A brutal sect of Chechen soldiers executed ‘heavily wounded’ Russian troops in a hospital that lies northwest of Bucha, witnesses have claimed.
The Kadyrovtsy, who have been used as a PR tool in Vladimir Putin’s war, allegedly murdered their own comrades and ‘operated a torture chamber’ in a glass factory on Yablonska Street – confirming previous reports by Ukraine’s ombudsman for human rights, Lyudmila Denisova.
Artem Hurin, a member of the city council of the neighboring town of Irpin who also serves as a deputy commander in Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces, was one of the first to visit Borodyanka, northwest of Bucha, after the Russians retreated last month.
He said: ‘They would bring heavily wounded Russian soldiers to a big hospital they had there, and those who were very heavily wounded, they would just shoot them. No one other than the Kadyrovtsy did this.’
Hurin recalled the horrifying stories of torture and rape from residents and saw evidence of ‘executed civilians’ who lay on the street, the Daily Beast reports.
According to residents of the town, the killer squad of Chechen fighters – known as Kadyrovtsy – had executed people as early as March 5.
One woman recalled how she endured four days of torture by one Kadyrovtsy soldier and one Belarusian soldier before they brutally shot her husband in the head.
Meanwhile, the Bucha Mayor, Anatoliy Fedoruk, claimed Chechen troops tied white bands around prisoners’ arms who were captured that were similar to those found on the bodies of executed civilians.
Opening up about civilians who attempted to leave their homes to get food and water, Hurin added: ‘They didn’t allow them to do anything. There they just killed people through binoculars for example. They just shot them.’
Many Chechen soldiers were fighting alongside the Russian military, which waged two wars against Chechnya – a Muslim republic in southern Russia – between 1994 and 2000.
This comes as the towns around Kyiv which were recaptured by Ukrainian forces have revealed horrific atrocities, with the bodies of hundreds of dead civilians piled up after Putin withdrew his band of thugs.
Russia has denied targeting civilians despite the many stories of gang rape, sexual abuse in front of children, torture and executions to emerge from the barbaric war.
A United Nations mission to Bucha documented ‘the unlawful killing, including by summary execution, of some 50 civilians there’, the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said.
Forensic tests carried out on civilian corpses dumped in mass graves in the Kyiv region show women were raped before being brutally killed.
Dozens of autopsies have been carried out on mutilated corpses from Bucha, Irpin and Borodianka, with many showing signs of torture and multiple bullet holes in the back.
Some have been so badly disfigured or even decapitated that investigators have been unable to identify them.
Vladyslav Pirovskyi, a Ukrainian forensic doctor who carried out the autopsies, told The Guardian: ‘We already have a few cases which suggest that these women had been raped before being shot to death.
‘We can’t give more details as my colleagues are still collecting the data and we still have hundreds of bodies to examine.’
His team has been analysing 15 bodies a day, with most killed by automatic gunfire.
He added: ‘There are many burnt bodies, and heavily disfigured bodies that are just impossible to identify.
‘The face could be smashed into pieces, you can’t put it back together, sometimes there’s no head at all.’
The evidence has been passed on to the region’s senior prosecutor, Oleh Tkalenko, for further investigations.