After Russian retreat, pattern of executions seen in Ukraine’s Bucha

The mayor of Bucha, Anatoliy Fedoruk, showed a Reuters team two corpses with a white cloth tied around their arms which he said was what residents were forced to wear by fighters from Chechnya, a region in southern Russia that has deployed troops to Ukraine to support Russian forces.

One corpse had his hands bound by the white cloth and appeared to have been shot in the mouth.

Russia's defence ministry issued a statement on Sunday saying that all photographs and videos published by the Ukrainian authorities alleging "crimes" by Russian troops in Bucha were a "provocation."

While Reuters was not immediately able to verify the mayor's allegations, reporters on Sunday saw at least three victims who had been shot in the head, and residents recounted examples of others shot through the eye or strafed with bullets.

Local officials say they have logged around 50 executions so far, dubbing it a genocide.

Bucha lies 37 km (23 miles) northwest of Kyiv city and this weekend when journalists visited and the authorities began making allegations of atrocities, it was a scene of shattered buildings and streets strewn with corpses.

Sobbing as she gestured at a shallow grave, a shot of vodka topped with a cracker resting on freshly dug earth, Tetyana Volodymyrivna recounted a harrowing ordeal at the hands of Russian troops.

She and her husband, a former Ukrainian marine, were dragged from their apartment when Russian troops set up their command centre in their building and held prisoner for days.

She said a Chechen fighter warned he would cut them both to pieces.

Volodymyrivna was eventually released.

Her husband was nowhere to be seen - until she was told about some slain victims in a basement stairwell.

“I recognised him by his shoes, his trousers. He looked mutilated, his body was cold,” she said.

“He was buried a meter deep, so dogs wouldn’t eat him.”

Another corpse still lies in the stairwell where he was found.

Local residents covered the body with a bedsheet as a mark of dignity.

And around the corner, another grave contains the remains of two men that residents said had been taken away by Russian troops.

Both appeared to have been shot through their left eyes.

Bucha was captured in the days immediately after the February 24 invasion by Russian forces, which later swept south, capturing Chernobyl and moving towards the capital.

But Bucha and the northern outskirts of nearby Irpin were the points at which the Russian advance from the northwest was halted after they met with unexpectedly fierce resistance from Ukrainian forces.

The area witnessed some of the bloodiest fighting of the war for the capital region until Russian forces pulled back from the outskirts of Kyiv to regroup for battles in eastern Ukraine.

On Saturday (April 2), Ukraine said its forces had retaken all areas around Kyiv and that it now had complete control of the region for the first time since the invasion.