Mykola Zakharchenko is standing in Bucha in front of the junkyard and is telling about the murders he has seen.

He's a security guard here, and right next to the fence, the terrain slopes down a little to the Buchanka River.

In March, while Russian troops occupied the northern satellite towns of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, this river was the front line.

Over in Irpin the Ukrainians were defending every inch, here in Bucha the Russians were trying to advance.

At the end of March, the attackers withdrew after their advance on the capital failed.

Konrad Schuller

Political correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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When the Ukrainians then advanced to Bucha, pictures of many hundreds of dead people became known.

They showed people in civilian clothes walking the streets, some of them tied up.

The head of the funeral service speaks of more than 300 dead, with new ones being added every day.

Some of them can still be seen on the streets of Butscha, and the FAZ counted four uncovered bodies when it was inspected on Monday.

Some had apparently been there for many days.

Two of them are lying half burnt below the spot where Zakharchenko is now standing in the entrance to his junkyard and telling his story.

On March 3, right after the invasion began, the Russians captured him and another guard as well.

They led him to their base, where he saw eight dead men lying in their blood.

Two of the dead had their hands tied.

Fellow prisoner was shot for no reason

The Russian soldiers forced Zakharchenko to his knees.

They examined his mobile phone and checked whether it contained Ukrainian flags or pro-Ukrainian chats.

One of the men checked his ID on a computer and asked if he belonged to the newly formed volunteer units of the Ukrainian territorial defense.

When Zakharchenko said no, the occupiers took him to a basement, where gradually more and more men, women and children were crammed together.

Some of the children were only three years old.

Zakharchenko remembers that he and his fellow prisoners spent four days in this cellar.

They were given nothing to eat and there was no toilet.

Anyone who had to go to the toilet had to squat down in front of everyone.

When the Russians counted the prisoners, they came up with about 130 people.

The doors were then opened on March 7th.

The Russians forced people to put on white armbands and let them go.

Zakharchenko says that from then until the end of the occupation he somehow tried to survive without electricity, water, food and heating.

Once he saw for himself how people who were cooking on an open fire were attacked by the Russians.

Before his eyes, says Sachartschenko, an occupier shot one of them – for no apparent reason.

Zakharchenko cannot say anything about the eight dead that he saw on the first day of his imprisonment.

He only knows that a fellow prisoner, a nurse, apparently took a closer look at the corpses.

After that she told him about the marks of torture on the corpses, about cuts on the face and chest.

Zakharchenko also reports that almost all of his fellow citizens saw Russian soldiers shooting people.

One of them is Serhiy Matyuk, the director of Bucha's funeral service.

Since the Russians left, he was responsible for recovering the dead.

He reported to the FAZ and other media on Monday that his people had now recovered more than 300 dead, mostly men, but also women and children.

Some died from artillery, but most from headshots.

Some bear marks of beatings.

Only three of the victims were soldiers.