When the Russians withdrew from Buca, a massive operation was launched to find and document the dead.
BBC News has joined local police officers and grieving families as they carry out the grim task.
Warning: This article contains explicit scenes.
Police chief Vitaly Lobas is sitting in a children's bench in an abandoned school in Buca, gathering details about the dead.
Every few minutes, Lobas, a man with broad shoulders and short dark hair, who rarely uses superfluous words, receives a call on his cell phone.
The short conversation is always the same - the location, a few details, the phone number of a relative or friend.
Before the Russians arrived, Lobas was an ordinary local police chief in charge of Bušanski District 1, and he spent his days solving cases of petty crime and only the occasional murder.
However, after the liberation, Buča spends his days in an abandoned school classroom, where school posters still hang on the walls, coordinating a massive operation to find the dead.
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In front of Lobas on the school bench is a map of Bucha, a once peaceful and little-known suburb of Kyiv, which is now a sprawling crime scene.
The area was held by Russian forces for a month while they tried to conquer Kiev, and with its liberation a little over a week ago, the slow and painful process of uncovering the horrors began.
Every time the phone rang, Lobas would consult the map in front of him and write down the necessary information in neat handwriting on a plain piece of paper, one line per body.
By noon he fills one side of the A4 paper and switches to its reverse side.
The previous day there were 64 bodies, he said.
The day before that, on the 37th.
He doesn't know how many there will be that day, but he expects the number to jump by around 40 bodies, because a mass grave was being excavated nearby.
Lobas is in charge of only one part of this region, and many more bodies were found outside his area.
Lobas occasionally takes breaks to go out and smoke a cigarette in the school yard, but even in those moments he is interrupted by calls about bodies or problems related to their collection.
It's raining in Buča, and one of the vans transporting bodies to the morgue got stuck in the mud.
A tractor must be found quickly, because the number of vans is limited and the number of bodies is high.
Lobas usually delegates field work to deputies, but in the case of particularly serious crimes, he goes there himself.
"When people were shot in the head while their hands were tied behind their backs, for example, I go," he says.
"When the bodies are burned, I go too."
Somewhere around noon, a call arrives from Dmitr Kušnir, a twenty-four-year-old police deputy in one of Lobas's units, to register a body discovered behind a residential building on the outskirts of Buča.
It is a lonely building on an otherwise uncultivated green area at the edge of the forest.
When Kušnir got there, he found two people behind the building.
They wear blue surgical gloves and stand over the partially decomposed body of a man who looks like he's been shot in the back of the head.
The body lies on a stained white quilt with red floral patterns and is surrounded by empty beer and alcohol bottles.
The blue surgical gloves at first give the impression of medical personnel, but they introduce themselves as Vladimir and Sergei Brezhnev - the father and brother of the dead man.
Lying on a quilt is Vitaly Brezhnev, a thirty-year-old former chef who, until the Russians arrived, lived a peaceful life with a girlfriend on the sixth floor of an apartment building towering over his body.
Vladimir and Sergej had lost contact with Vitaly a month earlier, when the Russians occupied Bucha and communications were cut off.
It was impossible to enter the suburbs to look for him in his building.
Because of this, they searched for him online for a month, searching in vain on social media for any evidence that he was alive.
When the Russians finally retreated, a little over a week ago, Vitaly's girlfriend called Sergei and told him the whole story.
The Russians attacked their apartment building and broke into each apartment, breaking the lock on the door with a shotgun blast, she said.
They required people to hand over their SIM cards and keys.
They interrogated her and Vitaly in separate rooms, beat them and killed their dog, she said.
Then they took her to the basement with a group of other tenants and locked them up, but Vitaly was taken somewhere else and told she would never see him again.
And it didn't.
As soon as the Ukrainian military declared it safe to re-enter Bucha, Vladimir and Sergey headed to the building.
Inside, they found blood smeared on the landing floor and stairs, and scattered personal photos from people's apartments.
Shotgun ammunition holes could be seen in each door - sometimes one, sometimes four or five.
The door with metal panels had been broken open with a crowbar.
On one wooden door, where the lock did not budge under persistent shots, it looked as if the Russian soldiers had lost patience and made a hole in the middle of the door so they could enter the apartment.
Behind the other door, it was obvious that the owners of the flat had pushed a heavy dining table against the door frame in a failed attempt to stop the attackers.
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When Vladimir and Sergey reached the sixth floor, they saw that the door of apartment number 83 had been broken open with a shot from a shotgun.
An unpleasant smell spread from the apartment.
The Russians ransacked the apartment, broke the ventilation grilles, even the drain in the bathroom - in search of money, Sergei assumed.
When he entered Vitali's bedroom, his hopes of finding his brother alive suffered the first of several blows.
There was a deep bloodstain on the pillow, and the wall behind the bed was splattered with blood.
Also in the mess on the floor were two 7,62mm bullet casings - the caliber used by the Russian military for rifles.
"You could see that someone was killed there," says Sergej.
"But there was no body anywhere."
And that's why Vladimir and Sergei started looking for Vitaly, knowing that now they were probably looking for a dead body, not a son and brother they could hug.
Sergei carried Vitaly's passport picture with him.
"We searched and searched," he says,
"And at first we sought his face."
Warning: Some readers may find some of the following photos disturbing
Behind the building, right next to the woods, they found what looked like a shallow grave and started digging.
It took until they managed to dig up the remains.
First they saw a quilt with a flower pattern they didn't know, but when they dug up the whole body, they saw that the quilt contained a curtain from Vitaly's apartment.
Then they saw the shoes of the murdered man and thought they were familiar.
The sun had already started to set and they had to return home before curfew, so they covered the body with a shroud.
Glimpses of hope remain.
"Today came the final blow," says Sergei, the next day, as he looks at the body.
"Today we took his shoes off and saw his feet."
the Italian's feet were in socks and shoes, which is why - even after a month spent in the country - they are better preserved than the rest of the body.
"We saw the shape of his feet," says Vladimir.
"Then we looked at the shape of the nose and hands," adds Sergej.
"And we knew it was one of our lineage."
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Vladimir bought a small apartment in Buca two years earlier - it was an investment in his son's future.
Vitaly was a chef in a restaurant in Kiev, until the pandemic broke out, and he was fired.
He worked a bit as a construction worker, looking for a permanent job, but he had a girlfriend he loved and a dog, and now an apartment in a nice neighborhood.
In his free time, he liked to fish and hunt, pick mushrooms and cook.
"He lived a peaceful life here," says Sergei. "He was a simple man, that's all, a good-hearted man. He gave everything from his heart."
"He was a son and a brother," adds Vladimir, trying to hold back tears.
In front of the apartment building, police officer Kušnir is writing a police report.
Vladimir goes to his car, takes two small pieces of cardboard and writes first his name and phone number on both, and then Vitali's name and address.
Then he asks a neighbor for some adhesive tape to cover the ink, because the rain has started to fall harder in Buča, and then he goes back to the body, this time without surgical gloves, to tie one cardboard to Vitali's ankle and the other to Vitali's wrist.
"I don't want to lose my son," he says.
Officer Kušnir finished the report and submitted it.
Chief Lobas will arrange for a van that collects dead bodies to drop by.
Vladimir and Sergey take shelter from the rain and wait for the van to arrive.
As the day goes on, Chief Lobas' command station is getting busier.
Cops come and go, filing crime scene reports.
The list on Lobas' desk is getting longer and longer, and his phone keeps ringing.
A dead woman was found in a well next to a column of destroyed Russian tanks.
One body is located on the ninth floor of a residential building.
The driver of one of the vans calls to say he can't find the body he was sent to pick up.
One woman came to the classroom in person to report that her neighbor was dead.
"I understand everything," Lobas tells her, eager to get on with the job.
"We'll try to pick him up today."
Lobas's father is calling.
"Dad, I'm busy," she tells him. "Everything's fine."
Two police stations in Buča district were destroyed in the Russian attack and Lobas is struggling with resources.
Not enough body bags.
His team has also in the earlier days fallen on those who have shown that they can cope with a new type of work.
"The weaker ones left at the very beginning," he says.
There is not much room for sentimentality in the face of a task of this magnitude.
Lobas receives another call.
"Nine?" he says. "Where?"
The call was made by a unit from the neighboring police station.
