As mayor of a small town, there are a number of duties I have to deal with. As with everything else in life, some are more pleasant than others. The ribbon cuttings, the events, the meetings, and the complaints all come with the territory. Outside of the occasional nutjob, most of the things small town mayors deal with aren’t issues of life and death.
Reading the news about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, especially the story coming out of the village of Motyzhyn, is a sobering, chilling tale about the perils of public service. The mayor of Motyzhyn, Olga Sukhenko, was tortured and murdered execution-style by Russian invaders. So were her husband and adult son. The mayor of the neighboring village of Kopyliv reported that Sukhenko’s body showed signs of torture, that her fingers and arms were broken. Her body, as well as her husband’s and son’s, were dumped in a pit behind houses the Russian troops were using as makeshift barracks. Another local official noted that they can’t even remove the bodies, because they suspect the burial pit has been mined.
Reports from Ukraine indicate that this is the Russian army’s tactic: troops target local officials in a bid to win them over, and kill them if they do not cooperate. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said there are 11 mayors and community heads in Russian captivity across Ukraine, from the mayor of Kyiv to other communities in the vicinity of the Ukrainian capital.
As the Russian army has retreated from positions near Kyiv, stories of atrocities and potential war crimes are coming to light. According to Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Iryna Venedyktova, the bodies of more than 400 civilians have been retrieved from Bucha, the neighboring towns of Irpin and Hostomel, and smaller villages around Kyiv after the Russian pull-back. Satellite imagery has shown bodies lying in the streets for weeks, contrary to the Russian government’s claim that this is all “fake news.”
“What has been done to this modern town is a characteristic of the Russian military, which treated humans worse than animals,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters. Contrarily, the Russian Defense Ministry claims in a statement that, and I am not making this up, “During the time that the town has been under the control of the Russian armed forces, not a single local resident has suffered from any violent action. Russian servicemen have delivered and distributed 452 tons of humanitarian aid to civilians in the Kiev Region.”
Ironically, the Russian Defense Ministry demanded an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council regarding “provocations of Ukrainian radicals” in Bucha. To actually claim that all the bad things happening to Ukraine is the fault of the Ukrainians and not the invaders requires a major suspension of belief in all things real — not too different from the “alternate facts” circulating about the January 6 insurrection. And if the Security Council does meet over this unbelievable demand, it will be interesting to see just how that meeting goes.
These stories about what is happening to local officials in Ukraine are horrifying. I would imagine it’s not so different in Ukraine as it is here — invasion, torture and murder are not things one expects to encounter as a small-town mayor. These officials are heroes for not cooperating with the invaders, and it is my fervent hope that those who committed these atrocities will be prosecuted and brought to justice.
The stories of torture and murder of civilians coming out of Ukraine have been called war crimes by both Zelenskyy and U.S. President Joe Biden. The Ukrainian army has been gutsy and effective in repelling the Russian invaders, and the people of Ukraine have been solid and undeterred in their resistance to these hostile forces. As more and more of these atrocities come to light — and I’m sure we’re only hearing the first reports — hopefully the pressure on Vladimir Putin will escalate, from both internal and external sources. I’m also hopeful that there will be a way out of this horrific invasion that won’t take long — because the rebuilding of Ukraine certainly will.
And my heart goes out to my fellow mayors and other officials paying the ultimate price for public service.
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