DESPITE a police operation to collect them, corpses were still scattered over Bucha’s streets. The local authorities say that over 300 have been buried in a makeshift mass grave. On April 4th about 30, some in black bags, were still left unburied. A day earlier, reporters had seen bodies, apparently of civilians, littering the roads, up to 20 in one street. As investigators collect evidence of war crimes, The Economist was able to verify reports of what appears to be a summary execution.

Nine bodies lay at the side of a builder’s yard that had been used as a Russian base, and another two on the road linking Bucha with Irpin, two aspiring suburbs of the capital, Kyiv. All had gunshot wounds to the head, the chest or both. At least two of the victims had their hands tied behind their back. From the sweet, putrid smell of the decomposing bodies, they had been there for some time—giving the lie to Russian claims that the killings were carried out by Ukrainian forces, which liberated Bucha on March 31st.

Serhiy Kaplichny, director of the municipal burial service, says he knew one of them. His friend, Andriy Dvornikov, worked as a driver. “His only crime was not immediately accepting Russky mir [the Russian World],” he said, fighting back tears.

Mr Dvornikov’s common-law wife, Yulia Truba, found out about his apparent execution from pictures of the grisly scene published on Facebook. “I recognised his trousers, his trainers, and his tattoos; and it was his back.” That was on April 1st.

The last contact she had with her partner was a phone call four weeks earlier, on March 5th. In hushed tones, he had told her he was in trouble. He’d been caught at a checkpoint when it came under artillery fire. The Russians had encircled them, and he was taking shelter in the basement of a local home along with the seven men manning the checkpoint.

One of the men, Vasya Skyba, described what happened next. Russian soldiers found the group later that evening, and hammered down the door of the shelter. They asked if any had fought in the Donbass or were serving soldiers. “We said no, we were builders. But they moved us to a base on Yablonska street 144. They made us take our clothes off, lie face down, and then they searched our telephones and bodies for symbols and tattoos.”

As an example, to make the group talk, the Russians then killed one of the men—“a short, bespectacled guy from Ivano-Frankivsk,” in Mr Skyba’s words. It worked: one of the rest admitted that he was a member of Ukraine’s territorial defence. Mr Dvornikov, who was no longer a serving soldier, had fought in Donbas in 2015-16. But he had a paratrooper’s tattoo and that would have given away his past.

Mr Skyba, speaking to us on April 4th, says that he and the other men were beaten and tortured, and after a few hours an order was issued to kill them. Some of the soldiers had Asian eyes and strong accents, he said, which led him to assume that they were from Buryatia, in eastern Siberia.

The execution order was itself issued by a man who spoke with a standard Russian accent. “The Buryatis asked what they should do with us. The Russian answered that they should ‘yebashit’ us [‘fucking do them in’]—but to do it away from the base.”

Mr Skyba says that they were led to the side of the building and shot. He took a bullet in the side, but it went through his body. He survived by playing dead on the concrete floor. As soon as he heard there were no voices, he fled over a fence to a nearby home. Some Russian soldiers later found him there, but they were from a different unit, and believed a cover story that he was the owner of the home.

Remarkably, they then led him back to a bomb shelter in the cellar of the same base where he had been shot. Mr Skyba stayed there, along with a dozen or so women and children, for a few days before the soldiers released them. He travelled back to Kyiv on March 9th or 10th, when humanitarian corridors opened.

Many of those in Bucha say that the Russian soldiers were polite. “Some of them even said sorry,” says one. Military defeat may have changed that. On the road linking Bucha with nearby Irpin, the charred remains of a column of Russian hardware stands to this day, the result of a devastating Ukrainian drone and artillery attack. Vehicle engines and detached tank barrels are visible 10 metres either side of the road. A local resident claims that Russian soldiers were later brought to the scene to inspect the carnage.

In the centre of Bucha an elderly woman queuing for food and medicine at the central hospital on Energetykiv Street cries as she remembers the worst of five weeks of Russian occupation. “We tied white ribbons to our arms so they wouldn’t shoot,” she says.

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis.