Heartbreaking images have emerged of two young Ukrainian brothers placing food and juice on their mother’s grave after she starved to death amid Russia’s deadly invasion.
Vlad Tanyuk, 6, and his 10-year-old brother, Vova, were pictured standing over their mother’s hastily dug grave in the courtyard of their home in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, earlier this week.
Their mother, Ira, is said to have passed away from starvation and stress from Russia’s ongoing atrocities.
It wasn’t immediately clear when Ira died.
Russia has been accused of war crimes in Bucha — the town where the boys live — after dozens of innocent civilians were slaughtered by Vladimir Putin’s troops.
Authorities have been collecting bodies — many with close-range gunshot wounds or severe burns — from the streets of Bucha and placing them in mass graves.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the town on Monday to “show the world” the mass graves as he vowed to hold Russia accountable for treating Ukrainians “worse than animals.”
“We want you to show the world what happened here. What the Russian military did. What the Russian Federation did in peaceful Ukraine,” Zelensky said.
“It was important for you to see that these were civilians.”
“What you see around, what they did to this modern town, is a characteristic of the Russian military, who treated people worse than animals. These are war crimes, and this will be recognized by the world as genocide.”
Meanwhile, Ukrainian authorities continued to gather the dead after the apparent slaughter of civilians in Kyiv’s northern suburbs Wednesday, as startling photos of a beloved Ukrainian mayor executed alongside her family made her a symbol of Russian cruelty.
Investigators have collected bodies — many with close-range gunshot wounds or severe burns, several with their hands still bound — throughout Bucha, where the dead have been found in mass graves and strewn across the city streets.
