Ukrainian street where step outside meant a sniper’s bullet

Volodymyr Borovchenko stepped out on Yablunska Street for the first time since Russian soldiers swarmed into Bucha six days earlier.

It was March 5, a Saturday, and he wanted to reach the disabled children he cared for at an orphanage in Vorsel, a neighbouring village. The street seemed quiet as he moved gingerly.

But he walked into an ambush. A sniper had been lying in wait, determined to keep the street clear of all human life. Having suffered heavy losses, the Russians had grown more aggressive, ordering people to stay inside.

The first to die on Yablunska Street was a female cyclist whose death was captured by a Ukrainian drone that caught video of a Russian tank opening fire on her.

Her body was left on the street for a month. She was identified as Iryna Filkina, 52, a make-up artist, after friends recognised her distinctive nail art from a photograph of her curled hand.

Borovchenko, 58, was shot soon afterwards. When his son came out to drag his father’s body back into the house, he was shot through the shoulder and forced to retreat inside.

 “They entered Bucha as if it was some kind of parade,” Vasily Mykolayovych, 63, a friend of Borovchenko for four decades, said. Mykolayovych learnt about the death of his friend, godfather to his children, 12 days later when he emerged from his basement.

He wept when he saw the body. Other corpses littered the street, including those of two men he did not recognise, whose hands had been tied behind their backs before they were shot.

By the time the Russians retreated on March 31, at least 17 bodies were left in the street. Video filmed by Ukrainian soldiers a day later show their vehicle swerving to avoid the corpses. On April 1 the first pictures of the street were captured by an agency photographer.

If Bucha has become synonymous with the gravest of Russian war crimes, as evidence emerges of systematic execution-style killings and torture, then Yablunska Street is its ground zero. It has emerged as the centrepiece of Russia’s increasingly implausible campaign to cast the atrocities as a hoax set up by the Ukrainian army to frame it for war crimes.

Russia’s lies have met with powerful rebuttals, not only from the testimony of Yablunska’s survivors but also the satellite images and drone video that show its victims were mown down while Russian soldiers were in control of Bucha, long before Ukrainian forces pushed them out.

Almost 90 per cent of the more than 400 civilian bodies recovered so far in Bucha have wounds from bullets, not shrapnel, discrediting the Kremlin’s claims that those lying dead in the streets were victims of crossfire or shelling. It emerged on Wednesday that German intelligence had intercepted radio messages of Russian soldiers talking about the killings in Bucha.

Many of their descriptions of the deaths matched those that took place in Yablunska Street, which runs parallel to the Bucha River. The Russians’ next target was Irpin, the city on the outskirts of Kyiv.

The soldiers’ anger at their failure to penetrate Irpin appears to have played into the mounting paranoia that civilians were informing on them.

Russian forces began bursting into homes, ordering men to strip to see if they bore patriotic tattoos that might indicate military service.

One of them was Mykola Korniychyk, 62, Mykolayovych’s neighbour, who was trying to cook over a fire in his garden when the soldiers came in. They told him to take off his shirt but shot him before he could. He was buried in a small grave marked out by bricks in the garden, yards from where he was killed. His sister wept quietly beside his grave yesterday.

Ruslan Kravchenko, Bucha’s district prosecutor, led teams of investigators on Wednesday uncovering atrocities at a glass factory that the Russians took over as a base, turning it into a torture and killing chamber.

They recovered the body of Dmytro Chaplyhin, 21, who had been beaten and burnt with cigarettes before being fatally shot through the chest.

Two other victims lay near by, one decapitated with his head burnt and placed at his feet. Officials examined the scene and local residents were summoned for testimony but the men could not be identified. The corpses were zipped into body bags and taken away.

Borovchenko did not die as one of the many nameless victims, however, thanks to his friend Mykolayovych.

“We knew each other for more than 40 years,” he said. “We raised children and grandchildren together. We lived our lives in parallel.” Many of the dead on Yablunska were shot in the stomach, he said. “A slow and painful way [to die],” he added.

Mykolayovych insisted that he had many Russian friends and classmates from his college days.

“But I haven’t spoken to them since this started,” he said. “What would I say? How do you forgive this?”

He pointed to the bloodstains on the tarmac where another neighbour, Oleh Abramov, 40, was hauled out and shot in the head as he knelt on the ground with his shirt pulled over his head, like an executioner’s hood.

“All this hate will stay for 50 or 100 years,” Mykolayovych said.

President Zelensky, who held back tears as he visited Bucha this week, has said that the atrocities will make any peace agreement with Russia much more difficult to reach.

He has warned that yet worse atrocities may be discovered as Russian soldiers are pushed back from other fronts. The number of dead in Bucha was mounting yesterday as people who had fled their homes before the fighting returned to make grim discoveries.

 “Please will you come and see my war crime?” Grygoriy Rychkovskuy, 83, asked meekly on a road around the corner from Yablunska Street.

He was standing outside a building supplies company office where eight men were found with their hands and ankles tied, gunshots through the head and chest.

Those bodies were removed by city officials last week but the charred remains of Volodymyr, 50, Rychkovskuy’s son, was still sitting behind the wheel of the car where he was shot on March 3 by a Russian sniper, after visiting his father.

Volodymyr’s wife, Olena Makovozova, 44, who was in the car with him and has fled to Germany, recalled the horrors.

 “We were passing by Yablunska Street and I told my husband, ‘Vova someone is trying to shoot us,’ ” she said. “Vova slowed down the car, the shooting got louder then I saw big red stain on the dashboard in front of him. He collapsed and I started shaking him, talking to him and telling him to ‘Wake up, because they will kill us now’. But he wasn’t breathing

“I was shaking him and shouting at him first and then I tried to get out of the car. When I opened the door I saw this huge dog, like a wolf, next to the car, that was roaring at me, and it tried to jump inside the car and climb on my bleeding husband.”

After Olena escaped and hid behind a nearby bus, the car exploded. She stayed with neighbours before leaving Bucha last month.

She reached Kyiv on March 9 through a so-called humanitarian corridor after Russian troops gave them three hours to flee.

She travelled to Germany as a refugee but still mourns for her husband.

“He was the love of my life,” she said as she wept down the telephone from Germany. “I feel so much pain that I cannot say goodbye and bury his body.

“I told the Ukrainian soldiers in Kyiv, ‘It is too late to save my husband but please save beautiful Bucha.’ ”

Overwhelmed by the scale of the carnage, officials in Bucha have not yet come for Volodymyr’s remains.

They told Rychkovskuy that if he wants, he can take his son’s remains and bury them in his own garden.

Too frail to do so, and paralysed by grief, Rychkovskuy could only stand weeping by the burnt-out car.

 “Nothing more can be done to hurt him,” he whispered. “Dogs already ate almost everything.”

Finding justice will be hard for the survivors, even as investigators begin trying to build a war crimes case against the offending soldiers.

While Mykolayovych knows that the Russians are to blame, he suggests their actions were made possible by Nato’s refusal to approve a no-fly zone.

He said: “When you write this down please ask, ‘Why didn’t they close the sky?’ If the sky had been closed, none of this would have happened. Look how bravely our soldiers fought.”

Mykolayovych gestures at the destroyed tank column on Vokzalna Street, from where the first fatal shots of Yablunska Street’s agony came. “With your help, they could have stopped all of this from ever happening.”