By Simon Gardner
Content warning: This story includes a graphic image which may offend or disturb and discusses graphic details of deaths suffered by civilians during the ongoing Russian occupation of Ukraine.
A man lay sprawled by the roadside in the Ukrainian city of Bucha on Sunday, his hands tied behind his back and a bullet wound to his head, one of hundreds of local residents that officials say have been found dead in the wake of five weeks of Russian occupation.
People gather close to a mass grave in the city of Bucha, just northwest of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. Photo: AFP or licensors
Bucha's deputy mayor, Taras Shapravskyi, said 50 of the dead residents, found after Russian forces withdrew from the city late last week, were the victims of extra-judicial killings carried out by Russian troops, and the officials have accused Moscow of war crimes.
Russia's defence ministry said in a statement issued on Sunday that all photographs and videos published by the Ukrainian authorities alleging 'crimes' by Russian troops in Bucha were a "provocation," and no resident of Bucha suffered violence at the hands of Russian troops.
Reuters was not able to independently verify who was responsible for killing the dead residents.
But three bodies seen by Reuters reporters on Sunday - the corpse with the hands bound and two others which did not have bound hands - bore bullet shots to the head consistent with what Bucha mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk and his deputy described as executions.
In all three cases, there were no signs of any other significant injuries elsewhere in the body. All three people shot in the head were male, and all three were dressed in civilian clothing.
On the body of the person whose hands were bound, there were powder burn marks on his lips and face. Such marks can mean a person was shot at close range.
The following image may offend or disturb.
A body with hands bound by white cloth, who according to residents was shot by Russian soldiers, lies in the street in Bucha, Ukraine, 3 April 2022. Photo: AFP or licensors
The cloth used to bind the man's hands appeared to be a white armband. Russian troops, while they were in Bucha, required that local residents wear the armbands to identify themselves, according to one woman who was still wearing hers.
Reuters sent questions to the Kremlin and the Russian defence ministry about the corpses that its reporters had witnessed, but received no immediate reply.
Russia's defence ministry, in its statement on Sunday said: "During the time that Russian armed forces were in control of this settlement, not a single local resident suffered from any violent actions." It added that before Russian troops withdrew on 30 March they delivered 452 tonnes of humanitarian aid to civilians around the Kyiv region.
Shapravskyi, the deputy mayor, said some 300 people were found dead after the Russian withdrawal. Of these, he said officials so far have logged 50 as executions carried out by Russian forces. Reuters could not independently verify those figures.
The others were either killed in crossfire, or their deaths are so far unexplained.
"Any war has some rules of engagement for civilians. The Russians have demonstrated that they were consciously killing civilians," Fedoruk, the mayor, said as he showed Reuters reporters one of the bodies.
Shallow grave
Reuters also spoke to one local resident who described a person being found dead after Russian troops detained them, and another resident who described two people found dead with single gunshot wounds to the head.
Reuters was not able to independently verify the descriptions provided by the residents.
Sobbing as she gestured at her husband's shallow grave, a shot of vodka topped with a cracker resting on freshly dug earth, Tetyana Volodymyrivna recounted an ordeal at the hands of Russian troops in this city 37 kilometres northwest of Kyiv.
She and her husband, a former Ukrainian marine, were dragged from their apartment when Russian troops set up their command centre in their building. The soldiers held them prisoner in the apartment building where they lived.
She said the Russians, when they arrived in the city, asked people who they were, and demanded to see documents.
She said a fighter with the Russian forces who she believed was from Russia's semi-autonomous Chechnya region warned he would "cut us up". She did not say how she knew he was Chechen.
Reuters sent a request for comment to the office of the leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, a Kremlin loyalist, but received no reply.
Tetyana, who identified herself by her first name and patronymic but did not give her family name, was released after being held for four days. Her husband was nowhere to be seen for several days, until she was told about some bodies in a basement stairwell of the building where she and her husband lived.
"I recognised him by his sneakers, his trousers. He looked mutilated, his body was cold," she said. "My neighbour still has a picture of his face. He had been shot in the head, mutilated, tortured."
Residents of Bucha told Reuters civilians were killed indiscriminately during the Russian occupation. Photo: AFP or licensors
Reuters reviewed the photograph, which showed that the face and body were badly mutilated. The news agency could not determine if there was a bullet wound.
After recovering her husband's body, she and some neighbours buried it in a garden plot near their building, just deep enough "so dogs wouldn't eat him," she said.
Another corpse still lay in the stairwell where her husband was found, a Reuters reporter saw. Local residents covered the body with a bedsheet as a mark of dignity.
'Shot in left eye'
Around the corner, another grave contained the remains of two men, a woman resident told Reuters. She said the men had been taken away by Russian troops. She did not witness them being killed. When the bodies were found, both had been shot through the left eye, she said. Six other residents gathered near the grave said her account was correct.
