\n They all had different paths to death on Yablunska Street in Bucha: A risky evacuation, a borrowed bicycle, a wounded parent. One among them was even Russian born.\n<\/p>\n
\n But at the end of it all, at least 20 people in civilian clothes were found on a stretch of the street -- victims of what are widely alleged to be war crimes by Russian forces.\n<\/p>\n
\n AFP and other outlets' images of the dead -- who were mostly shot and left to decompose on the road for weeks -- fuelled fresh outrage and sanctions against Russia as well as more aid for Ukraine's fight to save itself.\n<\/p>\n
\n Questions far outnumber answers about the killings, but a picture is emerging as investigators open probes and witnesses detail the terrible things that happened on Yablunska (Apple Tree Street).\n<\/p>\n
\n These are stories of the dead.\n<\/p>\n
\n - A burst of gunfire -\n<\/p>\n
\n \"We left together, I came back alone,\" said Oleksandr Smagliuk, 21, his blue eyes fixed and blank as he began to recount the morning of March 6.\n<\/p>\n
\n The Russian tanks had been in Bucha for more than a week. The Ukrainian counter-offensive launched days prior was unsuccessful -- and the invaders' stranglehold was beginning to tighten on the key town on the road to Kyiv.\n<\/p>\n
\n The evacuation of Bucha's inhabitants became more and more risky, then impossible. The city was already cut off, without electricity, water and mobile phone service.\n<\/p>\n
\n On March 6, at 10:30 am, Mykhailo Romaniuk, 58, was accompanying Smagliuk, his niece's boyfriend, in an effort to visit the younger man's father, who was in hospital after being seriously wounded by a shelling attack.\n<\/p>\n
\n Smagliuk and Romaniuk also thought they would find electricity there to charge their phones.\n<\/p>\n
\n They pedalled together and arrived in a few minutes on Yablunska Street. Then the shooting started.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"We didn't see anybody. I didn't realise until the end where the shots came from. I just heard gunfire and saw him fall. I turned down a lane to escape,\" Smagliuk said.\n<\/p>\n
\n Residents told AFP they heard and saw gunfire from numerous directions during the occupation, raising the likelihood that more than one shooter had carried out the killings on the road.\n<\/p>\n
\n Without the inhabitants grasping it immediately, the street leading to Irpin had become the outpost of Russian units that had taken the town.\n<\/p>\n
\n Tanks were positioned in residents' gardens and on the street, barricades were set up and troops were deployed in surrounding buildings.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"The first thing they did was to set up and shoot at everything that moved, everyone who approached. They even shot at statues,\" said Bucha police chief Vitaly Llobas.\n<\/p>\n
\n Romaniuk's body remained for 28 days on a stretch of pavement with a yellow and white curb -- his swollen face turned to the side in a grimace, orange gloves still on his hands.\n<\/p>\n
\n His corpse was collected on April 3 following the liberation of the town.\n<\/p>\n
\n His death certificate cites \"ballistic cranial trauma, caused by a penetrating bullet... multiple cerebral lesions and fracture of the cranial cavity\", and concludes: \"automatic weapon injury with intent to kill\".\n<\/p>\n
\n These sterile descriptions gave no indication of who he had been in life.\n<\/p>\n
\n He was a construction worker in Bucha, a growing area that enticed families from Kyiv looking for a peaceful life, with nature close by.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"He loved to sing, he was a joyful man, and a bit of a drinker,\" recalled his sister-in-law Viktoria Vatura, 48, miming a drinking gesture with her thumb.\n<\/p>\n
\n Romaniuk was buried on April 18 without ceremony, and without a priest, each of the four members of his family said a few words at his grave in Bucha.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"A simple man who loved life and had never hurt anyone,\" Vatura told AFP.\n<\/p>\n
\n - Hands up at Russian checkpoint -\n<\/p>\n
\n While it was still possible, Mykhailo Kovalenko, his wife and daughter tried on March 5 to escape Bucha by car.\n<\/p>\n
\n Intense fighting had trapped people in the area, and not only was there a risk of deadly shrapnel and bullets but the water supply to homes was also cut off.\n<\/p>\n
\n When the 62-year-old arrived on Yablunska, he \"got out of the vehicle with his hands up\" to present himself to a checkpoint manned by Russian soldiers, said Artem, the boyfriend of Kovalenko's daughter, who spoke on condition that his full name not be published.\n<\/p>\n
