A businessman who lived and worked there managed to escape. But not before having seen the “horrible reality.”
by Massimo Introvigne
Gianluca Miglietta is a businessman from Torino, Italy. He works with Ukraine and has an apartment in Bucha. I happen to know some of his friends and relatives who followed with trepidation his adventurous escape from Ukraine. Miglietta is not a politician. He is just a common citizen caught in the horror of the war, and for this reason a reliable and independent witness.
He told his story to the Italian wire agency Adnkronos. He saw the “people who died in the street,” the “cars that blew up,” and “the fear of snipers hiding everywhere” in what had become “a ghost town.” He calls what happened in Bucha “an indescribable catastrophe.”
Miglietta survived by hiding for six days and six nights in the basement of his apartment building. Then, on March 2 he decided to go out to save himself. ‘”A difficult decision, it could have been my time and instead thank God we made it, but for others it was not so,” he reported to Adnkronos from his Italian home, where he has now safely arrived. “They shoot, missiles everywhere, missiles even on the elderly. I was hidden as much as possible, then I decided to try the journey of hope.”
When he went out of his hiding place, he “found in front of [his] eyes chilling scenes of destruction and death. On the ground there was everything. There were bodies, kids, they shot kids.” “In those moments, he said, there is little lucidity. You see the broken tanks, the corpses on the road, the checkpoints, they are moments of panic and you only think of running, looking for the best route.” “I’ve ventured and I’ve been brave, but I’ve also been luckier than others. In those moments it is the adrenaline that commands.”
“My brain is still in shock and for me it is impossible to forget what I saw,” he reported, mentioning “the massacre of women, raped and killed. Then they passed over them with the tank.” For him, there is little doubt that this is “a genocide,” and that international media are only aware of “one percent of the horrible reality that Ukraine is experiencing.”
Miglietta has now seen the images of the bodies found in Bucha. He said he recognized “my church, the one in front of my house in Bucha, where I used to go on Saturdays and Sundays. There was a lawn, they were fixing it before the war, and now there is a mass grave, black bags with bodies inside… the mothers and children who are buried in the grounds in front of the apartment buildings. They are no longer people, there are no more faces, they no longer have identities, they are no longer recognizable. It’s atrocious.”
The businessman keeps receiving news from Ukraine. “Only yesterday, he reported, they killed a 14-year-old boy with a white armband to indicate that he was a civilian. But then what does the mayor say that Bucha has been freed? It will take time before it is really free from the Russians, maybe there are still some hidden ones, disguised as civilians.”
Referring to Bucha, “for two weeks I haven’t been able to get in touch with 40 or 50 people I know who are still there, added Miglietta. There’s the elderly Oleg, who decided to stay in his city, but hasn’t answered me in a while. And there are the women, young and old, who were like me in the basement.”
