After images emerged of civilian bodies strewn across the streets of Bucha, a town near the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk told CNN’s New Day’s Brianna Keilar via a translator this morning that “we will not forgive the Russian people for the atrocities that happened here.”

He said that “half the city is destroyed” and the city is now busy “transitioning from a war footing to peacetime living.”

They are working on identifying the bodies of the civilians who were shot dead, who mayor Fedoruk said “were indiscriminately killed by the Russian occupiers. A lot of them are elderly people.”

“We get the impression that the Russian occupiers have got the green light from Putin and Shoigu, the Russian Defence Minister, to have a safari in Ukraine, and they weren’t able to take Kyiv, so they vented their frustration on Bucha and the surrounding areas,” he added.
Around 3,000 people stayed in the town, which usually has a population of around 500,000, for the month of the Russian occupation, according to the mayor who also decided to stay. They were all “witnesses to the horrific events.”

Mayor Fedoruk noted that many children and teenagers were victims of the carnage, despite posing “no threat” to the Russian troops. “It was impossible not to see that they were children, not to see that a mother is carrying a child,” he told CNN.

He said that we can expect to see the same picture of atrocities from Kyiv to Mariupol, everywhere where the Russian occupiers have stepped, adding that what Putin has described as “denazification” is actually the “dehumanization of Ukrainians.”