By Aaron Miller-
The mayor of a Ukrainian village was kidnapped, executed and dumped in a shallow grave alongside her husband and son — as disturbing satellite images showed a 45-foot-long trench where a mass grave was dug in neighboring Bucha after killings widely decried as “genocide.”
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk confirmed the death of the Mayor of the Village of Motyzhyn, Olga Sukhenko who was ‘unfortunately killed in captivity by the Russians’.
“This is a war crime,” Vereshchuk added.
“The guilty will inevitably be punished in accordance with international humanitarian law.”
Eleven mayors and community heads are in Russian captivity across Ukraine, including leaders from Kyiv, Kherson, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv and Donetsk regions, Vereshchuk says.
Vereshchuk went on to say: “We are informing about them and about other captive civilians to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United Nations and other international organizations.
“We demand everyone on whom it depends to do everything possible to make sure our civilians, our mayors, our clergymen, journalists activist are released.”
He added: “The occupiers suspected they were collaborating with our military, giving us locations of where to target our artillery.
“These scum tortured, slaughtered and killed the whole family.”
“It’s very difficult to conduct negotiations when you see what they did here,” Zelenskyy said, adding that Russia’s leadership ‘needs to think faster if it has what to think with’.
One resident of the town, which sits in territory recently abandoned by Russia’s forces about 31 miles west of Kyiv, told The Associated Press that Russian troops had targeted local officials in a bid to win them over and killed them if they did not collaborate.
lga Sukhenk, the mayor of Motyzhyn — a suburban village just outside the capital, Kyiv — and her family were believed to have been kidnapped by invading Russian troops on March 23, Ukrainian officials said.
The troops then “tortured and murdered the whole family of the village head,” said Anton Herashchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian interior ministry.
“The occupiers suspected they were collaborating with our military, giving us locations of where to target our artillery.
“These scum tortured, slaughtered and killed the whole family,” he said, naming Sukhenko, her husband, Ihor Sukhenko, and their son, Oleksandr.
lga Sukhenk, the mayor of Motyzhyn — a suburban village just outside the capital, Kyiv — and her family were believed to have been kidnapped by invading Russian troops on March 23, Ukrainian officials said.
The troops then “tortured and murdered the whole family of the village head,” said Anton Herashchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian interior ministry.
“The occupiers suspected they were collaborating with our military, giving us locations of where to target our artillery.
“These scum tortured, slaughtered and killed the whole family,” he said, naming Sukhenko, her husband, Ihor Sukhenko, and their son, Oleksandr.