From NYT/Yahoo:
“They Fell Deeply in Love in
Bucha. One Russian Bullet Ended It All.”
(Iryna Abramova mourns at the
grave of her husband Oleh, who was executed by Russian forces outside of their
home, in Bucha, Ukraine, April 26, 2022.)
She called him Sunshine. He
called her Kitty. They met nearly 20 years ago when she was working at a
hospital and he sauntered through the door, young, muscular and beautiful, to
fix the roof. Iryna Abramova said she made the first move and followed him to
where he smoked cigarettes behind a wall. They started talking and fell in
love, she said, “word by word.” But a few weeks ago, the special connection she
had with Oleh, the love of her life, and everything they built together ended
in a single cruel gunshot. What follows is difficult for Iryna to describe, she
said, because it feels so raw and real but, at the same time, it is almost
impossible to believe.
On the morning of March 5, Iryna
said, Russian soldiers attacked her house. They threw a grenade through the
window, which started an enormous fire, and marched her and Oleh outside at
gunpoint. Then they took Oleh into the street. They ordered him to strip off
his shirt. They made him kneel. The next thing Iryna remembers is running to
Oleh’s side, plunging to the ground, grabbing his hands, seeing blood spurt
from his ears and feeling a wild rage explode out of her. “Shoot me!” she
screamed at the Russian soldiers standing coolly above her. She was wearing a
bathrobe and slippers, her house burning down behind her, clutching one of her
cats. “Shoot me! Come on! Come on! Shoot me and the cat!” A Russian commander
leveled his gun at her chest not once, not twice but three times. To this day
she regrets he didn’t pull the trigger. “Maybe my destiny is to die tomorrow,”
Iryna said, admitting that she had thought of suicide. But she added, “It’s a
big thing to take your own life and then I won’t be able to meet my husband in
heaven.” Iryna Abramova’s story is Bucha’s story. It is about heartbreak,
bloodshed and, most of all, loss.
This Ukrainian town, not far from
the capital, Kyiv, is where the war’s worst atrocities have been discovered,
and as the days pass the full scope of the terror and butchery only grows. The
Russians slaughtered at least 400 civilians here in March, officials have said.
Weeks later, mutilated bodies are still being found. Human rights groups and
Ukrainian investigators, along with a phalanx of international war crimes
experts, are trying to document each killing, and last week the Ukrainian
government published the names and photos of 10 Russian soldiers who it said
had committed war crimes in Bucha. The Russians pulled out a few weeks ago,
leaving much of Bucha in ruins. Work crews have been trying to fix the utility
poles knocked down by Russian armored personnel carriers and the transformers
that the Russians blew up. In the meantime, many Bucha residents have been cast
back into the 19th century, drawing water from wells, lighting candles at night
and cooking outside on campfires, staring into the flames. “There’s a black
mist over this town,” said Iryna Hres, a young woman who lives across the
street from Iryna Abramova. “Something ominous will remain because so many
people were killed here, so thoughtlessly, so senselessly, for no reason.” Iryna
Abramova described the killing of her husband to The New York Times in several
interviews last month. Her account was corroborated by neighbors and her
father, who finally pulled her back toward the house as she screamed at the
Russian soldiers. The Times viewed the autopsy report and spoke to the
prosecutor investigating the death, who supported her account and said there
were only Russian soldiers, not Ukrainian, in Bucha at the time.
‘Hello, My Sunshine’ Life
for Iryna has become a lonely chore. She says it is difficult getting through
the day, and especially the night, without being consumed by feelings of
revenge or suicide or what she calls “bloody thoughts.” She has lost
almost everything: her husband, her home, three of her four pets; her life
savings, in cash, turned to ash. She doesn’t have a single piece of paper to
prove her identity — “I keep asking for something that says me is me, but the
people at the city council tell me, ‘How do we know you are you?’” She
has spent her entire life in Bucha, which used to be known as one of the most
desirable small towns in Ukraine — woodsy, with a rustic vibe and only 45
minutes from Kyiv. Now it’s a city of ghosts. But she can’t leave. “Oleh
is still here,” she said. One of Iryna’s rituals is walking to the
graveyard, passing through peeling birch trees in a daze. She brings Oleh’s
favorite treats: Halls cherry cough drops, Maria cookies, toffee and chocolate.