\n Still, the troops opened fire, said his daughter and his wife, who survived the attack by running away.\n<\/p>\n
\n His wife was seriously shot in her leg as she ran, Artem added.\n<\/p>\n
\n Her husband's body, shot at close range by the soldiers, lay on its side on the pavement of Yablunska for 29 days in his blue parka and smart beige trousers.\n<\/p>\n
\n It was a brutal and sudden end for a man who loved classical music and collected stereo equipment, but also treasured walks in the bucolic Bucha landscape.\n<\/p>\n
\n Kovalenko's relatives identified him by his clothes in a photo taken from afar by AFP on April 2.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"It was horrible,\" Artem said.\n<\/p>\n
\n On April 18, Artem was called to the Bucha morgue to identify the body. His girlfriend is now a refugee and being treated in psychiatric care in Bulgaria \"and wakes up every night\" after witnessing her father's killing.\n<\/p>\n
\n Kovalenko was buried in a black coffin in Bucha on April 18, with Artem and two other relatives as the only mourners, an AFP journalist saw.\n<\/p>\n
\n - 'Maksym the fearless' -\n<\/p>\n
\n Blood pooled under Maksym Kirieiev's body, which lay face down at the roundabout of Yablunska and Yaremchuka streets, near pallet loads of paving blocks outside a building site.\n<\/p>\n
\n His corpse was one of three at the spot shown in a haunting AFP photo, including one with hands bound behind his back using the type of white cloth strips that Ukrainians have worn to mark themselves as non-combatants.\n<\/p>\n
\n Up to that point the 39-year-old construction worker had dodged the Russians and survived by taking refuge in basement hideouts, said Iryna Shevchuk, 52, an acquaintance who grew into a friend during the invasion.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"Everyone called him 'Maksym the fearless',\" she told AFP around 100 metres (109 yards) from where traces of his blood still marked the ground more than a month after his death.\n<\/p>\n
\n Part of that moniker was his willingness to help people who needed to move between shelters.\n<\/p>\n
\n His final moments came after weeks of Russian military occupation, something he documented in videos and messages even after Shevchuk evacuated in mid-March due to lack of food.\n<\/p>\n
\n Then on March 17 he and at least one other man set out from their refuge -- Kirieiev was going to get a change of clothes from a nearby construction site, Shevchuk said.\n<\/p>\n
\n He never came back.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"It's very important to get justice for Maksym, because if we don't punish them, they (Russians) will do the same in the future,\" Shevchuk said.\n<\/p>\n
\n - A borrowed bicycle -\n<\/p>\n
\n Volodymyr Brovchenko had something he had to do.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"That day he needed to bring the bicycle to Vorzel, he worked in Vorzel,\" said his sister-in-law Natalia Zelena, referring to a neighbouring town.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"He borrowed the bike from someone and on that day, he just needed to bring it back,\" she added, noting he'd held various jobs in his life, including woodworking.\n<\/p>\n
\n His wife tried to dissuade the 68-year-old from making the trip given the dangerous situation, but the father of two children set out on the trip nonetheless.\n<\/p>\n
\n He was shot dead while pedalling up Yablunska around March 5.\n<\/p>\n
\n Zelena and his wife Svitlana Brovchenko identified him from the AFP photo showing his body on Yablunska.\n<\/p>\n
\n A neighbour tried to pull his corpse from the street, and that man ended up getting shot too.\n<\/p>\n
\n The neighbour, however, survived, said Zelena, 63.\n<\/p>\n
\n Brovchenko thus lay on the pavement with a blue bike for weeks until his body was retrieved after the Russians retreated.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"He, himself, was from Russia, somewhere from Gorkovsky district,\" said Zelena. \"But he'd lived here since 1976.\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
They all had different paths to death on Yablunska Street in Bucha: A risky evacuation, a borrowed bicycle, a wounded parent. One among them was even Russian born. But at the end of it all, at least 20 people in civilian clothes were found on a stretch of the street -- victims of what are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-91451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n