April 9, 2022 GMT https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-europe-war-crimes-7791e247ce7087dddf64a2bbdcc5b888 BUCHA, Ukraine (AP) – There is a corpse in the basement of an abandoned yellow house at the end of the road near the railway tracks. The man is young, pale, with a dry blood from his mouth, shot to death and left in the dark, and no one knows why the Russians brought him there, to a house that was not his. There are a lot of toys near the stairs to the basement. Plastic clothespins sway in an empty line under a cold, gray sky. It’s what’s left of normal on this blackened street in Bucha, where tank floors were stripped of charred vehicles, civilian cars were smashed and ammunition boxes stacked next to empty Russian military rations and bottles. The man in the basement is almost an afterthought, another body in a city where death is plentiful, but satisfactory explanations for it are not. A resident, Mykola Babak, points out the man after contemplating the scene in a small courtyard nearby. Three men lay there. One is missing an eye. On an old rug near a body, someone has placed a handful of yellow flowers. A dog walks next to a stroller in the corner, confused. The stroller holds the body of another dog. This has also been filmed.

This story is part of an ongoing investigation by the Associated Press and Frontline that includes the interactive War Crimes Watch Ukraine experience and an upcoming documentary.

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 Bouha’s monthly occupation, he said, the Russians kept more or less to themselves, focusing on future progress. When that stopped, they went from house to house looking for young men, sometimes picking up papers and telephones. The Ukrainian resistance seemed to be wearing them. The Russians seemed more angry, more impulsive. Sometimes they looked drunk. The first time they visited Babak they were polite. But when they returned to his birthday on March 28, they screamed at him and his brother-in-law. They put a grenade in 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,” said one of them, but another Russian told them to leave. Before leaving, the Russians asked him a great question: “Why are you still here?” Like many who stayed in Bucha, Babak is older – 61. It was not so easy to leave. He believed he would be saved. And yet, in the end, the oppressed Russians accused him of being a saboteur. He spent a month in occupation with no connection to the world, no electricity, no running water, cooking over a fire. He was not prepared for this war. Maybe it wasn’t the Russians either. Around 6 p.m. March 31 – and Babak clearly remembers – the Russians jumped in their vehicles and left, so quickly that they abandoned the corpses of their comrades. He is now watching the police and other investigators arrive, look at the corpses in the yard and leave. He wonders when the corpses will be taken to mourn the families. Down the street is an empty playground, steps away from six charred bodies. People do not know who they are. “We were fine on this road,” Babak said, taking stock of the occupation. In Bouha everything is relative. “They did not shoot anyone who came out of their house. “On the next road, they did.”

While walking in Bukha, a reporter met two dozen witnesses to the Russian occupation. Almost everyone said they saw a body, sometimes even more. Civilians were killed, mostly men, sometimes at random. Many, including the elderly, say they have been threatened. The question that survivors, researchers and the world would like to answer is why. Ukraine has seen the horror of Mariupol, Kharkiv, Chernihiv and nearby Irpin. But images of this city an hour’s drive from Kyiv – with corpses burned, bodies handcuffed, corpses scattered near bicycles and flat cars – have fallen into the world’s consciousness like no other. “It certainly seems to be very, very deliberate. “But it is difficult to know what other motive was behind it,” a senior US defense official said this week, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the military assessment. The inhabitants of Bouha, as they come out of cold houses and basements, offer theories. Some believe that the Russians were not ready for an extensive battle or that they had particularly unruly fighters among them. Some believe that the house-to-house targeting of younger men was a hunt for those who had fought the Russians in recent years in separatist-controlled eastern Ukraine and had taken refuge in the city. Sometimes, they say, the Russians themselves explained why they killed. In a backyard in Bucha there are three tombs, dug by neighbors too scared to put them elsewhere. One of the dead was killed on March 4, hit in the head with the butt of a rifle. On March 15, a friend of the deceased was approached by Russians asking for his documents. He is at home, he said. On the way there they crossed the tomb. He pointed it out. The next moment, says witness Iryna Kolysnik, the soldiers shot him. “He was talking too much,” one said, adding a rhyming expression. In the end, every trace of discipline broke down. “They became much, much worse than regular soldiers,” said Roman Skitenko, 24, who saw four civilian bodies on the street near his home. Grenades were thrown into basements, corpses were thrown into wells. An elderly man in a nursing home was found dead in his bed, apparently due to negligence, while a younger man, perhaps a caregiver, was outside and shot to death. Women in their 70s told them not to stick their heads out of their homes, otherwise they would be killed. “If you leave the house, I will obey the order and you know what the order is. “I will burn down your house,” Tetiana Petrovskaya recalls being told by a soldier. Now that the Russians are gone, corpses are being collected by investigators wary of traps and landmines. The body bags are placed in rows in a cemetery. Some bags are not completely closed. A glance shows the bloodied face of a young man. Another shows a pair of white sneakers. Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk said the death toll was 320 as of Wednesday. Most died from gunfire and some bodies were handcuffed and “thrown like firewood” into mass graves. Vladyslav Minchenko is an artist who helps collect corpses. During the occupation, he found another way to help – to locate Russians with binoculars and to tell the “right people” where they were. He was discovered three weeks ago, he says. The Russians came and stripped him and put him near the wall to shoot him. But at the last minute something changed. The Russians had a list of Ukrainian military personnel to search and it happened that Minchenko was staying with one. “I was about to be killed,” he says, “but someone said, ‘This is not the guy on the list.’ He is worried that the Russians will return, with more experienced fighters who may not hesitate to shoot.

Many Buha residents describe similar, scary encounters. One building was used as a base by the Russians. the residents were forced to stay in the basement full of garbage. It was cold and crowded, with about 100 people. They used buckets for toilets. There was not enough food. The babies were crying. On March 3 or 4, a resident who went to the shelter was told to stand near the bodies of several men who had been killed, some with their hands tied. “I thought they would shoot us there,” she said, without naming her. As she stood there crying, a Russian soldier told her not to be afraid, they only wanted to talk to men. Three days later, he was released. It is not clear why. A few houses away is 80-year-old Galyna Cheredynachenko. She rests on two reeds near the end of her sidewalk, with a bright pink scarf around her head. When the Russians came to her door in the early days of the occupation, they parked their tank in her front yard, almost crushing its bulbs. He refused to go to the shelter. The Russians moved with her. They cooked in her yard, slept in her house, used her kettle for tea. She gave them her tomatoes and cucumbers. She was told not to leave her room. “They were not bad, they just wouldn’t let me out,” he says. He is just beginning to learn the true story of the city – how at least four people were killed in the area, all civilians, and how the Russians told people to bury the dead in their backyards. “I was born in World War II,” says Cheredynachenko. “If you told me that the Nazis did that, I would understand. “I do not understand how the Russians can do that.” Another survivor, says 63-year-old Nataliya Aleksandrova, is hungry. They got cold. At first, he says, the Russians behaved: “They said they had come for three days.” But the war continued and they began to plunder. Clothes, shoes, alcohol, gold, money. They turned TV screens for no reason. They feared that there were spies among the Ukrainians. Alexandrova says her nephew was arrested on March 7 after he was found filming damaged tanks with his phone. He was accused of being a Ukrainian nationalist. Four days later, he was found in a basement, shot in the ear. Days later, thinking the Russians were gone, Alexandrova and a neighbor slipped out to close nearby houses and protect them from looting. The Russians caught them and took them to a basement. “They asked us, ‘What kind of death do you prefer, slow or fast?’ Grenade or weapon? “I told them I did not want to die,” he said. They were given 30 seconds to decide. Suddenly the soldiers were called to leave, leaving Alexandrova and her neighbor shocked but alive. “I’m not saying that everyone was crazy, but some were very …