Ira Gavriluk holds her cat as she walks next to the corpses of her husband and her brother, who were killed in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, April 4, 2022

Ira Gavriluk holds her cat as she walks next to the corpses of her husband and her brother, who were killed in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, April 4, 2022.

War Crimes Watch: A devastating walk through Bucha’s horror

BUCHA, Ukraine (AP) — There is a body in the basement of the abandoned yellow home at the end of the street near the railroad tracks. The man is young, pale, a dried trickle of blood by his mouth, shot to death and left in the dark, and no one knows why the Russians brought him there, to a home that wasn’t his.

There is a pile of toys near the stairs to the basement. Plastic clothespins sway on an empty line under a cold, gray sky. They are all that’s left of normal on this blackened end of the street in Bucha, where tank treads lay stripped from charred vehicles, civilian cars are crushed, and ammunition boxes are stacked beside empty Russian military rations and liquor bottles.

The man in the basement is almost an afterthought, one more body in a town where death is abundant, but satisfactory explanations for it are not.

A resident, Mykola Babak, points out the man after pondering the scene in a small courtyard nearby. Three men lay there. One is missing an eye. On an old carpet near one body, someone has placed a handful of yellow flowers.
A dog paces by a wheelbarrow around the corner, agitated. The wheelbarrow holds the body of another dog. It has been shot, too.

Babak stands, a cigarette in one hand, a plastic bag of cat food in the other.

“I’m very calm today,” he says. “I shaved for the first time.”
At the beginning of their monthlong occupation of Bucha, he said, the Russians kept pretty much to themselves, focused on forward progress. When that stalled they went house to house looking for young men, sometimes taking documents and phones.

 

Ukrainian resistance seemed to be wearing on them. The Russians seemed angrier, more impulsive. Sometimes they seemed drunk.

The first time they visited Babak, they were polite. But when they returned on his birthday, March 28, they screamed at him and his brother-in-law. They put a grenade to the brother-in-law’s armpit and threatened to pull the pin. They took an AK-47 and fired near Babak’s feet. Let’s kill him, one of them said, but another Russian told them to leave it and go.
Before they left, the Russians asked him an excellent question: “Why are you still here
Like many who stayed in Bucha, Babak is older -- 61. It was not as easy to leave. He thought he would be spared. And yet, in the end, the stressed-out Russians accused him of being a saboteur. 

He spent a month under occupation without connection with the world, without electricity, without running water, cooking over a fire. He was not prepared for this war.
Maybe the Russians weren’t either.
Around 6 p.m. on March 31 — and Babak remembers this clearly — the Russians jumped into their vehicles and left, so quickly that they abandoned the bodies of their companions.
Now he watches police and other investigators arrive, look at the bodies in the courtyard, and leave. He wonders when the bodies will be taken away so families can mourn. Down the road is an empty playground, steps away from six charred bodies. People don’t know who they are.
“On this street we were fine,” Babak says, taking stock of the occupation. In Bucha, everything is relative. “They weren’t shooting anyone who stepped out of their house. On the next street, they did.

On March 15, a friend of the dead man was approached by Russians demanding his documents. They’re at home, he said. On the way there, they passed the grave. He pointed it out. The next moment, witness Iryna Kolysnik says, the soldiers shot him.
“He was talking too much,” one said, adding an expletive.
By the end, any shred of discipline broke down. “They went from normal soldiers to much, much worse,” says Roman Skytenko, 24, who saw four civilian bodies on the street near his house.

Grenades were tossed into basements, bodies thrown into wells. An elderly man at a nursing home was found dead in his bed, apparently of neglect, while a younger person, perhaps a caregiver, lay outside, shot to death. Women in their 70s were told not to stick their heads out of their houses or they’d be killed. “If you leave home, I’ll obey the order, and you know what the order is. I’ll burn your house,” Tetyana Petrovskaya recalls one soldier telling her