By John Marone in Kyiv
I am standing on the site of a tank battle, along a narrow stretch of country road north-west of Kyiv, where some of the fiercest fighting took place during the Russian army’s attempt to seize the Ukrainian capital last month.
Half a dozen or so Russian tanks stand incinerated, decapitated of their turrets, stopped dead in their tracks. “T-72 tanks, made during Soviet times,” a Ukrainian soldier explains.
The scene looks more like an ambush, possibly by javelin anti-tank weapons from the tree line, under the cover of darkness. The smell of exploded ammunition still permeates the air.
Scattered about, in addition to charred pieces of Russian armor, are the personal effects of dead Russian Federation soldiers: A boot manufactured in Moscow, fatigues too thin to provide much comfort during a frosty Ukrainian winter. “Look at the size,” says the soldier, holding up a pair of camouflage trousers. “They’re too small for a Russian soldier to wear, probably belonged to a soldier from the Far East.”
A Russian soldier’s boot, found among the debris of a tank battle fought north of Kyiv last month. ‘Made in Moscow’ reads the print on the boot. (Photo Credit: John Marone)
Indeed, from the first-hand accounts of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, and due to the fact that the Russian army doesn’t collect its dead, the face of the aggressor is not secret. Russians, Chechens and Buryats, a Siberian people whose corpses were discovered after this particular battle and who figure strongly in stories of cruelty in occupied towns and villages.
There’s no sign of sleeping bags or tents at the battle scene. “Are you kidding?” exclaims the Ukrainian soldier. “This is the Russian army.” There are a couple of shallow ditches dug nearby on the side of the road – not impact craters from artillery shelling, but make shift bedding for the invading troops. Picking up a flak jacket from among the rubble, the soldier points out its lack of armored plating, without which it’s not much protection for the person wearing it.
Further on up the road is the village of Dmytrivka. I meet a man named Sasha from nearby Bucha who stayed on during the fighting after sending his family west to safety.
The Russian tanks and infantry kept a safe distance from the village of about four or five hundred meters, to keep from being encircled by Ukrainian forces, he said.
Instead, Russian tanks fired shells among the village’s neat rows of fenced-in houses.
Back in his home town, Sasha says, the treatment of civilians by Russian Federation forces was mixed. “There was a colonel, an engineer from Moscow, who led off a group of about 30 civilians from Bucha to the safety of a shopping center.”
But not all were so lucky. Other occupying soldiers forced people into the basements of their homes, which they themselves camped outside of in the hopes of deterring fire from Ukrainian troops, he explained.
Some of these soldiers, drunk or simply sadistic, would occasionally descend into the basement to torment terrified women and children, fire shots over their heads or, worse, lead them off to be tortured or killed. He told of a friend of his who had been active in Kyiv during Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity in 2013-14, who suffered a particularly gruesome example of such treatment, which included binding and mutilation.
“There were no territorial defense guys in the city of Bucha. One group of them held out as long as they could and were killed to the last man,” Sasha added.
The people photographed after the liberation of Bucha, dead with their hands tied behind their backs, were not combatants, he emphasized.
Days later, I am in Chernihiv, a quiet northern Ukrainian town that is more than a thousand years old. The people here are as decent as they are unassuming – not that this afforded them any better treatment from the Russian army than their neighbors in Kyiv to the west.
The city was savagely bombed by Russian SU-34 fighter bomber strike aircraft, designed to be used for “tactical deployment against ground and naval targets”. In the case of Chernihiv, this included a football stadium, a hotel and a nine-storey block of flats in the center of town, from which rescuers continue to find and remove bodies.
On the eastern outskirts of the city lies the village of Novoselivka, which took regular and heavy artillery fire from Russian Federation forces located on two ridges to the east and north, about 500 meters away. “They would send in a column of tanks, and our artillery would beat them back,” explained a policeman.
The village of Novoselivka, outside Chernihiv, after Russian artillery attack. (Photo Credit: John Marone)
Today, the area is spotted with completely leveled or badly damaged homes. It’s a depressing scene under overcast skies, the grounds littered with rubble and personal items from people’s homes.
Just as in the case of Kyiv, if Ukrainian forces had not held the line close to the city, Russian forces would have been able to position themselves close enough to wreak similar artillery havoc on the city center of Chernihiv, located only 55 miles from the Russian border.
Instead, mixed units of Buryat and Russians occupied the neighboring village to the east, from which they menaced the local population. They came out of an area where the Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian borders all meet, disappearing weeks later in the same direction, leaving desolation and destruction in their wake.
Crater from shelling by Russian artillery in the village of Novoselivka, outside Chernihiv. (Photo Credit: John Marone)
