MIKULICHI, Ukraine (AP) – In a quiet street lined with walnut trees, there was a cemetery with four bodies that have not yet found a home.
All were victims of Russian soldiers in this village outside the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. Their temporary coffins were together in a tomb. Volunteers dug them up one by one on Sunday, two weeks after the soldiers disappeared.
This spring is a gloomy season of planting and replanting in towns and villages around Kyiv. Bodies that were given quick graves during the Russian occupation are now being retrieved to investigate possible war crimes. So far, more than 900 civilian casualties have been identified.
All four bodies here were killed on the same street, on the same day. This is according to the local man who provided them with the coffins. He bent down and kissed the wrought-iron crosses in the cemetery as he walked toward the makeshift grave.
The volunteers tried to dig with shovels, then gave up and called an excavator. While they waited, they talked about their work on secretly burying bodies during the month-long Russian occupation, after which they were retrieved. A young man remembers being discovered by soldiers who point a weapon at him and tell him “Don’t look up” while digging a grave.
The excavator arrived, crashing past the wooden outbuilding of the cemetery. Soon there was the smell of fresh earth and the murmur, “Here they are.”
A crying woman appeared. Ira Slepchenko was the wife of a man buried here. Nobody told her they were digging it up now. Another victim’s wife arrived. Valya Naumenko peered into the grave, then hugged Ira. “Don’t collapse,” she said. “I need you to be fine.”
The two couples lived next to each other. On the last day before the Russians left the village, soldiers knocked on 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 explanation.
Then the soldiers shouted, “Is anyone else here?”
Ira’s husband, Sasha Nedolezhko, heard the shot. But he thought the soldiers would search their homes if no one answered. He opened the door and the soldiers shot him too.
The men’s coffins were taken out along with the others, then opened. The four bodies, wrapped in blankets, are placed in sacks for corpses. The white lining with lace edges on each coffin was colored red where the head was.
Ira looked into the distance, smoking, but stood by the empty coffins while the others left. “All this land is covered in blood and it will take years to recover,” she said.
She knew her husband was here. Nine days after his temporary burial, she came to the cemetery, which was strewn with picnic tables, following local custom of spending time with the dead. She brought coffee and cookies.
“I want this war to end as soon as possible,” she said.
The other bodies were a teacher and a local living alone. No one came for them on Sunday.
In the house next to the cemetery, 66-year-old Valya Voronets was cooking home-grown potatoes in a room heated by wood, still recovering without water, electricity and gas. He turned on a little radio, but not for long because the news was getting too depressing. A plate of freshly sliced radishes lay by the window.
One day, a Russian soldier ran up and aimed his gun at her husband after noticing him climbing on the roof to receive a cell phone signal. “Are you going to kill an old man?” Mihailo Shterbakov, 65, responded.
Not all Russians were like that. Voronets said she cried with another soldier, only 21 years old. “You are too young,” she told him. Another soldier told her they didn’t want to fight.
Still, she was afraid of them all. But she offered them milk from her only cow.
“I felt sorry for them under these conditions,” she said. “And if you’re nice to them, they might not kill you.”
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