioner will be found, he said.
Shortly before, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine Iryna Venediktova had announced on Facebook that 26 bodies had been discovered by rescue workers in the rubble of two apartment buildings bombed in Borodianka, a town that had a little more than 13,000 inhabitants before the war. But it is difficult to predict how many dead will be counted in total, she had immediately stressed, noting that it is the most destroyed city in the region of Kiev.
Only the civilian population was targeted: there are no military sites in this locality recently retaken by Ukrainian forces after the withdrawal of Russian troops from the capital region, Ms. Venediktova continued. The prosecutor said the Russians used cluster bombs and heavy multiple rocket launchers that bring death and destruction there. There is evidence of war crimes by Russian forces at every turn, she wrote.
The enemy treacherously shelled the residential infrastructure in the evening, when there were as many people as possible in their homes, Venediktova said. She accused Russian soldiers of murder, torture and beating of civilians, as well as rape, and said law enforcement agencies were collecting evidence for local and international courts. The macabre discoveries are multiplying in several small towns in this area devastated by fighting. Ukraine and Western countries accused the Russian military of war crimes after dozens of bodies, apparently of civilians often shot dead, were discovered in the streets of Butcha. The Russian army entered Boutcha on February 27 - three days after the invasion of Ukraine began - and stayed there for a month.