The new count has also begun in Borodyanka. The police chief, Viacheslav, takes the lists of reports of various family members or those who stop him on the street and drives with a team of soldiers and a pickup truck. They stop every fifty meters: they take the white plastic bag, zigzag between the concrete and hardware blocks, then bend over backwards to retrieve, one by one, what remains of their fellow citizens. Borodyanka is where the Russian military tsunami arrived first, sweeping everyone on February 24 and retreating just five days ago, along with half the destroyed city. That day Olga’s daughter calls her mother out of town: “Mom, the war has come.” The occupation in Ukraine began at that time.
In Vulystsya Lenina, the main road, Russian military planes flew low, almost 600 meters – the inhabitants say – with surgical trajectories dropping bombs all hit, so much so that in a few hours the city shopping street was transformed into a post landscape. atomic. Not a single shop was saved. Now some buildings no longer exist, others have been gutted, many houses have been burned and – unlike nearby Bucha, which is only twenty kilometers further south – most of the dead are nowhere to be seen on the street. The corpses are in the rubble, buried in the shelters of collapsed buildings or in some field on the outskirts.
“There is already information that the death toll of the occupiers could be even higher in Borodyanka and some other liberated cities than in Bucha,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced. The mayor speaks of “two hundred civilians under the rubble, we were the first city to be bombed. We are taking the dead away now because the Russians did not allow it while they were here.
Yes, it’s true, they activated the humanitarian corridors six times, but the soldiers shot anyone who came out on the street and terrorized people just by drawing that cursed zeta everywhere. “In fact the ‘Z’ and on the cars, on the doors of the warehouses, on buildings and even the ‘N’ of the signs was overturned to become another letter. So they were all trapped, because in the meantime the rockets and bullets from the tanks were arriving on things and people. After the first ten days of occupation someone has attempted to block military tanks and trucks by launching Molotov cocktails, a first form of resistance which was then annihilated.
The city was isolated and still is. The first bomb was dropped by the planes on the river bridge that connected Borodyanka to the road to Irpin. And now there is no field for telephoning or internet, but a sort of town hall has been recreated in a school: the registers of people and some repeaters have been arranged to have wi-fi at least within ten meters. “These were given to us by Elon Mask, he gave them to all of Ukraine”, they say of the military. Among the bodies, Viacheslav also recovered the corpse of a young man in his twenties: he was lying on the ground behind a garden overlooking a field and had his pants down, an envelope tightened to his head with adhesive, his hands tied by a rope and marks on the legs. The cop tried to turn it around, then with a grimace he pulled back and asked for the envelope. “It is clear that the signs are those of torture,” she says. “We were told that the Russian soldiers were taking some people away, we don’t know where they are and we think they have been tortured.” And he tells of an entire family – mother, father and daughter – who died in the house under the blows of a tank.
Volodymyr, 38, instead lies in the backyard after being killed with his dog by a shotgun shot in the head as he went out to buy him food. A few days ago his brother-in-law Denis managed to retrieve it with a forklift and after an hour on the road he reached home, took a spade, shoveled and placed a cross on the ground in the garden.
In front of the building that no longer exists, in the central street, there are still those who hope that the people who fled to the shelter, buried by the collapse of the building, are still alive. “My dog ​​stops here, sniffs,” says a passerby. “They have not even spared the children’s playground”, indicates with his finger the elderly Vitalij, who tells of the arrival of the planes between those six-storey buildings: ”
On some they raged, until they collapsed “, he says, protecting himself from an icy wind of rubble dust that enters his eyes until it burns, but which at times becomes salvific. Better not to look. REPRODUCTION RESERVED © Copyright ANSA
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