Head of the UGCC on the 59th week of war: Atrocities in Bucha may be a prelude to even more horrific atrocities in Kyiv
People from Bucha told me that what happened in their town was supposed to happen in the capital. Bucha massacre was planned as a prelude to an appalling Kyiv massacre. His Beatitude Sviatoslav, the Father and Head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, said on the 59th week of Russia’s full-scale invasion of peaceful Ukrainian land.
“Unfortunately,” said the Primate, “people are dying on our land again. Human blood is flowing. In our prayers we tirelessly ask God for justice, peace, and freedom for our homeland from earth to heaven.”
According to the spiritual leader, these days mark the first anniversary of the liberation of the outskirts of Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Chernihiv, and Sumy regions from the Russian occupier.
“We are commemorating sad events… I remember how I came to Bucha a year ago as soon as I had the opportunity. Later, this name became known all over the world. You could still see dead bodies, burnt-out tanks, and Russian equipment on the streets. But the hardest thing was to look at the mass graves of innocent young people — women and men. My words failed me at that moment. Those pictures were harrowing. Local people spoke little because they were still full of pain. The whole world seemed to pay attention to this recently occupied and liberated territory,” said the spiritual leader.
Yet, he says, we have seen that life returns when the Church comes to the liberated territories. Therefore, it is very important to communicate with people who have survived the occupation. A year after those terrible events, they need to be heard.
“Having visited these territories recently, I didn’t want to see those places as much as I wanted to meet the people — the relatives and friends of the victims. One father told me how he recognized his son’s dead body in early April last year with his eyes gouged out. I still remember the gaze of that father…” the Head of the Church said with regret.
Going to these liberated territories, the church community carried with it the hope that life was returning, that it was stronger than death. And obviously, we are still trying to go to the places where people are suffering the most to be with them.
Indeed, at the beginning of the war, Kyiv became the world’s spiritual capital because we were all on the verge of life and death, the Primate recalls. Many leaders of international delegations who came to Ukraine said that if someone was not in Kyiv today, he was an outsider to world diplomacy.
“Because only in those places of crimes of the Russian army — looking into the eyes of those people, seeing the destroyed houses and mass graves — one can see that the world they knew before, that is, former Russia, Ukraine, Europe, no longer exists,” said His Beatitude Sviatoslav.
The UGCC Department for Information
