Bodies with bound hands, close-range gunshot wounds and signs of torture lay scattered in a city on the outskirts of Kyiv after Russian soldiers withdrew from the area. Ukrainian authorities accused the departing forces on Sunday of committing war crimes and leaving behind a "scene from a horror movie."
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As images of the bodies emerged from Bucha, European leaders condemned the atrocities and called for tougher sanctions against Moscow. In a sign of how the horrific reports shook many leaders, Germany's defense minister even suggested that the European Union consider banning Russian gas imports.
Ukrainian officials said the bodies of 410 civilians were found in Kyiv-area towns that were recently retaken from Russian forces.
Associated Press journalists saw the bodies of at least 21 people in various spots around Bucha, northwest of the capital. One group of nine, all in civilian clothes, were scattered around a site that residents said Russian troops used as a base. They appeared to have been killed at close range. At least two had their hands tied behind their backs, one was shot in the head, and another's legs were bound.
Satellite images show a 45-foot-long trench dug into the grounds of a Ukrainian church where a mass grave was found this week after Russian forces withdrew from Bucha, a private US company said on Sunday.
Maxar Technologies, which collects and publishes satellite imagery of Ukraine, said the first signs of excavation for a mass grave at the Church of St. Andrew and Pyervozvannoho All Saints were seen on March 10.
"More recent coverage on March 31st shows the gravesite with an approximately 45-foot-long trench in the southwestern section of the area near the church," Maxar said.
Reuters could not immediately verify the images. It was not clear if the images disseminated by Maxar were of the same church visited by Reuters journalists on Saturday.
Foreign Minister Yair Lapid on Sunday evening became the most senior Israeli official to react to the shocking scenes from Bucha.
"It is impossible to remain indifferent in the face of the horrific images from the city of Bucha near Kiev, from after the Russian army left. Intentionally harming a civilian population is a war crime and I strongly condemn it," Lapid wrote on Twitter.
It is impossible to remain indifferent in the face of the horrific images from the city of Bucha near Kiev, from after the Russian army left.
Intentionally harming a civilian population is a war crime and I strongly condemn it.
— יאיר לפיד - Yair Lapid🟠 (@yairlapid) April 3, 2022
Ukrainian officials laid the blame for the killings squarely at the feet of Russian troops, with the president calling them evidence of genocide. But Russia's Defense Ministry rejected the accusations as "yet another provocation."
The discoveries followed the Russian retreat from the area after Moscow said it was focusing its offensive on the country's east. Russian troops had rolled into Bucha in the early days of the invasion and stayed up until March 30.
One resident, who refused to give his name out of fear for his safety, said that Russian troops went building to building and took people out of the basements where they were hiding, checking their phones for any evidence of anti-Russian activity before taking them away or shooting them.
Hanna Herega, another resident, said Russian troops started shooting at a neighbor who had gone out to gather wood for heating.
"They hit him a bit above the heel, crushing the bone, and he fell down," Herega said. "Then they shot off his left leg completely, with the boot. Then they shot him all over."
The AP also saw two bodies, of a man and a woman, wrapped in plastic that residents said they had covered and placed in a shaft until a proper funeral could be arranged.
"He put his hands up, and they shot him," said the resident who refused to be identified.
Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, described bodies lying in suburban streets as a "scene from a horror movie." He claimed some of the women had been raped before being killed and the Russians then burned the bodies.
In a video address, Zelenskyy said Russian soldiers who killed and tortured civilians were responsible for "concentrated evil."
"It is time to do everything possible to make the war crimes of the Russian military the last manifestation of such evil on earth," he said in remarks translated by his office.
He directed some of his remarks at the mothers of Russian soldiers involved.
"Even if you raised looters, how did they also become butchers?" he said. "You couldn't overlook that they are deprived of everything human. No soul. No heart. They killed deliberately and with pleasure."
Zelenskyy said his government would take steps to create a special justice mechanism to investigate every crime committed by the Russian forces in Ukraine.
Zelenskyy also appeared in a pre-recorded video message at Sunday's Grammy Awards, contrasting the lives of those attending the award ceremony in Las Vegas with the lives of musicians in his battered homeland.
"Our musicians wear body armor instead of tuxedos. They sing to the wounded in hospitals, even to those who can't hear them," he said in English. "But the music will break through anyway."
