A four-story office building was one of the first sites where Ukrainians were questioned, tortured, killed or detained, according to residents and officials. The Russian troops arrived in waves in Bucha, each one crueller than the last, residents said, all seeking to hold this once-sleepy town outside Kyiv through fear, manipulation and coercion. The soldiers, a combination of infantry soldiers, paratroopers and troops associated with Russia’s mercenary Wagner Group, set up headquarters in the town to prepare for the coming assault on Kyiv, said Ukraine’s military and Ukrainian officials. The nerve center of their operations was a Soviet-era building on 144 Yablunska Street. Soldiers stationed there and in smaller outposts up and down the street guarded it fiercely, turning the leafy road that translates as Apple Street into the scene of some of the grisliest killings of Ukrainians that have come to light since the start of the conflict. The nondescript four-story office building on the town’s southernmost stretch was one of the first sites where Ukrainians were questioned, tortured, killed or detained, according to Bucha residents and local officials. (…) More than 30 Russian military units in all came through Bucha, mostly from Russia’s Far East and Siberia, including the 14th Separate Special Forces Brigade from Khabarovsk, the 38th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade and paratroopers from Pskov, in western Russia. Bucha Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk said the Russians divided the city into several zones and worked through a list of some 40 names of local politicians and state officials who lived in each zone, detaining and killing those they found. (…) When Mykola Zakharchenko, who worked as a security guard on the grounds of 144 Yablunska Street before the Russians arrived, was detained on March 4 with another man, the grounds of the building were already strewn with dead bodies. The two were led with their hands in the air to a side yard where the bodies of seven men who had been shot were lying face down in pools of blood. The Russian troops told them to look at the bodies, get on their knees and confess to being members of the Ukrainian resistance
via wsj: Russia Turned a Bucha Building Into an Execution Site and Underground Prison