Bucha massacre
The Bucha massacre was the mass murder of Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war by the Russian Armed Forces during the fight for and occupation of the city of Bucha as part of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Photographic and video evidence of the massacre emerged on 1 April 2022, after Russian forces withdrew from the city. Verbal reports had been emerging since early March.
According to local authorities, 458 bodies have been recovered from the town, including nine children under the age of 18. Among the victims, 419 people were killed with weapons and 39 appeared to have died of natural causes, possibly related to the occupation. A memorial wall was installed in Bucha with 501 names of killed residents. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights documented the unlawful killings, including summary executions, of at least 73 civilians in Bucha. Photos showed corpses of civilians, lined up with their hands bound behind their backs, shot at close range. An inquiry by Radio Free Europe reported the use of a basement beneath a campground as a torture chamber. Many bodies were found mutilated and burnt, and girls as young as fourteen reported being raped by Russian soldiers. In intercepted conversations, Russian soldiers referred to these operations involving hunting down people in lists, filtration, torture, and execution as zachistka. Ukraine has asked the International Criminal Court to investigate what happened in Bucha as part of its ongoing investigation of the invasion to determine whether a series of Russian war crimes or crimes against humanity were committed. The massacre was described by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as genocide.
Russian authorities have denied responsibility and instead claimed that Ukraine faked footage of the event or staged the killings itself as a false flag operation, and have claimed that the footage and photographs of dead bodies were a "staged performance". These assertions by Russian authorities have been debunked as false by various groups and media organisations. Additionally, eyewitness accounts from residents of Bucha said that the Russian army carried out the killings. Human Rights Watch released a report finding Russian Armed Forces guilty of summary executions, unlawful killings, enforced disappearances, and torture.
Background
As part of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military entered Ukraine from Belarus. One of the initial moves was a push towards the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, as part of which a huge column of military vehicles moved south towards the city. On 27 February 2022, Russian advance forces moved into the city of Bucha, making it one of the first outlying areas of Kyiv taken by Russian forces. According to Ukrainian military intelligence, Russian forces occupying Bucha included the 64th Motor Rifle Brigade, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Azatbek Omurbekov, a part of the 35th Combined Arms Army.In late March, prior to the Russian retreat from Kyiv, Prosecutor General of Ukraine Iryna Venediktova stated that Ukrainian prosecutors had collected evidence of 2,500 suspected cases of war crimes committed by Russia during the invasion and had identified "several hundred suspects". Matilda Bogner, the head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, also raised concerns about the precise documentation of civilian casualties, specifically in regions and cities under heavy fire, highlighting the lack of electricity and reliable communications.
Under attack by the Ukrainian military, Russian troops in the Bucha area retreated north, as part of the general Russian retreat from the Kyiv area. Ukrainian forces entered Bucha on 1 April 2022.
Reports
During the Russian offensive
According to The Kyiv Independent, on 4 March, Russian forces killed three unarmed Ukrainian civilians who were driving back from delivering food to a dog shelter. At around 7:15a.m. on 5 March, a pair of cars carrying two families trying to escape were spotted by Russian soldiers as the vehicles turned onto Chkalova Street. Russian forces opened fire on the convoy, killing a man in the second vehicle. The front car was hit by a burst of machine-gun fire, instantly killing two children and their mother.In an interview with the Associated Press on 7 March, the town's mayor, Anatoliy Fedoruk, said the situation in Bucha was a "nightmare", telling reporters that "we can't even gather up the bodies because the shelling from heavy weapons doesn't stop day or night. Dogs are pulling apart the bodies on the city streets." In a 28 March interview with Adnkronos, Fedoruk accused Russian forces of killings and rapes in Bucha. He evoked "a plan of terror against the civilian population" and claimed that "here in Bucha we see all the horrors we heard about as crimes committed by the Nazis during Second World War".
After the Russian withdrawal
On 1 April 2022, following the Russian withdrawal, video footage was posted to social media showing mass civilian casualties. According to Mayor Fedoruk, "hundreds of Russian soldiers" were also among the bodies found in the region. Subsequently, further evidence emerged that appeared to show war crimes committed by Russian forces while they occupied the region. Soldiers of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces said they had found eighteen mutilated bodies of men, women and children in a summer camp's basement in Zabuchchya, near Bucha. One of the soldiers said that some of the bodies had suffered cut-off ears or extracted teeth and that the bodies had been removed a day before the interview. Footage released by the Ukrainian Army appeared to show a torture chamber in the basement. A report by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, an American state-funded media organisation, described the basement as an "execution cellar" used by Russian forces.Journalists entering the city discovered the bodies of more than a dozen people in civilian clothes. Fedoruk said that these individuals had all been shot in the back of the head. Corpses of other killed civilians were left on the road. Ukrainian officials said the women had been raped and their bodies burnt. A report published by The Kyiv Independent included a photo and information about one man and two or three naked women under a blanket whose bodies Russian soldiers had tried to burn on the side of a road before fleeing. The photos show that Russian forces had singled out and killed Ukrainian civilian men in an organised fashion, with many bodies found with their hands tied behind their backs. Many of the victims appeared to have been going about their daily routines, carrying shopping bags. Other footage showed a dead man next to a bicycle.
