Archpriest Piotr Pavlenko had just finished praying over the body of one of Hostomel’s fallen and had returned to his church when the villagers burst in to tell him his friend Yriy had died.

The mayor, Yriy Pzylyko, was distributing food and medicine to civilians stuck by conflict when their humanitarian convoy came under fire from Russian snipers hiding in a multi-story building.

When Pavlenko went to confront the soldiers who had come to fetch Pzylyko’s body, they grabbed his vestments and crossed with a look of humiliation on their faces.

A soldier yelled, “Don’t touch the body or it will explode and you’ll blow up with it.”

Pavlenko took a step back.

As the priest would find, the troops who executed Pzylyko and his driver, Ivan Zoryo, did not bury or leave their bodies in peace. Instead, they came from their hiding location to rig the deceased with explosives in the hopes of killing those who came to retrieve them.

It’s another another misery being visited on the dead, as well as an outrage being perpetrated on the living, that was initially witnessed in the early days of the war and is now being exposed as settlement after settlement is taken back from Russian troops as they withdraw from Kyiv.

Several similar bodies were discovered wired with explosives in Irpin before specialists went on to the horrors of Bucha, where executed civilians’ remains lay on the streets.

New casualties were discovered in basements and courtyards by Ukrainian forces and police moving into Russian-occupied buildings, all the while advising media accompanying them to stand back until the deceased could be inspected for booby traps designed to kill or maim rescuers. According to Oleksandr Yurchenko, a Ukrainian MP who was in Hostomel yesterday as a territorial defense force volunteer helping the town recover from the devastation wrought by weeks of hard warfare, Bucha’s crimes may only be the tip of the iceberg.

“Bucha was not so badly damaged as Hostomel but crimes were carried out deliberately on the civilians,” Yurchenko said. “Now we are discovering this is the case for so many places that the Russians occupied. In places where the fighting was intense, like Hostomel, probably more people have been killed. In occupied places like Bucha, women were raped, children were shot, people’s bodies were run over.”

Yesterday, President Zelensky paid a visit to Bucha to experience personally the effects of the Russian occupation. “These are war crimes and will be recognized by the world as genocide,” he warned reporters accompanying him.

Nobody knows how many people were killed in Hostomel, one of the first villages around Kyiv to be attacked after Russian war planners picked its huge freight airport as a target for an airborne assault on the capital. As the Ukrainians continually pushed back waves of Russian paratroopers and the armored columns that followed them, battle raged through the airport and the town. The burnt-out military vehicles and the splintered corpse of the Mriya, which meant “dream” or “inspiration” and was once the world’s largest airplane and a source of Ukrainian national pride, litter the Antonov airfield, which resembles a post-apocalyptic environment.

The discovery of civilian bodies dotting the town, however, is “like a horror movie,” according to Oleksander. “We keep finding bodies.”

Pavlenko revealed how he was regularly asked to supervise emergency garden burials by families who were scared of having their loved ones’ bodies removed from their homes. When word of Pzylyko’s murder reached him, he had just returned from one. With a wheelbarrow and a white sheet, he started out from the church to the spot where the two men had fallen.

“I saw a multistorey building badly damaged and Russians snipers in the window,” he said. “I lifted up the white sheet and said I want to speak to the commander. I want to take the bodies and you must let me do it.”

Pavlenko was “walking slowly, only a few metres when one of the soldiers shouted “stop!” — apparently shamed into action by the priest’s holy status. Pavlenko and his verger, who had come to help, hid behind a wall as the soldier unzipped Pzylyko’s jackets and began dismantling the explosives.

“Only after he finished was I allowed to take the body,” he said. “I wanted to take Ivan’s body too but they said, no, you must come tomorrow, we can’t dismantle it in time.”

Pavlenko was able to return home two days after the fighting had stopped. The soldiers had already left.

“We did not know if Ivan’s body was clear or not,” he explained.

“So we got a very long rope, maybe 15 metres, and tied it around his legs. We all pulled it and nothing happened. So we were able to take him away.”

Because Pavlenko was the mayor and “and a very good man, Yriy was my friend,” he wanted to give the men a dignified funeral. He was unable to locate Pzylyko’s siblings, who had escaped the invasion at the onset, nor coffins, so the men were wrapped in cloth and buried in the yard of Hostomel’s Holy Intercession Church.

“It was better to bury them like that,” he said. “When the war is over, we will disinter their bodies, wash them and give them a funeral with full honours. We will do it the day Ukraine wins the war.”

Russian soldiers arrived at the chapel after Pzylyko was executed, claiming to know the mayor was dead. Pavlenko was invited to take over. Mayors of towns around Ukraine have been chased out, kidnapped, or executed by Russian soldiers as representatives of the administration that President Putin has labeled “Nazis.” Olha Sukhenko, the chief of Motyzhyn village west of Kyiv, was discovered in a mass grave with her husband, Ihor, and son Oleksandr over the weekend. She had been kidnapped on March 23, and Ihor and Oleksandr refused to let her go alone.

Pavlenko declined the invitation to collaborate. He prayed over another body yesterday, an unidentified shelling victim discovered in a field. While he holds Moscow responsible for the invasion, the soldiers’ acts are putting his Christian charity to the test.

“I don’t think Ukrainians will forgive them,” he says.

On his own confession, he doesn’t say anything at all.

Image Credit: Getty

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