She lights a cigarette and puts it by the head of the grave. The ash grows long
in the afternoon light. “Hello, my sunshine,” she said the other day,
stroking the picture of his face that she put on his grave. At 40, he
was eight years younger than Iryna, and she allows herself a faint smile about
that. “I stole him,” she said. A few months after they met, he moved in. They
got married, and unusually, he took her last name, becoming Oleh Oleksandrovych
Abramov. He encouraged her to quit her job as a hospital clerk, saying he would
support them. They never had children, but Iryna said they had the perfect family:
the two of them. During the week, he worked hard as a welder and often returned
late, when she was already in bed watching TV. On weekends, they’d grill in
their backyard and occasionally catch a movie at the nearby Giraffe Mall in
Irpin. A few weeks ago, the mall was shelled to smithereens.
‘Oleh Will Not Be Coming’ Russian
troops rolled into Bucha soon after the war started. But they got stalled by
fierce Ukrainian resistance. On Feb. 27, Ukrainian forces ambushed a
long column of Russian armor parked along Iryna’s street, leaving at least 20
destroyed vehicles and an unknown number of Russian soldiers dead. Oleh
became especially nervous after that, Iryna said. He could sense the Russians
would be out for revenge. He insisted that he and Iryna stay indoors and they
spent many hours in the kitchen, on the floor. As they lay side by side,
fingers touching, she could feel him shaking. “I asked him: Are you afraid of
death? He said, ‘No, I am afraid for you.’” On the night of March 4,
they heard huge trucks passing in the road. The next morning, their house was
rocked by a grenade, which set off a fire. Gunshots rang out. Their gate
was blasted open. Four Russian paratroopers stormed in, she said. Three were
young, maybe 20, and the commander was in his 30s. Iryna said the
commander ordered them outside. She recounted what happened next in a flat,
detached voice. “Where are the Nazis?” the commander said “There are no Nazis here,” Iryna
responded. “Where are they?” “There were never any Nazis here.” “Give me the
exact address.” “We are simple people.” The commander got angrier, she said.
“We have come here to die, and our wives are waiting for us and you started
this war. You elected this Nazi government.” (“They love the word Nazi, for
some reason,” she added.) “Did your husband ever hold a weapon in his
arms?” “No.” “What is his profession?” “Welder.” The
commander then stomped off.
Iryna’s father, Volodymyr
Abramov, who lived in a house next door, said he and Oleh were held in the yard
at gunpoint. The young soldiers ordered Oleh to strip off his shirt, sweater
and jacket, to reveal any military tattoos. He didn’t have any. He had never
served. They marched Oleh out of the gate. His last words were “Guys, what are
you doing?” A minute passed. The fire grew. Black smoke raged out of the house,
making it impossible to see anything. The commander reappeared. “Where is
Oleh?” Iryna’s father asked in a panic. The commander looked out the gate and
said, “Oleh will not be coming.” Iryna raced out. “I looked to the left.
Nothing. I look to the right. I see my husband on the ground,” she said. “I see
lots of blood. I see part of his head is gone. Later I see other dead people,
in different poses.” She grabbed his hands, crying, “Oleh, Oleh.” “The Russians
were sitting on the curb, drinking water from plastic bottles, just watching
me,” she said. “They didn’t say anything, they didn’t show any emotion. They
were like an audience at the theater.” That’s when she let out a “wild cry, like
something I have never heard,” her father said. “Shoot me!” she screamed.
“Shoot me and the cat!” She was looking at the soldiers, staring at their
boots, but the commander eventually lowered his gun and said, “I do not kill
women.” He gave Iryna and her father three minutes to leave.
Collecting Corpses Bucha’s
population is normally around 40,000, but all but 3,000 to 4,000 residents had
fled before the Russian occupation, city officials said. Around 400 civilians
are thought to have been killed, meaning about 1 in 10 people who were here.
