Warning, the material contains photos that may shock some readers.
Residents of Buca told the BBC how some Russian soldiers shot civilians, while others cried when they saw children in the basements.
- And what is today's date?
- The seventh day of the war.
This is how time was measured on the calendar in the hospital in the city of Buča from February 24, when the first rockets lit up the sky.
Twenty-three-year-old Anastasija, a first-year intern at the Kyiv maternity hospital number 4, did not make it to the capital for surgery and lived in a three-story building of the local hospital for almost a week.
He calls the invasion of Buč, where 40.000 people lived, the time "when Ukraine came under the control of Russia".
- Can Putin be prosecuted for war crimes in Ukraine?
- Massacre of civilians near Kiev: What we know so far
- Witnesses of the horror in Marijupolje: "People were falling and dying before my eyes"
On the first day, when I was sitting in the basement of the house and listening to the sounds of gunfire and rockets, I decided, well, I'm a doctor, people need me.
My mother begged me on her knees not to leave. My father cried, but he let me go with the words: "You are my pride."
Anastasia came to the hospital reception and said she was ready to work.
On the same evening, they started bringing Ukrainian soldiers there by "transporter", 70 people a day.
Anastasia, who was used to the department of obstetrics and gynecology, had to learn how to work in traumatology and surgery.
"The Ukrainian soldiers were impatient to return to the fight in a few days. Among the wounded were two or three Russians.
We then still respected the rule of 'neutral territory' and treated everyone.
The Russian soldiers did not have serious wounds, we healed them and then handed them over to the Ukrainian army. They were almost always silent.
Sometimes they just said that they were tricked, that they didn't know where they landed, they were told that there would be a special operation, they didn't know that it was Ukraine...
We said to the third one who said that, come up with something else next time!"
Initially, there were no civilians among the patients. Then they brought in the first civilian, a woman with a torn thigh.
And then every day between 15 and 20 wounded people arrived at the hospital.
In those days, Anastasia kept a diary.
"Wake up without an alarm clock, when you still hear an ambulance from the entrance or just a person who came wounded himself.
You jump out of bed. You put on your gloves. You put on a mask. You check if you have a stethoscope around your neck, brownies in your pocket and Esmarch's pendant. There's only one thing in my head: 'Well, here we go.'"
The point of no return, Anastasija says, for her was March 2, when they brought a four-year-old girl Katja from Gostomelje with a wounded head.
"That's when we realized that there would be no more Russians in the hospital. It was the downfall of all of us. I looked at this little body again.
And again, the words of the Russian fascists about not shooting at civilians, especially not at children, were running through my head... And the surgeon's words echoed through my head: "Nastya, this is a child, take the yellow brownie."
According to the doctor, Katya's family tried to leave the city, her mother was driving, and the girl was in the back seat.
When the shell hit the car, the mother was killed, and shrapnel hit the little girl.
"She had shrapnel in her skull, and was wounded all over her body. A neurosurgeon operated on her here, and we really wanted to take her to Kiev for neurosurgery, but the Russian army did not allow the child to be transported. Katja could not speak, she just nodded her head.
I asked her, do you want a toy? He nodded. A cat? They won't. A dog? No. A pony? Yes. People from all over Buca brought her six pieces of those purple ponies."
"I can show you a child without arms"
The next day, four Russian soldiers came to the hospital, one of whom was Anastasia's age.
"We looked at each other for about twenty seconds, shocked, and questions were floating in the air: "What are you doing here?", "And what are you doing here?"
According to her, the army had information that Russian soldiers were in the hospital, but they were no longer there, the Ukrainian special services captured them.
"The army went to inspect the wards with pregnant women and children, we allowed them.
The Ukrainian soldiers hissed for everyone to lie down quietly, otherwise our guys, when they see the Russians, can immediately start yelling at them."
Among the Russians, Anastasija recalls, was "a boy of around 20 years old".
"He went to the reception office, and I followed him so that he wouldn't plant anything there. I sat at the table, he sat across from me. They were silent for about thirty seconds.
Then he caught my eye and covered the weapon with his hand. I nodded my head, I understood that he was not going to shoot.
And then he spoke: 'You understand that we are not the ones shooting at civilians. We have no such weapons. All these wounds I saw here are not us. I also have a four-year-old child, I lost everything here. And you attack us too...'
And I'm sitting and thinking, well, you didn't come as tourists, but with weapons. He kept trying to dissuade me, and I told him, I can take you and show you the child without arms, lying unconscious. He shut up and left."
The Russian army stopped showing up at the hospital.
The chief doctor told the doctors that everything depends on the commander of a particular unit.
"We were, if I may say so, lucky. They came to us and did not shoot the doctors. "It happened in the other part of Buča, behind the railroad, murder, execution, rape, because the second commander of the unit was there," explains Anastasija.
"I spent two weeks in the hospital without communication," continues the doctor.
"And then my friends started talking about the cruel groups of Russians who stood behind the railway, on the left bank. This is where the most murders and shootings took place. According to rumors, it was the Kadyrov family."
- Is Russia distorting the concept of genocide to justify the attack on Ukraine
- Mass murders of civilians in Buca - what we know so far
Anastasia recalls how the soldier she talked to in the hospital assured her that ordinary soldiers and the so-called Kadyrovs are not tolerated, that the Chechens are allegedly always sent first and that they are angry about it, and that for civilians it is actually roulette, which unit will to occupy your domain.
The next day, 12-year-old Sonja was brought to the hospital. She, like Katja, lost her mother, whom she constantly called.
The girl's arm was amputated. Her screams and blasts of air could be heard in the hospital room through the window.
"We got used to them so much later that it was even harder for us when the guns fell silent," Anastasia sighs.
Then they immediately brought nine-year-old Maša (name changed), on planks held together with a towel.
Her family was sitting in the basement without communication, and the parents did not know that the Russian army introduced a rule: "If you drive a car, and the green corridor is not declared, we will shoot at it."
You could only go on foot, say the locals. But Masha's family didn't know that, says the doctor.
The mother heard that the shelling had died down in the street and decided that she could try to escape. The five of them ran out of the basement, got into the car, and as soon as they started, the shelling started.
The wounded father remained in the car, the neighbor was killed, and Maša with her mother and older sister again ran out of the car into the basement.
"I was hit by accident. Or maybe on purpose. I hope it's accidental," says the girl in the video, which is available to the BBC.
"I ran after my sister, my mother opened the basement door for me and she fell down herself. I thought that was all, but it wasn't all."
The woman fell on purpose so that the shooters would think she was dead.
Then the three of them jumped inside. Wounded Maša lay in the basement for two days, until her hand started to fester.
Her mother, sister and two neighbors brought her on boards to the hospital across Buca. A piece of her arm is taped to the boards.
"Tell me honestly, do I have a left hand or no more? Will I be healthy? Is it possible to make a pink prosthesis with flowers", the girl greeted Anastasia with such questions when she came to her room after the operation.
“Did my mom bring me here?” she asked later.
"Mommy brought me. I was a little afraid, because we went while the shelling was going on. And after the operation, I didn't feel anything and I didn't want to feel anything."
Masha's story was confirmed by her relatives.
"Don't make eye contact"
Not only the wounded came to the hospital in Buča, there were also children with colds who coughed, and who were sick because of living in the basements.
It was cold in the city in March, and the doctors recall how a woman almost froze to death on the street, who had undergone a caesarean section the day before in an operating room full of bags, without water or light.
In such a ward, a boy named Ženja was born, weighing 3,8 kilograms, who immediately started crying.
It was recorded by the entire staff, "as if they had come to a concert," Anastasija fondly recalls.
This was the mother's fourth child, and immediately after giving birth, the woman took the newborn to the children in the basement.
But she quickly returned as the basement collapsed.
On the first day of the evacuation, she went outside to wait for the bus for the refugees. It was minus three degrees outside.
From 10 a.m. to 17 p.m., she stood with three-day-old Ženja at the bus stop.
She was afraid to go inside to warm up, lest she miss her seat on the bus. The bus didn't come.
"When she came to our hospital, she was all blue, and the child was also blue. We covered him with heating pads, blankets, as much as possible.
The child survived. As far as I know, they were evacuated to Kiev," says the doctor.
A fourteen-year-old teenager came to the hospital.
With the words "I can't sit idly by", he brought the doctors everything he had at home, medicines, warm clothes.
And two hours later, Anastasia saw him again in the emergency room, but this time with a gunshot wound on his arm.
After the hospital, he decided to help his neighbors who were sitting in the basement, carried them water and got shot in the arm. This bullet was removed from the child by Anastasia's colleague.
"Later we found out that you should tie white gauze strips, not to walk fast, not to keep your hands in your pockets," explains the doctor.
"Our guys also told us not to look them in the eyes to avoid contact. In the beginning, nobody understood what you can and can't do on the street.
- Why Russia is trying to encircle the east of Ukraine
- "I saw Russian soldiers kill my father"
- Gruesome evidence points to war crimes committed on the way to Kiev
"It was not possible to explain who was shooting and from where"
Russian soldiers, locals say, were often drunk.
Not a single whole kiosk or shop remained in Buca, all the alcohol, the doctor says, was taken away by the army from Russia and local robbers.
Anastasia was called by her friends and told:
"Now I barely got rid of him, drunk, in uniform, he followed me from the shopping center itself and said: 'Leave quickly, otherwise I am not responsible for my actions, what am I going to do with you.'"
In the beginning, there was no widespread violence in the city, says the doctor:
"As far as I understood, when the army realized that they couldn't do anything here, then out of desperation they started robbing houses and raping.
In mid-March, they realized that they were not going to go any further and began to mine the city and place landmines.
Wounded people started coming to our hospital and they couldn't explain who was shooting and where. Grandfather went to get water, a shot from the bushes and grandfather is gone.
The humanitarian corridor from Buča was opened on March 15 and Anastasia, after two weeks of work in the hospital, left in a joint column.
Then, according to her, almost all the civilians left. About 10.000 people remained in the city. Those who lived on the outskirts of the city remained alive.
Then, according to her, the army looted and bombed expensive houses and residential complexes.
Locals say that washing machines, women's underwear, notebooks, sneakers, tea, coffee and Nutella were taken from the houses.
"We don't understand how they live under this government in Russia, that they are so poor," the residents of Buča are surprised.
Doctor Anastasia says that her house was bombed by the Ukrainian army, because she knew that soldiers from Russia lived there.
Anastasia does not know about the mass executions in the last days of March.
According to her, many corpses were lying on the streets even before the evacuation on March 15.
There was frost in the city and they remained well preserved, says the doctor.
Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Russian president, said on April 5 that accusations against Russia of responsibility for the mass killings in Bucha were "a well-staged tragic play."
The Ministry of Defense of Russia added that "photos and videos from Bucha are another representation of the Kiev regime for the Western media".
- Who are the people who are pulling people out of the war in Ukraine for money
- Are the Russians supporting the war in Ukraine? It depends on who and how you ask
"He cried and went to look for a shovel"
Anatoly Fedoruk, the mayor of Buce, announced on April 2 that 280 people had already been buried in mass graves in the city.
Ivan (name changed at the request of the interlocutor for security reasons) is a parishioner of one of the churches in the town of Buča.
He himself dug a mass grave for the dead.
"In the first days, I didn't think about leaving, and then it was no longer possible," he says.
"When the Russians came in, it became clear that nobody was going anywhere."
His family stayed with Ivan in the city.
"They came to us for service, the officer asked: 'Are you Old Believers?'" says Ivan.
"I said look, the letters 'MP'?" This is the Patriarchate of Moscow, we are the same church as you."
Then he told him to take off his military cap.
Ivan says that at first the priests buried the people who died from shelling one by one as befits a funeral, but then it became impossible:
"I tried not to leave the house without a reason, because people said that soldiers just shoot men."
According to him, the day came when he went to the morning service and saw that they had already stopped removing the bodies.
"In the beginning, they were removed immediately, those who were hit by shrapnel would be taken away by their relatives or dragged aside by the soldiers.
And then they became more and more and no one came for them. I went to the church and told Father Andrej (name changed for the safety of the hero), well, they can't lie like that on the streets?
Come on father, let's give them a proper burial. He cried and went to look for a shovel."
"The common grave was dug all day long by both the church members and the locals. According to Ivan, they managed to transfer the bodies of 15 people into it.
The church where Ivan is going was also damaged by the shelling. The dome was damaged, the walls were damaged by shrapnel, says another parishioner.
Another common grave in the courtyard of the temple in Buca was found by Reuters journalists through satellite images.
They show a 14-meter trench near the church of St. Andrew the First-Called and All Saints.
The locals say that it was dug up by the Russian army.
Andrej Levkovski, director of the company "Irpinski City Center for Primary Health Care", told reporters that 67 people were buried in the tomb near the Church of St. Andrew the First-Called.
But there are also residents who still managed to leave the area around Buča.
- Does the video show shooting in the legs of captured Russian soldiers?
- "She is Ukrainian - she will win" - Fight for the life of premature babies
“Your man is a doshao to shoot"
Web designer Tatjana from Kiev was woken up by explosions on February 24.
She and her husband took two backpacks, one of which contained their three-year-old son's belongings.
We decided to go to my husband's parents in the village of Mirotskoje, not far from Buča.
"We were afraid of rocket attacks on Kiev and decided it would be safer with our parents.
On the way, I called my sister with her husband and two-year-old girl and a couple of friends.
I honestly believed that we were going to a safe place, so I invited everyone there," says 32-year-old Tatiana, crying.
But as soon as they sat down to have lunch, explosions started above the village, helicopters flew and everyone ran to hide in the basement.
They dragged benches and chairs there, settled among the potatoes and cans.
There was white mold on the walls, heavy dust on the shelves, and Tatiana and her son, who recently recovered from the corona virus, were coughing every minute, she recalls:
"But we had a heater, and there was still gas in the house. And it was still normal."
Then the family realized that they were shelling Gostomelj, which is five kilometers away from them.
It was dangerous to go anywhere.
"A helicopter is flying, we're hiding, a drone is flying, we're hiding, explosions, we're hiding. We were lying in the basement, where the walls were shaking. We protected ourselves with potato crates and blankets."
Three days later they had no light and communications were interrupted.
Tatjana and her relatives hoped for peace after the negotiations on March 3.
But on the fourth day they had just finished breakfast when they heard a loud noise.
Russian troops entered the village of Mirotskoye, and columns of military equipment passed by their house without interruption.
One of the armored personnel carriers stopped, and the family from the basement heard the soldiers cursing for a long time and repairing the armored personnel carrier.
"For the first time in our lives, we all sat and prayed and thought that now they will find us and shoot us. But, thank God, they repaired it, started the vehicle and left," says Tatjana.
Half an hour later, the next convoy started, and the family heard that they stopped right in front of the house.
Tatiana's father-in-law's house was a convenient point for the army.
It is large, two-story, and from it you can see Gostomelj, Buča and Irpenj. And right in front of it is a new, recently laid road.
"It was creepy. We heard footsteps in the yard. I didn't know how it would reach us. I covered the child with an aluminum bowl, a blanket and myself. I don't know why," cries the interviewee of the BBC.
They were convinced that they would come in at any moment and shoot them all. They heard a lot of machine gun fire.
In the evening, in the dark, the cellar door opened. One candle was burning inside.
The barrel of the machine gun peeked through the opening. A grandmother was sitting on the edge, she started saying, don't shoot, there are women and children here.
"Fine, we won't, hand over the phones for your safety and ours."
Grandfather and grandmother gave them, they broke them, and the others put mobile phones in potatoes".
"We women decided to go out to find out what to expect. We asked to take a potty for the child.
Two Russian soldiers were standing near the basement, they pointed their machine guns at us. We asked if you would shoot us or not," says Tatjana.
"They say if you listen we won't kill you, we won't shoot. The boys were 19 years old, one from Tver, the other from Donbass.
And I, my sister and friend, we are from Luhansk. We started crying, so how come our man came to shoot us.
They told us that they were going to exercises, that they found out that they were going to Ukraine when they passed Pripyat, that they were deceived and that this was not their war. They were sad and looking at the ground."
Tatjana's story was confirmed by two other interviewees of the BBC.
The army allowed them to cook food for the children.
Then, says Tatjana, their commander went to see what the conditions were like in the basement, and immediately left with the words: "I can't watch this." There are children here..."
- "Little miracle": A Ukrainian woman and her boys regained their sight after being blinded in a bomb attack
- How a woman survived a 500-kilogram bomb attack on a Ukrainian theater
"Platoons are coming along the turret, and they shoot to kill"
From that day on, there was an army in the yard of the house all the time.
They put the tank in the garden 30 meters from the basement. They dug trenches there.
The family with children and pensioners continued to live in the basement. The detonations did not stop.
A helicopter was burning in the field behind the house. From the yard, you could see how the multi-story buildings in Buca were disappearing and Gostomelj was burning.
There was no gas, water or electricity. We went to the toilet with the permission of the army.
Then they allowed us to take the children out for fresh air. And we heat the spa, in order to warm a two- and three-year-old child after spending the night in an icy basement.
Tatjana says that the army did not insult them. They shared their dry meals with the children.
They gave them applesauce, cereal, and chocolate.
"They promised us that they would pass on information about us to other convoys," she says.
"Because generally everyone has orders to shoot and kill and under no circumstances communicate with civilians.
But they say, we see that there are no Nazis here, you even speak in Russian. But there are platoons that shoot to kill."
Then came the shift with the next convoy, there were also special forces.
The latter, according to the BBC interlocutor, "put everything in sight and started checking the attics and the house with machine guns."
The house was occupied by snipers and soldiers, the family was told to occupy any other house in the village.
"We cried and asked to stay because of the spa and the wood stove. But they said that now the spa will be only for them, and the special forces and the army will live in the house.
They brought there a lot of weapons, bazookas, sniper rifles. In the end, they allowed us to take all the things from the house, to sit in the summer kitchen and the basement.
We were never allowed to go outside the yard."
There was a commander among the soldiers, says Tatjana, his name was Rafael:
“He was the kindest, if I may say so. He said that his mother is in Zaporizhia, and that he cannot even imagine that someone could break into her house, and that they would intimidate and shoot her.
That's probably why we got good treatment."
Rafael, as the woman says, constantly came to them and asked if other soldiers were insulting them, if a doctor was needed when the girl was sick.
He gave us a thermometer.
"I still think it's a miracle that we came across such soldiers. They cried when they came to the basement with the children. And kissed their hands, you understand?
Many of them have families, one has three children, another has a pregnant wife. Looking at them, we thought they were humane, and everyone is like that."
"At the same time, they threw grenades at our neighbor, because he was 'behaving badly' and 'muttering something to them,'" recalls Tatjana.
"The house is gone. They blew up the corpse. They told us that. And behind the house was a riddled car.
The corpses were lying right next to the gate. Grandfather was not allowed to bury them in the field right away.
The army explained to us that the first shot in the air is a warning. If the driver does not stop, then they shoot to kill. But people didn't know that."
- "A parent should not bury children" - the horrors of the war in Ukraine
- When excel tables are replaced by snipers - how mobilized civilians defend Kiev
"I really don't know how we saved ourselves"
On one occasion, women were allowed to go outside the fence, to take humanitarian aid.
Tatjana says that the soldiers gave them things they had collected from broken-in stores: diapers, medicine, cereals and kinders.
At that time, Tatjana's two-year-old niece was lying in the basement with a temperature of 39 and they brought her an antipyretic.
"While it was possible to rob something in the district, everything was brought to us from stores, pharmacies and neighboring houses in such homemade boxes. It was terrifying."