Russia's Defense Ministry said in a statement that photos and videos of dead bodies in Bucha "were a "staged performance… by the Kyiv regime for the Western media."
The ministry said "not a single civilian" in Bucha had faced any violent military action and the mayor did not mention any abuses a day after Russian troops left.
Russia asked for a meeting Monday of the UN Security Council to discuss events in the city. The US and Britain have recently accused Russia of using Security Council meetings to spread disinformation.
Fighting was reported on Sunday in several parts of Ukraine.
The governor of the eastern Donetsk region said shelling had continued throughout the night and day. Russian shelling killed seven people in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, according to the regional prosecutor's office.
Missiles struck near the southern port of Odessa, with Russia saying it had destroyed an oil refinery used by the Ukrainian military. The Odessa city council said "critical infrastructure facilities" were hit.
Dmytro Lunin, governor of the central Poltava region, said the Kremenchug oil refinery, 350 kilometers (220 miles) northeast of Odessa, had been destroyed in a separate rocket attack on Saturday.
Two blasts were heard in the Russian city of Belgorod near the border with Ukraine on Sunday, two witnesses told Reuters, days after Russian authorities accused Ukrainian forces of striking a fuel depot there.
Ukraine evacuated 2,694 people from conflict zones in the southeastern port of Mariupol and the region of Luhansk on Sunday, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said. Ukrainian officials were in talks with Russia to allow several Red Cross buses to enter Mariupol, she added.
In Motyzhyn, some 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Kyiv, residents told AP that Russian troops killed the town's mayor, her husband and her son and threw their bodies into a pit in a pine forest behind houses where Russian forces had slept.
Inside the pit, AP journalists saw four bodies of people who appeared to have been shot at close range. The mayor's husband had his hands behind his back, with a piece of rope nearby, and a piece of plastic wrapped around his eyes like a blindfold.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk confirmed that the mayor was killed while being held by Russian forces.
Some European leaders said the killings in the Kyiv area amounted to war crimes. The US has previously said that it believes Russia has committed war crimes, and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken called images of what happened near Kyiv "a punch to the gut" on CNN's "State of the Union."
"It is a brutality against civilians we haven't seen in Europe for decades," NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on the same show.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko called on nations to immediately end Russian gas imports, saying they were funding the killings.
In a turnaround, Germany's defense minister said that the EU should consider doing just that. Ministers "would have to talk about halting gas supplies from Russia," Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said on German public broadcaster ARD. "Such crimes must not go unanswered."
Russia provides 40% of Europe's gas and 25% of its oil, and until now many EU nations have resisted calls to scale back or fully end reliance on Russian fossil fuels. Giving them up would mean even higher prices at the pump and higher utility bills, potentially creating an energy crisis and a recession.
The US has previously announced a ban on Russian oil, but it imports only a small share of Russia's oil exports and doesn't buy any of its natural gas.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said Russia must pay for "war crimes." British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said his government would step up sanctions, as well as military and humanitarian support for Ukraine.
"Putin and his supporters will feel the consequences," said German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, adding that Western allies would agree on further sanctions in the coming days.
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As Russian forces retreated from the area around the capital, they also withdrew from the Sumy region, in Ukraine's northeast, local administrator Dmitry Zhivitsky said in a video message carried by Ukrainian news agencies. The troops had occupied the area for nearly a month.
They pressed their sieges in other parts of the country. Russia has said it is directing troops to the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, where Russia-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces for eight years.
The mayor of Chernihiv, which has also been cut off from shipments of food and other supplies for weeks, said that relentless Russian shelling has destroyed 70% of the northern city.
The Ukrainian military said early Monday that its forces had retaken some towns in the Chernihiv region and that humanitarian aid was being delivered. The road between Chernihiv and the capital, Kyiv, was to reopen to some traffic later in the morning, according to the news agency RBK Ukraina.
The regional governor in Kharkiv said that Russian artillery and tanks launched over 20 strikes on Ukraine's second-largest city and its outskirts in the country's northeast over the past day.
The head of Ukraine's delegation in talks with Russia said Moscow's negotiators informally agreed to most of a draft proposal discussed during face-to-face talks in Istanbul this week, but no written confirmation has been provided.
The Russian invasion has left thousands dead and forced more than 4 million Ukrainians to flee their country.
