A neighbor comforts Natalya, whose husband and nephew were killed by Russian forces, as she cries in her garden in Bucha, Ukraine. Photo / AP
A neighbor comforts Natalya, whose husband and nephew were killed by Russian forces, as she cries in her garden in Bucha, Ukraine. Photo / AP
The handwritten sign on the passenger window, reading "child" in Russian, offered little protection from the hail of bullets.
Women's clothing, a pillow printed with a picture of a smiling cat, shopping bags and a towel lay inside the Honda CRV. Blood stained the car's airbags.
The bodies of the family inside, who were trying to escape from Bucha, near Kyiv, are likely to have been put in black bags by Ukrainian liberators, joining hundreds filling mass graves in a bleak clean-up operation.
But when the Telegraph visited this stretch of road on Monday, at least half a dozen civilian vehicles remained where they had crashed under the gunfire that halted people's escapes, ending their lives.
Rescue workers had cleared most of the dead from the streets by Monday, moving carefully for fear of booby traps. Bodies were carried to ambulances, then to morgues.
Tanya Nedashkivs'ka, 57, mourns the death of her husband, killed in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv. Photo / AP
But no one had come for the white-haired man lying on the grass on Soborna St, near the Bucha River. He wore a white armband to indicate that he was a civilian, and lay among tins of food and a brand new moka pot.
Further into Bucha, under the golden domes of the Church of St Andrew Pervozvannoho All Saints, is an open trench, 13m long and filled with at least 60 bodies.
According to Andriy Holovin, the priest of the church, locals had used the makeshift grave to bury their own after morgues and cemeteries filled up because of the number of casualties.
Some claimed the Russians had dug the grave to hide the murders, although this has been disputed. It has also been alleged that, when Russian soldiers came across the area, they began dumping victims into the grave.
For Father Holovin, one of the hardest parts of all these deaths is that his parish has not been able to identify the majority of the bodies and cannot therefore lay them to rest. Instead they remain in the trench, some in black bags, others beneath the sand in the clothes they were wearing when they died.
"We brought people here from the streets because the dogs were trying to eat the bodies," Holovin told the Telegraph. "The hospital near here has run out of space. There was no space in the morgue. Now a lot of relatives are searching for their family members, but we couldn't see a lot of the faces due to injuries."
He said the church hopes one day to make a monument to those who died during the massacre. Failing that, he hopes there will be space, eventually, to lay them to rest in the crematorium.
Another mass grave, which contained the bodies of Olga Sukhenko, the mayor of nearby Motyzhyn, and her husband and her son was discovered in woodland around 32km west of the city.
The mayor of the neighbouring village of Kopyliv said Olga Sukhenko's body showed "signs of torture", with her arms and fingers broken.
In the courtyard of their house in the outskirts of Kyiv, Vlad Tanyuk, 6, stands near the grave of his mother Ira Tanyuk, who died because of starvation and stress due to the war. Photo / AP
Vadym Tokar, the head of the Makariv village council next to Motyzhyn, said: "The bodies are still lying there. We can't get them out because there is a suspicion that they are mined."
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy travelled to Bucha on Monday to pay his respects to the deceased. Visibly emotional, he said he found it "very difficult to talk when you see what they've done here".
Zelenskyy said Ukrainian troops entering the liberated town were "day by day" finding "bodies in cellars, people tortured, people killed".
He added: "You can see around what was done to this modern town. That's a characteristic of Russian soldiers – treat people worse than animals. That is real genocide, what you have seen here today."
Standing by the mass grave, Sacha, a 61-year-old Bucha resident, said he "felt the death" of every person because they were from "one community" and therefore the "same family".
"Russia is not our brother," he said. "We will win this war. Ukraine will win. What they have done is unspeakable."
A dog wanders around destroyed houses and Russian military vehicles, in Bucha close to Kyiv yesterday. Photo / AP
A short drive from the church is a nondescript building in the remains of an industrial park. It became the Russians' headquarters to plan their reign of terror against the civilians of Bucha.
Soldiers told the Telegraph they were confident that the Russians had executed people at this location because they had found bullet holes in the ground and the walls were smeared with blood.
Inside the building, empty bottles, cans of old food and piles of rubbish covered the ground floor. In the basement, rugs and mattresses lay on the ground, a sign that the soldiers had used the area as their sleeping quarters.
Mykola Mikulich, of the Special Police Unit, said the state of the building indicated that the Russians had only recently vacated – and had done so in a rush.
A neighbor comforts Natalya, whose husband and nephew were killed by Russian forces, as she cries in her garden in Bucha, Ukraine. Photo / AP
Nearby, residential roads, where people had once taken pride in their homes, were a ghost town. Front doors were open, the windows of nearly every house smashed.
"The Russians looted and robbed every home," Mikulich said. "They stole everything they could get their hands on, from gold to microwaves and, when people had the chance, they ran."
During the Telegraph's visit, a resident returned to his shelled home to see what he could retrieve. He told Mikulich there was an unexploded grenade in the garage of his neighbour's house.
Mikulich retrieved and deactivated it. "If it helps make their home safer to return to, I had to help," he said.
By a communal cooking fire outside an apartment building, Ina Bohun told how Russians had looted people's homes and shot at them when they went to fetch water.
"I spoke to one Russian soldier, I asked him why he came here to kill civilians," she said. When the Russian replied he would be jailed if he did not follow orders, the 53-year-old told him: "It is better to go to jail than kill innocent civilians."
The soldier had protested his innocence, she said – but he turned and left without a word when she asked him about the civilian bodies on the ground.
So many bodies were lying in the street that many had to be gathered and moved to a mass grave in a churchyard.
Standing guard at the grave, a 44-year-old Ukrainian territorial defence fighter, who gave his name as Ruslan, said: "There are no words for this. They say they came here to save us. This is the Russian peace they speak of?"
