You can’t walk in the woods around Bucha and Irpin, in Ukraine, for at least five years. Authorities consider these sites no longer places for calm and shade during the summer, but rather situations where any hiker can fly in the airtorn into a thousand parts.

The place is full of mines against personnel, a deadly weapon banned by various conventions but re -used by Russia at close range during its failed attempt to seize kyiv. reach 13 kilos of weight to blow them up: the force of a footstep.

This is the first data to break once the car’s Clarion it reached the area of ​​massacres, mass graves and civilian casualties. Bucha and Irpin are weekend placeswith fine houses where the elites of kyiv once rested.

But they became places of blood and death when the Russian Army, for a strategic plan elusive, they were chosen as “doors” to reach the large capital at a distance of only 15 kilometers.

Just a month ago, on April 2, the world stopped. The Russians fell, left a pile of corpses scattered in its streets. The first photos showed neighbors riding bicycles being killed by enemy fire.

Ordinary men killed for crossing an avenue. Bodies on the side of vehicles and roads. Tanks burned, soldiers burned.

But there is still more horror. Bucha has a main church. This is the temple of San Andrés, a typical construction crowned with Orthodox domes like golden onions. This is the religious architecture that defines the character of almost all towns and cities in Ukraine.

church graves

The splendor of these buildings contrasts with the not -so -vivid tone of landscapes in general. The church is white and clean, although now it has this pattern of black polka dots: machine gun hit them. It was behind the temple, at the beginning of the month, that the wells full of bodies: the graves where the Russians tried to hide the massacre they committed.

The site, which is now full of piles of cement since a cenotaph identification of victims, is one of the key elements that currently exist to accuse Russia of crimes against humanity. Most of the corpses found at the scene were identified.

But complaints are only filed with first and last names at least nine Russian soldiers with a command rank to be had ordered and promisednot just torture, but mass murder.

None of that is visible today, but details. The exact location of the pit it is pure earth removed and all over the place can be seen latex gloves which coroners used to do in the recovery of each body.

There was a wooden door thrown aside, which in the pictures of that dark day, when death was seen, was used as a stretcher to remove bodies.

there is three black bags, the kind they use to move bodies, full of rubbish and rubbish. The church was on board and guarded by two soldiers, accustomed to the parade of international journalism.

This is a special day since the visit of Clarion in that area coincided with the visit to the area of ​​Antonio Guterres, the Secretary General of the United Nations, who described the war as an “ignorance of the 21st century”.

pure destruction

Despite this, Bucha sends calmly. This is pure destruction. A successive houses without windows, of broken glass and rubble piled on each side of the streets. It was, however, the time of rebuilding.

To the Russians, the spoils remained. Soldiers’ clothes in the ruins, war tank piecespackages of old Muscovite food, remnants of ammunition in completely destroyed houses.

inside houses, remnants of life: household utensils, toys, kitchen utensils, broken dishes. In Bucha you can enter and exit the ruins, repeatedly trampling the ruins of people’s private work, as in a sad game

This week the drinking water service was reconnected. A large pipeline supplying the area from kyiv. But how still no gas or lightimpossible to live there.

So. almost no one returned and some wanderers are neighbors who come to look at their belongings and leave.

Maxime and Oleksi have green and black uniforms. But they are not fighters. They wear the costume of the Internet service company they work for. They are trying return the signal to place and the question is how will they do it if there is not even a pole standing. “Included patience and looking a little healthy ”, they said.

Ludmila, 52, was walking on a dirty road. Bring bags of food. your house was saved. But those of their neighbors were taken and robbed by the Russians.

“Come on and I’ll show you how it is,” he said. He went through a gate: the house was on fire, everything was upside down. They invite you in but they ask you not to touch because everything is intact, boredom disasteras when the Russians left.

“This family is never coming back,” Ludmila said. He has a delicatessen business. He was asked what he lived in now that the worst was over. “You’re welcome,” he replied. unemployed. You are doing your best while you are waiting for financial help from the government. We signed up and are waiting. “

Irpin

Ludmila went down the same street and continued her journey you get to Irpinwhere an old demolished railway bridge is now the place of a small number of Ukrainian workers. It is important to get the train back to Irpin and Bucha because there is no other way to bring supplies in quantity. Until that happens, the bulk of the population will not be able to return.

That is why everyone is still paralyzed, to a large extent. The primary school of Irpin is a symbol of the catastrophe wrought by the Russians here. This shot down to the last centimeter of the wall

Flying in his yard was the Ukrainian flag that someone had tried to destroy. And you can see the sheets bent by the missile effects. Wells caused by bombs in the yard where children should play. Classrooms with no windows, but with books glued together and no longer available to anyone. A soccer field completely detonated by bombs.

Irpin, the place of deaths of civilians, of battles as well as of resistance, is still confined. There is no more risk of aggression. But the enclave has lost all its characteristics as a neat and tidy place. It is by far an obsolete battlefield, with “monuments” reminiscent of the tragedy.

for sure one attracts too much attention. It was a piled car grave. Ay fired or damaged vehicles by war tanks. It’s a new junkyard, designed in record time, built in recent days, when cranes cleaned the city’s major arteries, when they removed what no one wants to see: the destruction that completely took over this unknown place.

Bucha, special envoy

ap