Grim Torment in Bucha, Ukraine

"The intensity of this conflict f-----g voids everything we know [from previous conflict experience in Afghanistan, Iraq]."

"What makes it a living hell is the actual artillery and the sheer amount of anti-tank weapons that are being used ... And the extensive use of tanks and armoured vehicles and aviation."

"The Taliban didn't have planes. The Iraqi [insurgents] didn't have planes, they didn't have artillery."

Hruf (nom de Guerre) Veteran military Canadian volunteer, Ukraine

 

"We brought people [corpses from the street in Bucha] here from the streets because the dogs were trying to eat the bodies."

"The hospital near here has run out of space. There was no space in the mortuary."

"Now a lot of relatives are searching for their family members but we couldn't see a lot of the faces due to injuries."

Andriy Holovin, priest, Church of St.Andrew Pervozvannoho All Saints, Bucha

 

"[Troops entering the liberated town were] day by day [finding ] bodies in cellars, people tortured, people killed." 

"You can see around what was done to this modern town. That's a characteristic of Russian soldiers; they treat people worse than animals."

"This is real genocide, what you have seen here today."

"These are war crimes and will be recognized by the world as genocide."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

"The Russians loot and robbed every home."

"They stole everything they could get their hands on, from gold to microwaves, and when people had the chance, they ran."

Mykola Mikulich, Special police unit

Residents are seen after receiving humanitarian aid in the village of Sloboda, outside the northern city of Chernihiv, which was recaptured by Ukrainian forces on Friday. Russia says it was withdrawing troops from northern Ukraine and other parts of the country, and are instead refocusing to 'liberate' the Donbas. (Marko Djurica/Reuters)

 

"I spoke to one Russian soldier, I asked him why he came here to kill civilians", explained Ina Bohun, speaking of the Russians looting their homes and shooting at them when they tried to fetch water. She stood at a communal cooking fire outside an apartment building, surrounded by neighbours; elderly people who had lived in Bucha all their lives. The response from the Russian soldier was that he would face prison should he fail to follow orders. "It is better to go to jail than kill innocent civilians", responded 53-year-old Bohun.

When Ukrainian soldiers entered Bucha, a suburb of the capital Kyiv, after an aggressive attack on the Russians holding the town, to liberate it and other satellite towns surrounding Kyiv, which had taken the brunt of the Russian assault as it repeatedly attempted to invade Kyiv to remove government leaders as ordered by the Kremlin, they found a gruesome scene of mass murder amongst the ruins of Bucha. Bodies lying in the streets, to be zipped into black bags by the liberators to be placed with the hundreds piled in vans and filling mass graves.

Vehicles littered the roads, having crashed in gunfire when they were attempting to escape from the smashed charnel house their modern town had become under Russian control. Rescue workers were careful in moving the dead, handling them with care for fear of explosive traps. The corpses were first pulled by chains to evade the possibility of triggering explosives. Then, wrapped in black bags, carried to ambulances and from there, to crowded mortuaries.

 

Dozens of bodies wait to be buried at a cemetery in Bucha, in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, on Tuesday. (Felipe Dana/The Associated Press)

 

The body of a white-haired man was missed, lying on the grass near a river, amongst cardboard boxes, food tins and a coffee pot. The white armband indicating he was a civilian failed to protect him. If his white hair wouldn't have been enough of an alert to those who went on killing sprees, the armband certainly wouldn't have helped to secure his fragile life. 

 

An open trench 45 feet in length, piled high with some 60 bodies lay under the gold domes of the Church of St.Andrew Pervorzvannoho. Locals had used the trench, explained the church priest, to bury their family members once the mortuaries and cemeteries became too full. One of the most difficult issues for Father Holovin with respect to the deaths was that his parish has been unable to identify most of the bodies. They remain in the pit, stacked on top of one another in black bags. Other bodies lie under the sand in clothing they wore when they were shot. 

 

The priest expressed his hope that eventually space would be found to place these bodies to rest in the crematorium. A mass grave was found, within which was the tortured body of the mayor of nearby Motyzhyn. The bodies of her husband and son discovered near the town, west of Kyiv, in woodland. "Russia is not our brother. We will win this war. Ukraine will win. What they have done is unspeakable", said 61-year-old Bucha resident Sacha, who survived the shelling and looting of the town. He "felt the death" of each corpse within the mass grave; they were from "one community, [the] same family".

 

The streets of the destroyed town were ghostly, eerily silent. Some houses bore Christmas wreaths on their front door. Doors wide open, windows smashed, interiors looted. When a resident returned to his shelled home hoping to retrieve some belongings, he discovered an unexploded grenade in his neighbour's garage. He informed Police Inspector Mikulich who retrieved and deactivated the grenade. "If it helps make their home safer to return, I had to help", he commented.

 

A resident is seen amid the rubble of an apartment building destroyed during fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces, now in its 41st day, in Borodyanka, northwest of Kyiv, on April 5, 2022. (Vadim Ghirda/The Associated Press)