Note: This post contains graphic images.
The worst thing I’ve seen since arriving in Kyiv about a month ago has to be the corpse of a man who was shown in Backyard in Borodiankanorthwest of Kyiv.
The owner of the house, who had fled the city in the early days of the war, drove us to the site. She returned after the invading forces withdrew to find her house had been looted by Russian soldiers.
Behind her garden shed, she showed us a man with a bag on his head with his hands tied behind his back and his pants ripped down, revealing his underwear and his badly bruised leg.
He was shot in the head, and one bullet was still lying next to his body.
He appeared to have been tortured and executed by Russian soldiers, though we don’t know for sure what happened to him.
By this time we had already seen the infamous mass grave at Bucha, but the image of that man stuck with me – I find the individual more closely related to him than the collective. It is easier to separate a group and separate it from the humanity from which it was robbed.
Some context: Borodianka was home to 13,000 prewarMost of them fled after the Russian invasion. The rest of the city, after intense bombardment and devastating air raids, was then occupied by Russian troops, who moved on February 28. The city returned to Ukrainian control on 1 April.
Read more about what CNN journalists saw in Ukraine here:
