People from the Ukrainian city of Bucha have told of the “happy life, different plans and dreams for the future” they have lost as a result of the consistent attacks on the city.
Bodies with bound hands, close-range gunshot wounds and signs of torture lay scattered across the city, which lies on the outskirts of Kyiv, after Russian soldiers withdrew from the area.
Nadia Melnychuk (27) owns a cottage in Bucha with her husband, Roman, and said knowing neighbours have been killed in their “little, beautiful city” is “like a horror story”.
“We didn’t want to see this life, we didn’t want to have war,” Ms Melnychuk, a PR manager, told the PA news agency.
“In February and January we had a simple, happy life there… We had a happy life, different plans and dreams for our future, and after that we lost everything we had.
“We couldn’t even know – our house, is it still here? We have no information about it.”
Ms Melnychuk and her husband moved from Kyiv to Bucha during one of Ukraine’s Covid-19 lockdowns last year.
When Hostomel Airport was struck by Russian air forces just outside the city on the first day of the invasion, they could see it from the windows of their cottage.
They left Bucha for western Ukraine as soon as they could.
“It’s like a horror story,” Ms Melnychuk said.
“We know that our neighbours, who live not far from our cottage house, some of them are killed.
“We couldn’t even come into contact with our relatives who stayed in Bucha for the first two weeks because they were under their houses.
“They tried to be in a safe place because there were rockets everywhere and soldiers killed everyone they see on the streets.”
She confirmed her relatives, including her mother-in-law, have now left the city, but described what some of them had seen in Bucha.
“There were stories from our relatives who told us that they tried to go to houses of people, and if someone didn’t open their door to the Russian soldiers, didn’t give them food or something – because Ukrainians don’t want to be in contact with them, they are occupiers – they killed Ukrainians,” she said.
“People were frightened and they couldn’t even bury these bodies of killed people, because these killed people were on the streets.”
Ms Melnychuk likened Bucha to other European settlements, saying "it’s a little, beautiful city."
“I couldn’t even imagine that it could happen with us," she said.
“It’s really horrible that our neighbour country, Russia, wanted to take everything we had and tried to make such big and awful things with our people.”
She added she had heard via Ukrainian territorial defence forces that the scenes in Bucha were worse than what they saw in Donetsk in 2014.
Ms Melnychuk said the territorial defence forces reported to her relatives in the city that there were dead and naked women in the streets who they thought must have been raped.
Olha, who is also from Bucha and did not want to share her last name, left the city on February 24th just as Ms Melnychuk did.
The 21-year-old and her family left Bucha when they first felt shaking from the explosions at Hostomel airport.
Others she knows have also left the city, while she described how it felt to leave before many of her friends did.
“The messages were quite short, like: ‘I’m alive, in Kyiv, will text you if I need help,'” she said.
“I can’t even imagine how much pain and terror my friends went through.”
