Satellite photographs show bodies in Bucha

Russian claims that dead remains in civilian dress were discovered in Bucha after Russian forces departed from the destroyed Ukrainian town appear to be debunked by satellite photos released on Monday.

Satellite footage from mid-March purports to show many bodies of people lying dead in or near a Bucha street where Ukrainian officials previously stated they discovered additional corpses after Russian soldiers left.

Maxar Technologies spokesman Stephen Wood said Monday in a statement that “high-resolution Maxar satellite imagery collected over Bucha, Ukraine (northwest of Kyiv) verifies and corroborates recent social media videos and photos that reveal bodies lying in the streets and left out in the open for weeks.”

A US-based newspaper released an examination of close-ups of Bucha’s Yablonska street, concluding that many had been there for at least three weeks, while Russian forces were in control of the town, after comparing it to video footage from April 1 and 2 showing dead bodies along the roadway.

On Saturday, AFP photographers visited Bucha, northwest of Kyiv, and confirmed the discovery of 20 bodies, all dressed in civilian attire and some with their hands bound, in pictures that have aroused worldwide outrage and suspicions of war crimes.

Russia’s military ministry has denied culpability, claiming that all of its troops “fully evacuated from Bucha as early as March 30,” while the Kremlin has rejected the grisly photos emerging from the town as “fakes” created by Ukraine.

That argument was reaffirmed at the United Nations on Monday, when Moscow’s envoy Vassily Nebenzia said at a news conference that the bodies seen in Bucha were not there when Russian soldiers withdrew.

“They come on the streets, one by one, left and right, some of them moving, some of them displaying signs of life,” he claimed, saying that the scenes were “prepared by the Ukrainian information, information warfare machine.”

However, satellite photographs from Maxar from March 19 and 21 reveal many bodies on Bucha’s Yablonska street at the time.

Maxar photos indicate black things the size of human figures arriving on the roadway between March 9 and 11, according to the Times investigation.

Many of the bodies seen in satellite pictures looked to be in the exact same location on the ground as seen in video footage shot by a Ukrainian local council member and photographs taken by foreign news organisations from the same street.

On a second side-by-side comparison, the Times looked at a video of a body in the street in front of two automobiles that was shared on Instagram. The corpse and the cars appear to be in the same place in a satellite view taken on March 21.