In May final yr, we stood within the grounds of what had been a mass grave of the residents of Bucha – only a month after town was liberated from invading Russian forces.
Tetiana Sichkar, then simply 20 years outdated, informed us how the occupation had affected her life in essentially the most unimaginable manner.
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Today, she takes us to the sting of a forest the place a battle crime devastated her life.
On 24 March final yr, Tetiana and her 46-year-old mom, additionally referred to as Tetiana, made the quick journey dwelling from her grandmother’s home – the one place with a working fuel range and a wooden fireplace – by means of the woods alongside a railway line.
They wore white tape on their arms to suggest to the Russian troops they had been civilians. They weren’t a risk.
Unbeknownst to anybody, in simply seven days, Bucha could be free once more.
But as the 2 Tetianas walked that Thursday a loud crack pierced the quiet between the bushes.
“Suddenly I heard a very loud gunshot,” the younger lady says.
“Then I saw something, maybe blood, maybe a bullet.”
She remembers telling everybody to get down, and falling to the bottom. Shaking her mom’s leg, there was no response.
“There was blood everywhere. Her eyes were still open and she was just staring. And I started to scream. I screamed for maybe five minutes.”
Does she know the place the shot got here from? Tetiana will not be certain.
She gestures to her proper, by means of the thickest a part of the forest.
“My father believes it was over here, because that is where the Russians were.”
She factors to a white constructing forward and says calmly: “The sniper was on the second floor there.”
Staring on the upstairs window it’s onerous to consider Tetiana’s composure whereas rooted to the spot of such a tragedy.
A brief distance away, we’re led to the grave of her mom.
She says the funeral preparations had been a blur.
Before the Russians had been pushed out of Bucha, they gave her mom’s physique again in a stolen automotive and he or she was buried first in her backyard, earlier than a rush of ceremonies came about at a cemetery when it was protected once more.
There are lots of of graves with lower than a foot between them – the location has been the ultimate resting place for thus many lengthy earlier than the Russian invasion.
Tetiana, now 21, reveals us an image of her and her mum, an important lady in her life.
“Of course, I miss her most because she was the closest one to me,” she says – her life have to be so onerous now. “Life is hard. But it goes on.”
She is finding out pc programming from her flat in one other a part of Bucha, however takes journeys into Kyiv to fulfill the lady who helps her combat for justice.
Oksana Mykhalevych, 36, is a lawyer who has been prosecuting human rights abuses because the Maidan Uprising in 2014, when 100 activists and 13 law enforcement officials had been killed throughout demonstrations in opposition to then-president Viktor Yanukovych.
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She has pages of paperwork neatly sorted in plastic sleeves in a shiny purple folder, and can assist Tetiana liaise with the official battle crimes investigators who’ve been given help from authorized techniques world wide, together with the UK.
Oksana outlines that they need Ukrainian police to stage a reconstruction subsequent month to at the least set up precisely the place that deadly shot got here from – to allow them to maybe determine the Russian navy unit concerned.
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They will then go after the commanders. “Someone should take responsibility,” she tells us.
Tetiana admits that the Russian navy personnel who occupied Bucha could have been despatched to a different battlefront within the nation and should have met their destiny by the hands of Ukrainian troopers.
“It is very likely that that person is already dead. But if that person is still alive, I believe that I will see him in a court. And maybe I’ll ask him what made him do that to my family”.
Source: information.sky.com”