CNN, the BBC, and AFP released video documentation of numerous dead civilians in the streets and yards in Bucha, some of them with tied arms or legs. On 2 April, an AFP reporter stated he had seen at least 20 bodies of male civilians lying in the streets of Bucha, with two of the bodies having tied hands. BBC News said that some had been shot in the temple and some bodies had been run over by a tank. On 5 April Associated Press journalists saw charred bodies on a residential street near a playground in Bucha, including one with a bullet hole in the skull, and a burned body of a child. On the same date, The Washington Post reported that Ukrainian investigators found evidence of torture, beheading, mutilation, and incinerations of corpses. The body of at least one of those killed was mined and turned into a trap with tripwires. Villagers who were asked to help identify a beheaded body reported that drunken Russian soldiers told them of carrying out sadistic acts against Ukrainians.
By 9 April, Ukrainian forensic investigators had begun recovering bodies from mass graves, such as at the church of Andrew the Apostle. On 21 April, Human Rights Watch published an extensive report that summarised their own investigation in Bucha, implicating Russian troops in summary executions, other unlawful killings, enforced disappearances, and torture. It also urged Ukrainian authorities to preserve evidence and cooperate with the International Criminal Court to bolster future war crime prosecutions. By 24 April, The Guardian reported that dozens of bodies had flechettes in them. Unnamed eyewitnesses in Bucha had previously reported the firing of flechette rounds by Russian artillery, using shells that carry up to 8,000 flechettes each, according to The Guardian. The use of such indiscriminate weapons in areas with civilians is a violation of humanitarian law.
Testimony from residents
Residents and the mayor of the city said that the victims had been killed by Russian troops. They indicated many of the survivors had been hiding from the Russians in basements, too scared to come out. Some of them had no light or electricity for weeks, using candles for heating water and cooking. They came out of hiding only when it was clear the Russians had left, welcoming the arrival of Ukrainian troops.The BBC and The Guardian cited eyewitness accounts, from inhabitants of Bucha and the nearby villages of Obukhovychi and Ivankiv, of Russian troops using civilians as human shields as they came under attack by Ukrainian soldiers.
The Economist reported an account of a survivor of a mass execution. After getting trapped at a checkpoint when it came under fire from Russian artillery, the man was captured by Russian soldiers, along with the construction workers he was sheltering with at the checkpoint. The soldiers moved them to a nearby building being used as a Russian base, strip-searched them, beat and tortured them, then took them to the side of the building to shoot and kill them. The man was shot in the side, but survived by playing dead and later fleeing to a nearby home.
Residents, talking to Human Rights Watch following the retreat of the Russian forces, described the treatment of people in the city during the occupation: Russian soldiers went door-to-door, questioning people, destroying their possessions, and looting their clothes to wear themselves. HRW heard reports that civilians were fired upon when leaving their homes for food and water, and would be ordered back into their homes by Russian troops, despite a lack of basic necessities such as water and heat due to the destruction of local infrastructure. There were also reports that Russian armed vehicles would arbitrarily fire into buildings in the city and that Russian troops refused medical aid to injured civilians. A mass grave was dug for local victims, and the troops carried out extrajudicial executions. A HRW spokesperson said that it had documented at least one "unmistakable case" of summary execution by Russian soldiers on 4 March.
According to a report by The New York Times, Russian soldiers killed residents of the town "recklessly and sometimes sadistically" in a "campaign of terror". Russian snipers killed unsuspecting civilians. A Ukrainian woman was kidnapped by Russians, held in a cellar, repeatedly raped, and then executed. Another group of women and girls was locked in a basement for almost a month; nine of them subsequently became pregnant. Individuals executed with hands tied behind their back were found throughout the town, indicating that several Russian military units had carried out the murders.
According to a Kyiv resident, who was present at the Bucha headquarters of the territorial defence force, Russian soldiers checked documents and killed those who had participated in the war in the Donbas region of Ukraine. He said that Russian troops killed people with tattoos associated with right-wing groups, but also those with tattoos of Ukrainian symbols. According to his account, in the last week of the occupation, Kadyrovite Chechen fighters were shooting at every civilian they encountered. Another resident reported that Russian soldiers checked the cell phones of civilians, for evidence of anti-Russian activity, before taking the civilians away or shooting them.
A witness told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that the Russians "were killing people systematically. I personally heard how one sniper was boasting that he 'offed' two people he saw in apartment windows. ... There was no need. There was no military justification to kill. It was just torturing civilians. On other blocks, people were really tortured. They were found with their hands tied behind their backs and shot in the back of the head." Locals asserted the killings were deliberate and many reported that in several instances snipers would gun down civilians for no clear reason.
Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraine's human rights commissioner at the time, stated that sexual violence against civilians was weaponised by the Russian soldiers as part of what she referred to as "genocide of Ukrainian people". According to Denisova, as of 6 April 2022, a special telephone helpline had received at least 25 reports of rape of women and girls from Bucha, aged between 14 and 24.