Russian bombardment of Kiev falls near symbolic site of Nazi massacre

At dawn, a thin layer of snow covers the bodies, lying on the road, of the five people killed by the Russian bombardment of the television tower in Kyiv, near the symbolic site of a Nazi massacre. Nobody dares to approach the bodies.

“We have been asked to stay away, the Russian saboteurs can be out there,” Volodimir Rudenko, a 50-year-old lawyer, a defense volunteer who spent the night from Tuesday to Wednesday at the scene, told AFP. of the coroners.

According to the police, it is in principle a family, decimated by the attack: father, mother, daughter and teenage son. But the victims have not been identified. They died while leaving a store, where they had gone shopping, shortly before curfew.

The store’s alarm, with shattered glass, continues to sound uselessly.

The fifth victim is a journalist from state television, according to a press card found among his belongings and shown to AFP.

A military truck, with the inscription “morgue” arrived during the morning, and the soldiers in charge of evacuating the charred bodies, struggle clumsily against the cold and stupor, to be able to unfold the gray plastic tarpaulin with which the bodies will be covered. corpses.

The television tower, a 300-meter-high metal structure emerging from the mist, is blackened by the impact of the explosion, but still stands. Another State television antenna is now used to continue broadcasting.

At the foot of this large metal structure, a field of shrapnel and pulverized debris stretches out, visible for several tens of meters.

“This tower is our symbol of truth, of true news, of free information: it is our truth that is being attacked,” says Rudenko, the lawyer and now armed volunteer

– Nazi massacre –

But this place is also that of another symbol.

Around it, the symbolic site of Babi Yar extends for several kilometers, a mass grave containing the remains of 33,000 Jews shot dead in this place, in 1941, when the city was under Nazi occupation.

The monument in his memory, a specially conditioned park located a kilometer from the television tower, was not directly hit by the bombing.

Amidst the birch trees, the snow-fluffy silence is suddenly interrupted by the eerie roar of an anti-aircraft bombardment siren. But the sculptures in memory of the victims, including a huge Menorah, the Jewish candelabrum, remain intact, as noted by an AFP journalist.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, nevertheless accused Russia of trying to “erase” Ukraine and its history, and urged “not to remain silent.”

For the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine, Moshe Asman, who is organizing the evacuation of the local community from the city of Kyivthe Russian bombardment of civilians in this place is a “war crime”.

“I can’t believe what I see,” the chief rabbi of Ukraine reacted to AFP on Tuesday night. During the last memorial ceremony organized a month ago in Babi Yar, he recalls warning: “a war is very easy to start, but very difficult to finish.