Some were shot execution style with hands tied behind their backs. Others
were horribly beaten. Many were like Oleh: no military experience, unarmed and
posing no obvious threat. So many bodies were left on Bucha’s streets
that city officials said they were worried about a plague. But they did not
have enough workers to collect the dead. So they drafted volunteers. One of
them was Vladyslav Minchenko, a tattoo artist. “The most blood I had
ever seen was in a piercing,” he said wryly. But soon he was picking up
dead people and body parts, zipping them into black bags and taking them to a
communal grave outside Bucha’s main church. He retrieved Oleh’s body, with its
shattered head, he said, which was verified by video evidence. Minchenko’s
tattoo parlor remains closed. He’s not sure if he could work anyway. Like many
other people in Bucha, he spoke of feeling physically different since the
Russian occupation, unable to sleep, distracted, drinking too much. His
hands keep shaking. “And I keep having these dreams,” he said. Behind
his closed eyes, heavily armed men pour into the streets and Minchenko tries to
join the army but is refused. He wakes up with a jolt. Oleh’s body was
taken for an autopsy. The cause of death listed on the coroner’s report was
skull fracture and gunshot wound to the head. Ukrainian prosecutors are now
trying to determine who killed him. They have interviewed Iryna extensively and
showed her pictures on their phones of Russian soldiers. “But they all
look the same,” Iryna said. She said she doesn’t remember the faces of
the men who shot Oleh, “just their guns and their boots.” Ruslan
Kravchenko, one of the prosecutors, said different Russian units divided up
control of Bucha and he believed members of Russia’s 76th Air Assault Brigade
killed Oleh, based on video footage the Ukrainians obtained of Russian troop
movements from that time. “It was a cruel killing,” he said. “But there were
many more just as cruel.” The prosecutors say they will soon file papers in
court to extradite suspects. Legal analysts and Iryna doubt that will ever
happen. “Russians are good at coming dry out of water,” she said. Some people
in Bucha are so badly haunted by what they suffered under the Russians that
they are leaving. “I need to change the picture,” said Ivan Drahun, whose young
wife died after having a heart attack during the occupation. He has three
children. They had been trapped in a basement for a month, watching their
mother die. “We can’t stay in Bucha.”
Nowhere to Go Iryna
doesn’t have the option to leave, even if she wanted it. Without a
passport or identity papers — they were all burned in the fire — she is not
allowed through any of the area’s military checkpoints. Bucha officials said
that they could not help her at the moment because their computer systems were
still down and that the only way for her to get new documents was to go to Kyiv
or another city, Boyarka. It is a Catch-22 since she needs the papers to
travel. So she does not go far.
She has almost no money and even if she were able to buy things like food, many
supermarkets in Bucha were ransacked or blown up. That has left many
residents like her trudging through the drizzly streets wrapped in dark
jackets, searching for humanitarian relief centers where they can get a loaf of
bread, a jar of pickles, anything. Iryna said she was recently warned
that without an identity document, she may soon be cut off from aid. Neighbors
have been sharing food with her. “I used to say that I had the best family
in the world,” she said. “One husband. Three cats. And one dog.
“It’s hard to process.” Standing
in her yard, surrounded by burned beams, burned pots, her whole life basically
burned — the bodies of her dog and two cats somewhere in that same ash — Iryna
said, “It’s like I look at this but I keep seeing my old house.” She added:
“It’s like I’ve made a wrong turn into a parallel reality and there is another
reality where my house and my husband still exist. And here in this reality I
am alone.” She allows herself to dream. There’s one scene she can’t get
out of her head, a good scene that she keeps replaying. She wants to keep it
there forever. “I’m in bed watching TV, and he’s walking through the
door, taking off his cap,” she said. “And then I hear: ‘Kitty, I’m home. Where
are you, Kitty?’”
^ On May 9th (Victory
Day) the Russians will celebrate their victory over Nazi Germany. Hopefully,
soon Ukraine will celebrate their victory over Nazi Russia. As more and more
massacre sites and more and more war crimes are investigated it is clear that
the Nazi Russians need to lose this War and have their country collapse (the
Grace Period on the Russian Default ends May 4th) so that peace and
prosperity can return to the world. ^
https://www.yahoo.com/news/fell-deeply-love-bucha-one-181034061.html
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