" The horrors of Bucha: mass graves, bodies ‘left to rot in bags like rubbish’ and the 89-year-old shot dead in bed

. . . Three-quarters of the street is filled with the charred skeletons of Russian tanks torn apart by Ukrainian missiles. Every house on either side has been damaged, some by pieces of flying armour that lie in gardens or have become embedded in walls.

On the small stretch beyond where the last tank was halted are fragments of bones and gore, from civilians who had been killed by the Russians and their bodies then abandoned for weeks.

“They were left to rot after they died, as if they were bags of rubbish,” said Dimitrou Zamohylny, a Bucha resident. “In that time flocks of crows sat on the bodies, pecking out and eating eyes. I had never thought I would see anything like that happening, actually happening near my own house. How could anyone even imagine something so bad, in an ordinary place like this.”

But Bucha is no longer just “an ordinary place”. This city to the northwest of Kyiv, with a population of 36,971 in the last census, is now in international focus for appalling reasons: the massacre of hundreds of its people – women, children and men, young and old – for which there are calls for Vladimir Putin to be tried for war crimes.

The Russians have withdrawn from Bucha, as they had done from a swathe of towns, from where they were supposed to launch a pulverising assault for what is said to have been Mr Putin’s fundamental aim – the capture of the Kyiv and the instalment of a regime more amenable to Moscow.

Ukraine’s president, who has survived attempts to remove him, including by attempted assassinations, came to Bucha on Monday accompanied by coach loads of media. He wanted to show what he has described as “genocide”, mass killings which have been replicated in other villages, towns and cities under Russian occupation.

“We know of thousands of people killed and tortured, with severed limbs, raped women and murdered children … dead people have been found in barrels, basements, strangled, tortured”, said Voldymyr Zelensky, wearing a flak-jacket. . . . "