Kiev: Russian troops accused of massacring, torturing and brutalising hundreds of Ukrainian civilians in the outskirts of Kiev may have committed even worse atrocities in villages and towns further from the capital, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned.
At least 410 innocent civilians were slaughtered in the cities of Bucha and Irpin to the west of Kiev, Ukraine has said, with bodies discovered littering roads and basements, and piled into hastily-dug mass graves as Russian troops fled the region at the weekend, leaving evidence of their crimes behind, Daily Mail reported.
Journalists based in Kiev who have visited the region since Russian forces withdrew say “clear evidence” of war crimes has been uncovered, including civilians shot with their hands bound behind their backs and other bodies that bear the marks of torture and rape.
But Tymofiy Mylovanov, the adviser to President Zelensky and Ukraine’s former Finance Minister, says even worse atrocities may have been perpetrated to the east of Kiev in the suburb of Brovary and in villages along the highway to Chernihiv, a city near the Russian border, and has called on journalists and lawyers to go to the region to help document what has happened.
Mylovanov said early eyewitness accounts and anecdotal evidence suggest children may have been burned alive, young women raped en-masse and then executed afterwards, and people forced to eat their pets after being deliberately starved by Russian troops.
Others may have been shot dead as they planted crops in the fields or killed in their gardens, he said.
Bodies of civilians, their hands bound and bullet wounds in the back of their heads, littered the streets of the small commuter town north of Kiev.
Survivors emerging from basements after weeks underground told of summary executions, sexual violence and terror not seen since Joseph Stalin’s Soviet rule of terror in the 1930s, reports the Daily Mail.