While investigators uncover the remains of civilians, heartbroken families wait nearby to reclaim their loved ones. Sometimes the dead have more to say than the living. Those lying beneath the soft, yellow earth in the grounds of the church of Andrew the Apostle, in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, have many terrible stories to tell. In a deep mass grave, a forearm and hand, the fingertips turning black, lay under a foot at a sickening angle; another man’s arm looked like it was clawing its way out of the disturbed soil in an attempt to escape his fate. On Friday morning a team of forensic investigators from Kyiv arrived at the site to begin documenting the terror inflicted on civilians by Russian troops during Moscow’s six-week-old invasion. They strapped a door to a municipal digger to create a makeshift gurney, and got to work. All of the people they uncovered had died violently. One man was missing a large chunk of his skull; another body was so badly burned only his head and half of his torso remained, the whites of his eyes subsumed by charred flesh. One person appeared to have been beheaded. As each new cadaver was laid in front of him, the lead investigator knelt over it and softly murmured an inventory while a colleague wrote it down: leather jacket, mobile phone, no ID. He checked inside decaying mouths, the range of motion of broken limbs, and documented burns, bullet wounds and injuries caused by shrapnel, before volunteers from the town helped put each corpse into a fresh body bag. (…) A wealthy northwest Kyiv commuter town before the conflict began, the name of Bucha is now synonymous with Russian war crimes. After a month of fighting, its soldiers embrangled at positions about 40km northeast and northwest of the capital and unable to advance, Bucha was one of the first places that Moscow pulled back from to reconcentrate its forces on Ukraine’s east. The scale of the violence against civilians which took place here – murders, rapes, torture, looting – is horrifying.
via guardian: With bloodied gloves, forensic teams uncover gruesome secrets of Bucha in Ukraine