On the road to Irpin, north-west of Kyiv, a long string of cars stand by the roadside — some riddled with bullet holes and mangled or charred by artillery fire. Many have makeshift signs saying “children” on their windscreens; some drivers left baby seats behind in their vehicles, suggesting they fled on foot after a nearby bridge was blown up.
Ihor Litvinyuk, the Ukrainian military commander in charge of securing the area, said he saw the bodies of civilians on the ground in the town of Bucha, a few kilometres north of Irpin, which was under Russian occupation until last week.
“There were corpses of tied-up people, we took 20 out of Bucha yesterday,” he said. Litvinyuk estimated that perhaps 300 people suffered the same fate around an area between Bucha and Irpin.