Behind the shot: Death and destruction are all around, but Ukrainians are already starting to rebuild
Russian forces fully withdrew from Kyiv Oblast and went back across the border at the end of the first week of April. With this, the atrocities they had committed during their occupation were laid bare for the world to see.
I was in Bucha when Karim Khan, the head of the International Criminal Court, arrived to inspect the mass grave in which civilian victims of the Russian occupation were temporarily buried before being exhumed for forensic examination.
I also spent several days negotiating destroyed bridges and dirt tracks flanked by mines to explore the smaller villages and towns to the east and northeast of Kyiv such as Makariv, Andriivka, Borodyanka, and Zalissya.
The scale of horror and destruction there is vast. Perhaps not as concentrated or on the same scale as in once desirable satellite towns such as Bucha and Irpin, but we did not pass a village that had not been affected in some way.
Andriivka, a hamlet on the road to Borodyanka, was largely flattened. While photographing some of the destruction, I was invited to see the fox holes the occupiers had dug in someone’s vegetable patch; the house to which it belonged now rubble.
The owner then showed me a corpse laid out on a military-style groundsheet, just the other side of his perimeter fence. He said he did not know who it was. The way the body had fallen looked as if the person had been kneeling with their hands tied behind their back. The state of decomposition suggested that it had been there for some time before the area was liberated. No one dared touch it because of the justifiable fear of booby traps.
In Zalissya we met police officers doing a preliminary battle assessment for potential compensation payments next to what was left of a house and a destroyed Russian tank.
Benkovski and his wife were clearing rubble from around the house they had built for themselves 30 years ago. It seemed a completely futile exercise but Mrs Benkovska explained that she wanted to clear the debris from her flowerbeds.
In the next village along, Shevchenkove, Andrey, a marketing manager, had just returned to his home for the first time and discovered a burnt-out tank in his front garden. It appeared that invading troops had ransacked his house. His television was still there but had been mindlessly smashed.
It was a similar situation in every village we passed. Destroyed armour, troop transporters, artillery pieces and cars — their wrecks lined the road.
Apparently, rebuilding work will start in Kyiv soon despite an increase in Russian missile attacks. It is testament to Ukrainian and human resilience more generally — I have seen it elsewhere too — that the clean-up and rebuilding process has already begun.
Electricity cables are being reattached, train tracks are being repaired and huge clean-up and de-mining operations are under way. It is almost incomprehensible but the desire to get back to a semblance of normality and to cleanse the area of its war detritus must, in some way, be overwhelming.
