Russia ukraine war Russian Bucha

Exclusive: resident recounts the murder of her nephew, just one of the casualties of the carnage wrought by Russian forces.

“The first stolen vehicle I saw with a V on it was a Tesla,” Alexandrova said. Viktor put a few souvenirs from the battle into a bucket: a box used for machine gun ammunition and a chunk of tread. One, Viktor, said he had talked to the Russians during the first day of their occupation of Bucha. “They told me they had orders to take Kyiv and to capture Zelenskiy,” he said, adding that two of them had told him they came from the Siberian republic of Buryatia, 4,350 miles away. After the Ukrainians launched an attack, a Russian soldier accused her of passing on information to the enemy, and threatened her with a grenade. Alexandrova talked to one of the Russians, who told her her nephew had been taken to a “non-active zone” in Belarus. “The soldier was 18. A shell had destroyed a Russian armoured vehicle and flung a sleeping bag and a pair of trousers into a tree. “They made him kneel and shot him in the side of the head, through the ear,” Alexandrova said. He was an electrician, and never a soldier,” she said. The family was able to hold a funeral service with Russian prayers. About a dozen people were murdered on Ivan Franko Street. They included brothers Viktor, 64, and Yuri, 62, who were left lying in a ditch next to the railway line. He had sent the images to a friend. It contained photos he had taken of a Russian military column, which Ukrainian forces had wiped out the previous week.