Afew houses down from Havryliuk’s place, two brothers had also been executed. Yuri and Victor had been in their sixties, and had lived in adjacent houses. Everyone in the neighborhood had referred to them as Uncle Yuri and Uncle Victor. While the Russians had been in Bucha, Yuri had worn a white cloth around his sleeve, to signal his neutrality, and had baked bread to help feed residents who’d stayed behind. No one knew why he and Victor had been murdered. Their bodies had been dumped in a nearby culvert, and were tangled together and half buried under debris that had washed down during recent rains. While I was talking to people who had known the brothers, a Ukrainian soldier approached us to say that he’d found something in the basement of a yellow house facing the culvert. It turned out to be the crumpled body of a rail-thin teen-ager. He, too, had been shot in the head. So had an overweight, middle-aged man in civilian clothes, a hundred feet or so up the road. Near his temple, dark blood pooled on the ground.

On the far side of a stretch of railroad tracks, two elderly women had been killed in their house. One lay in the doorway, another in the kitchen. Both were bundled in heavy winter coats. Neighbors said that they had been sisters, both in their seventies. Their small house was filled with hardcover books, and they did not own a television; it was impossible not to imagine their quiet, literary life together before it was annihilated. In the only bedroom, two narrow mattresses were pushed together and covered by a single blanket.

At the end of Havryliuk’s street, a number of corpses had been severely burned beside a garbage pile. It was hard to say how many there were—charred legs and torsos were severed and scattered—but one victim appeared to be a woman, another a child or an adolescent. Orphaned cats and dogs sniffed around the parts. Several people reported that Russians had brought the bodies on a tank, dumped them, and lit them on fire.