ometimes the dead have more to say than the living. Those lying beneath the soft, yellow earth in the grounds of the church of Andrew the Apostle, in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, have many terrible stories to tell.
As each new cadaver was laid in front of him, the lead investigator knelt over it and softly murmured an inventory while a colleague wrote it down: leather jacket, mobile phone, no ID. He checked inside decaying mouths, the range of motion of broken limbs, and documented burns, bullet wounds and injuries caused by shrapnel, before volunteers from the town helped put each corpse into a fresh body bag.
“We had to beg the Russians to let us bury them. They told us it was still cold, so it didn’t matter, they could lie there. But the dogs were starting to eat them. In the end we convinced them it was a sanitary issue and they let us dig the grave at the church of Andrew the Apostle since it was near both their military position and the morgue and hospital.
Kukharenko Vyacheslav, a large man of 47 with a soft voice and bright blue eyes, spent most of the day crying quietly next to the grave. He was not looking for a loved one. He felt guilty, he said, tortured by what he described as his own “cowardice” in the face of the invasion, and felt the need to bear witness.
Haylena Fiaktistava, 70, was among those hoping to find answers in the mass grave. She spent the occupation sheltering at home with her two sons, Dmitro and Andrei, but one day Dmitro left the house to try and find bread, and never came back. During a respite in the shelling three days later, Haylena and Andrei went out and found him lying face down in the middle of the road a few streets away, bullet holes in his back.
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