DISPATCH | CATHERINE PHILP
‘He told me: Don’t worry, Grandma. Now I stand by his grave and weep’
The cemetery in the blighted town of Bucha bears mute testimony to the immense weight of suffering endured by Ukraine’s civilian population, writes Catherine Philp
Oleksii evacuated his grandmother Valentina to Kyiv during the Russian occupation of Bucha, then left to join the fight against the invaders. He was killed in combat 40 days ago
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JACK HILL
The Times
The last time Valentina Zavadsky saw her grandson, he was heading back to the front in the east of Ukraine. “Don’t worry, Grandma, I will come back in a few months,” Oleksii told her as he left their home in Bucha, the town outside Kyiv where the first mass killings of civilians by occupying Russian troops were uncovered last year.
It was those civilian massacres that prompted Oleksii, 28, to join up, having left Bucha to evacuate his grandmother to Kyiv under shellfire from Russian forces. Last month he was laid to rest in the military section of the same graveyard where many of those civilians were buried after war crimes investigators disinterred them from a mass grave behind the St Andrew’s Church in the