"When we read the news, I realized that it was a real miracle, that we were lucky, we came across people with humane principles who said that they did not want to kill, that this was not their war, that they did not know how to go back, everyone were afraid of a military court," says Tatjana.
She told them that they could surrender voluntarily, that they could be accepted by Lithuania or Latvia, but they did not believe in these words.
They say that they have nowhere to go to surrender, because they will be shot immediately by their own people.
"They told us that they often shot at their own tanks. Because these 19-year-old boys with fear in their eyes don't know how to fight at all and have no training."
Tatjana says that she asked the young soldiers:
"Are you really for your government, do you really support it? They answered, of course not, they cursed Putin.
Those who are older and special forces, said that they came because Ukraine wants to join NATO and their task is to save their own country.
They were more patriotic."
"I don't know who they sent to Buca. And who did it there. They said that they give them the coordinates and they shoot. Maybe they thought they were targeting military targets.
But what we see now in the photo from Buca, I don't know who could have done this. Mercenaries, prisoners? I look at these videos and I don't understand how we managed to save ourselves."
The children, thank God, didn't really understand what was happening, sighs Tatiana.
Her two-year-old niece was screaming, "Mommy, let's hide in the basement, it's so good in the basement."
And the son was swinging on the swing.
“The only time we were really scared was when we were eating in the summer kitchen and suddenly there was such a deafening burst of machine-gun fire that we thought we were being shot at.
We fell to the floor and protected the children with our own bodies.
And the second time we were outside and again those machine gun bursts sounded so close and loud.
We were falling, children were crying. And then the special forces commander said 'protect the children', and the army covered the children with their backs."
- The struggle of surrogate mothers for children in the middle of the war in Ukraine
- Families of Russian soldiers are trying to find out their fate
"There were many corpses"
Every day, says Tatiana, falling asleep, she thought about how to save the child.
But she couldn't find a way out:
"Captain Rafael told us that we should have left earlier, now I can [take] you to Zhytomyr highway, but then every platoon you meet on the way will kill you. The only safe place for you is the basement."
On March 8, the people of Kiev came out of the basement to breathe some air, and the army said that they would drain gasoline from one car, "because the soldiers are freezing in the house."
"I started to cry: this is our only chance to leave here if there is a green corridor," says Tatjana.
"And then suddenly everyone left at lunchtime, they even drove the tank out of the garden. We ran to call our people and clean the house.
Only board games, collectible knives and a backpack were missing from the house."
Captain Rafael soon came to them and said that he had heard about a possible green corridor and that he would come in the afternoon to escort us to the Zhytomyr highway.
"We stuck to it. The parents refused to go, they have cats, dogs, chickens and a house.
We begged them but they said no. Everyone else decided to go. We hung white cloths on the cars as advised by the army, but Rafael still did not come.
"Then my grandfather saw that three civilian cars passed by, and they were not shot, and before that they were riddled.
And we decided to go. Our parents were crying because they were afraid that they might shoot us, and so did we, for leaving them there. We had half-and-half chances."
A convoy of seven cars was leaving the village of Mirotskoye.
Windows down, hands out the window, white rags, 15 kilometers per hour.
The army was forbidden to turn in the direction of Kiev, and a friend wrote to Tatyana that "under no circumstances should they drive on the Zhytomyr highway".
But they were already on their way.
"On both sides of the highway, vehicles were littered. There were many corpses. Something was smoking. There were destroyed houses and burned armored personnel carriers," the woman recalls.
Three hours later, Tatiana arrived at the Ukrainian checkpoint with her family and friends.
There the army said it was safe and that they could continue, and that they could put away the white cloths.
Now they live in one of the cities near the border with Moldova.
While we were talking, Tatjana was walking with her son on the playground. I heard him laugh over the phone.
Watch a video about the scale of destruction in Ukraine
Follow us on Facebook, Twitteri Viber. If you have a topic proposal for us, contact us at bbcnasrpskom@bbc.co.uk
Bonus video:
