20 November 2024
Visit to Kyiv region and meeting with relatives of political prisoners. Crimea Global conference Delegates are shocked by crimes against civilians
Some of the delegates of the Global Crimea conference from Mexico, Sudan and Iraq visited the settlements of Kyiv region – Irpin, Bucha and Borodyanka – freed in 2022 from the Russian troops. This trip was organized by PEN Ukraine.
The remains of broken civilian cars that were deliberately hit by Russian soldiers in Irpin in March 2023 shocked the Sudanese human rights defender Mohammed Hassan. “People were killed in these cars and simply left on the road. It’s terrible,” he said, trying to draw parallels with military operations in his homeland and in war crimes in Ukraine. “We also had terrible military actions. Civilians were shot in cars, their cars were taken and sold, women were sold into slavery”… Military conflict in Sudan’s Darfur lasted from 2003 to 2007.
Delegates spent most of their time near the memorial monument to the victims of the shootings in Bucha near the church of St. Andrew. They looked at the dates of birth and death of everyone whose name is on the Screens near the temple. The bodies of all these people were exhumed from the mass grave after the city returned to Ukrainian control.
Mexican journalist and documentarist Hania Novell asked the Priest of this church about the circumstances of the events of May 2022. Andrii Priest said that he and other residents of the city, civilians, had to collect bodies all over Bucha and transported them on carts from the nearest supermarket. “In this grave were a singer from the choir of this church and an Orthodox priest from the neighboring parish,” the Priest said.
At Borodyanka, at the site of the destroyed residential buildings, another delegate, Natia Navruzov, was interested in the fate of the residents who were left to live in damaged buildings. Ms. Navruzov defends the rights of Yazidis in Iraq, who suffered from the actions of the militants of the “Islamic State”. They left similar damages in the Yazidis region. She mentioned that in European courts, “it is not so easy to prove guilt usually in cases, even when the guilt is obvious. And you shouldn’t give up anyway”.
In the afternoon in Kyiv, at the office of Pen Ukraine, the delegates met with relatives of Ukrainian civilians imprisoned in Russia. Valentyn Vyhivskyi’s parents, Ali Mamutov’s brother, Mark Davydov’s relative, and Bohdan Ziza’s sister attended the meeting along with ZMINA Human Rights Center representatives. Relatives of the imprisoned spoke about fabricated cases, illegal court decisions, and lack of contact with relatives. Oleksandra Barkova, Bohdan Ziza’s sister, read a letter from her brother, who was brought to Ukraine from a Russian prison with great difficulty. “No matter where the Russian prison auto takes me, the beauty of Crimea will always be in my heart… I think it’s better to be under Russian missiles than where they fly from,” wrote the artist and political prisoner Bohdan Ziza, who was illegally sentenced by the occupiers to 15 years in prison on trumped-up charges of alleged “terrorism” and “vandalism for political reasons”.
