Around 11:00 on March 17, Yuriy Nechyporenko and his father, Ruslan, were riding bicycles to the Bucha administration building where aid was being delivered.
Electricity, gas and water were cut off and essential goods were in short supply in the city, one of the first to be occupied by Russian forces as they advanced towards the Ukrainian capital Kiev.
Yuriy and her father were waiting to collect medicine and food. Yuriy said a Russian soldier arrested him and his father on Tarasivska Street. They immediately raised their hands.
Speaking on the BBC on the phone with his mother, Alla, the 14-year-old gave his version of what happened next. “We told them we didn’t carry weapons and that we didn’t pose any danger,” he said.
“Then my father turned his head towards me, and that’s when they shot him … They shot him twice in the chest, right where his heart is. Then he fell.”
Tragedy in Bucha
The teenager told the BBC that the soldier also shot him in the left hand and arm.
“I was lying on my stomach, I couldn’t see anything that was going on around me,” said Yuriy. The soldier fired again, aiming for his head. “[Pero] the bullet went through the hood. “
Yuriy said the soldier fired again, this time in the head of his father. But Ruslan was already dead. “I had a little panic attack, lying there with my injured arm under me. I saw my hand was bleeding,” he said.
This death is one of many, perhaps hundreds, discovered in Bucha after Russian troops recently withdrew from the Kyiv suburb. The mayor, Anatoliy Fedoruk, said on Monday that at least 300 civilians had been killed. There is no official count yet.
Many of the bodies were seen along a stretch of Yablonska Street, just one mile (2 km) from the street where Ruslan was killed.
A similar tragedy is that of Volodymyr Abramov, who was desperately trying to put out the fire in his home in Bucha.
‘Oleg can no longer help you’
Russian troops broke down the front doors of Volodymyr’s house, opened fire on the house and dragged the 72-year-old man, his daughter Iryna, 48, and her husband, Oleg, 40, into the yard.
The soldiers pulled Oleg over the gate on the sidewalk, Volodymyr said, and threw a grenade through the front door of the house that exploded with a deafening bang and set the house on fire.
Volodymyr grabbed a small fire extinguisher and tried in vain to put out the flames. “Where is Oleg? Oleg will help!”, He shouted at his daughter.
But the answer came from one of the Russian soldiers, he said: “Oleg can no longer help you”.
They found Oleg on the sidewalk outside the gate, and it was clear from the way he was lying down that he had been forced to kneel and shot in the head at close range, Iryna said.
He was a welder living a quiet life on the corner of Yablonska Street in Bucha who was taken away from his home and killed.
cemetery in the streets
The BBC has not independently verified the details of Yuriy’s account, but a photograph of the partially covered body (taken by Alla and shared with the BBC) appears to confirm his testimony.
It shows a gunshot wound on the right side of the chest, near the heart.
And it is in similar states that hundreds of corpses have been found around Bucha
Some with their hands or legs tied behind their backs. Some clearly run over by tanks
The Russian soldiers who killed Oleg Abramov “didn’t ask him for anything,” his wife Iryna said.
“They didn’t ask or say anything, they just killed him,” he said. “They just told him to take off his shirt, get down on his knees and they shot him.”
On Tuesday he cried as he stood where he was killed, where a dark stain of blood was still visible on the road. When he ran out and found his body disfigured, the four Russian soldiers who dragged him out were casually standing drinking water, he said.
The apocalypse ‘
She yelled at them to shoot her, and one raised her gun, then lowered it, then raised it again and lowered it, until Volodymyr dragged her into the door.
“Those soldiers told us we had three minutes to leave and they forced us to run in slippers,” Volodymyr said. “Bucha was like an apocalypse: corpses everywhere, the streets full of smoke.”
Volodymyr and Iryna had no choice but to leave Oleg’s body lying on the street and stayed there for nearly a month while taking refuge in a close relative’s home.
When he was sure to return, Volodymyr attempted to bury his son-in-law in a rough patch of land near the sidewalk, and the half-hollowed hole was still visible there on Tuesday.
But exhausted from the effort and frightened by the Russian soldiers, Volodymyr took Oleg into the courtyard and left him there. Ukrainian soldiers then loaded the body into a van, Volodymyr said, and took it away. “I have no idea how we’re going to find him now,” he said.
Ukraine has launched a war crimes investigation into Russia’s actions in Bucha and neighboring Irpin. He says 410 bodies have been found in the two suburbs so far.
Now it is feared that more atrocities will be uncovered with the withdrawal of the Russians and the opening of more suburbs: more bodies in the streets, more mass graves. Volodymyr and Iryna Abramov are only looking for a body and fear they will never find it.
“He was just a peaceful man, a family man, a welder, who struggled with a broken spine and was disabled all his life,” Volodymyr said.
“Just before he died, while I was in the courtyard, I saw him briefly through the open door, on his knees, and he said his last words. He asked them ‘why?'”