A first trial for war crimes is due to open this Wednesday in Ukraine. A young Russian soldier is accused of shooting a 62-year-old man who died near Sumy in the north of the country. A village illustrates the atrocities that would have been committed by the Russians during the occupation: that of Boutcha, near kyiv, where hundreds of civilians would have been victims of abuses.
With our special envoys, Murielle Paradon and Sami Boukhelifa
It is a bruised woman who receives us in her modest house in Boutcha. Olga Petrova, 68, evokes the painful memory of her son Yevhen, who disappeared during the Russian occupation. He was only found by the police on April 14, two weeks after the city was liberated, in an unoccupied house.
“ Residents of Boutcha returned to their homes after the occupation. And they saw grenades hanging on their door. So they called the police or deminers, I don’t know. Then they came in and there they saw my son’s body, with a bullet in the head, behind, testifies Olga. As he had a passport on him, the police were able to identify him. She took a picture and came to my house. I recognized him, despite the state of the body, he was my son “.
Yevhen was 45 years old, a wife and three children. An ordinary man, according to his mother, a worker who since the beginning of the war had been volunteering. But while the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced the dispatch of more than 40 investigators and experts to work on war crimes in Ukraine, Olga Petrova expects nothing from justice.
” I’m not expecting an answer, because I’m sure there were no witnesses. Otherwise he would have died next to him. I believe in divine justice. It is up there that those who did this will be punished. What kind of man can be capable of that? Especially since my son didn’t do anything. He was only helping his neighbors by distributing medicine. Justice ? I don’t really care, I lost my son “laments the old lady.
Despite the pain, Olga claims to have no sense of revenge. ” I don’t wish harm on anyone “, she says.
► To read also: “I turned my head, I saw all these corpses on the ground”: Boutcha, an open-air cemetery