One of the residents said she recognised one of the dead men as a tenant in the apartment complex, who she said was a retired member of the Ukrainian military.
Bucha was captured in the days immediately after the 24 February invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces who swept south, capturing the defunct nuclear reactor at Chernobyl and moving southwards toward the capital.
Bucha and the northern outskirts of nearby Irpin were the point 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 battle for the capital, until Russian forces pulled back from north of Kyiv. Moscow said in late March it was regrouping to focus on battles in eastern Ukraine.
On Saturday, Ukraine said its forces had retaken all areas around Kyiv and that it now had complete control of the capital region for the first time since the invasion.
On Sunday, roads in Bucha were littered with unexploded ordnance. Rockets poked out of the tarmac near burned-out wrecks of tanks. Some residents scrawled "Beware, mines" on their walls in chalk after finding booby traps or missiles on their premises.
A street in Bucha, Ukraine, is littered with the debris of war. Photo: AFP or licensors
Resident Volodomir Kopachov said Russians troops had set up a rocket system in a vacant lot next to his garden. When a Reuters reporter visited, boxes of ammunition and spent shell casings littered the ground.
Kopachov, a Ukrainian dog breeder, was in mourning.
He said his 33-year-old daughter, her boyfriend and a friend were shot dead by Russian troops after firing a party streamer towards them just days before the pullback. Kopachov's wife said they fired the streamer as a gesture of defiance, not with the intent of harming the soldiers.
"It is so hard to go through it all," said the 69-year-old," as 10 Alabai, a breed of prized Central Asian Shepherd dog, barked in his backyard.
Kopachov said he had not ventured beyond the gates of his house for a month. "They were killing on the spot. No one asked: 'who you are, why you are out?' The men were simply shot."
The Kremlin denies that it has invaded Ukraine, saying it is carrying out a "special military operation" to degrade the Ukrainian armed forces and is targeting military installations rather than carrying out strikes on civilian areas.
Speaking in Hostomel, near Bucha, on Sunday, Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov said: "This is not a special operation, these are not police actions ... These are inhumans who simply committed crimes against civilians."
International condemnation
Pictures of the destruction and apparent violence towards civilians in Bucha sparked widespread condemnation of Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken described the images as "a punch in the gut," while United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for an independent investigation.
"Putin and his supporters will feel the consequences," said German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, adding that Western allies would agree on further sanctions in the coming days.
Germany's Defence Minister Christine Lambrecht said the European Union must discuss banning the import of Russian gas - a departure from Berlin's prior resistance to the idea of an embargo on Russian energy imports.
Russia requested the UN Security Council convene on Monday to discuss what Moscow called a "provocation by Ukrainian radicals" in Bucha.
Russia has previously denied targeting civilians and has rejected allegations of war crimes in what it calls a "special military operation" aimed at demilitarising and "denazifying" Ukraine. Ukraine says it was invaded without provocation.
Human Rights Watch said it had documented "several cases of Russian military forces committing laws-of-war violations" in the Ukrainian regions of Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Kyiv.
Ukraine's foreign minister called on the International Criminal Court to collect evidence of what he called Russian war crimes. The foreign ministers of France and Britain said their countries would support any such probe.
However, legal experts say a prosecution of Putin or other Russian leaders would face high hurdles and could take years.
'Beyond reprehensible'
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said reports of Ukraine civilians who have been killed, raped and severely wounded by Russian troops is "beyond reprehensible".
"Russia must answer to the world for what they've done. It goes without saying that these atrocities are against international law.
"New Zealand, alongside other Rome statue parties, has already referred the situation to the international criminal court and we continue to support prosecutors in their investigations."
Ardern said what was being seen by the international community was evidence of war crimes at the hands of Russia.
"When it comes to the process of determining that is indeed what has occured based on the evidence we've seen, that is something we are supporting a formal process around.
"Ultimately it is for the international criminal court to make that determination but the evidence is there and New Zealand is supporting the prosecutors and making sure that Russia is held to account."
Every piece of evidence "points to the fact that there are war crimes being committed by Russia in Ukraine at the hands of the President Vladimir Putin", Ardern said.
Asked why the Russian Ambassador has not been expelled from Aotearoa, she said New Zealand had been using "far more powerful tools" while keeping open those diplomatic options.
"When it comes to expelling ambassadors that also means you lose your diplomatic representation."
She would not rule it out in future, but the other tools already being used had far more impact on the conflict, she said.
"It is an aboslute option for us, it just so happens that we prioritised what we consider much more impactful options at this stage."
There was more the government planned to do on sanctions, importation and supporting with deployments, she said.
- Reuters with RNZ