Nine bodies were buried in a nearby field. Lobas hangs up and calls one of his mobile units.
"The team there is exhausted and they have no body bags left," he says.
"They collect bodies all day. Please go there now and help them. Find the body bags and help them pack the bodies."
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The nine graves are stacked in a neat row at the edge of the field, behind a wavy fence at the end of a dirt road.
The dead were buried by their neighbors during the Russian occupation, and now they are being dug up again with the help of the police.
"Some of these people died just because they couldn't get their medicine, others were killed by the Russians," says Gennady, a XNUMX-year-old Ukrainian from one of the buildings by the field.
He helped bury the bodies, and now he's working hard to dig them up again.
"These were our neighbors," says Gennady, with a furious expression on his face.
"This is Uncle Tolja from the next building and his neighbor. This is another person I knew from the building next door.
"This man has a bullet wound, we didn't know him, but we found a passport with him.
"This elderly woman had a severe form of diabetes and we tried to get her out of Buca, but there was no green corridor, so she died.
"This man went to walk his dog and never came back. We're not pathologists, but it looks like he's been shot."
Digging graves is hard work.
They were buried well, in deep graves, and the rain made mud and everything is slippery.
Gennady, in a green nylon raincoat, goes down into each grave, one after the other, and shovels dirt around the bodies so that thick bands can be tied around them and pulled out.
Each body is wrapped in what they found at hand - curtains, blankets of different colors and patterns.
They were examined by the police, and the obvious wounds were photographed with an iPhone.
Enough body bags were found and after a while the van arrived.
In the dirt on his back door, someone had finger-scribbled "200" - the military code for transporting the dead.
Loaded bodies stand in it.
The sky is gray and the rain is falling steadily.
In Vitaly's apartment building, Vladimir and Sergey waited as long as they could for the van to arrive.
It was getting dark and they had to go home.
Vitali's body will have to spend another night outside.
They were too late to make it in time for the curfew, which starts at nine o'clock in the evening in Kyiv.
However, at the military checkpoints along the way, they show the police report on the death, so they are let through.
At dawn the next morning, father and son get up and start driving back to Buca.
They can no longer wait for the van, so they load Vitali's body into the trunk of their car and set off for the morgue in the town of Bojarka, about an hour's drive south.
Before the invasion, the staff at the Bojarka morgue were used to working with about three bodies a day, the vast majority of which died of natural causes.
Since the liberation of Buča, they have been performing autopsies on about 50 bodies a day, 80 percent of which died a violent death, says Semen Petrović (39), a forensic expert who has been working at this place for the past 16 years.
The morgue, a small outbuilding behind the hospital on the edge of town, where Bojarka meets the forest, has just acquired two rented cold storage units, and both are full of bodies.
Body bags lie on the ground next to the truck and along the nearby fence, on either side of the entrance to the morgue.
"There's not enough staff and there's not enough space," says Petrovic, the forensics expert.
"Even if we had more people, where would we put all those bodies?"
At other times, he carefully performed an autopsy on each body and printed a death certificate.
"Now we just quickly vivisect them and write something simple by hand," he says.
Vladimir and Sergey are not the only ones who brought the body themselves.
Private vehicles are parked next to the morgue and bodies are brought in wrapped in blankets and tapestries.
Relatives and friends come to look for their loved ones.
Tatjana Žilenko was looking for the body of her friend's father who is abroad.
"He had his passport on his chest," he tells the staff.
Aleksandar Zakorotnji came to pick up his father-in-law.
When the Russians cut off the gas supply in the middle of winter, his father-in-law made a makeshift heater, using a gas cylinder, but fell asleep and poisoned himself when the flames went out.
Vladimir and Sergei wait outside until they are called to identify Vitaly.
They are standing in front of a crowded morgue with a low ceiling, where bodies lie on stretchers and the smell of maltena is unbearable.
They have to sneak past two stretchers, past an open corpse, to get close to Vitaly's body and look for any scars they can remember.
They repeat to the pathologist that they think they recognize his feet.
Vladimir looks away and returns it.
Struggle with doubt and hope.
Later, he goes behind the refrigerator and stands alone sobbing, his chest heaving from crying.
Vitaly was taken outside, his body bag marked with the number 552.
It's the 552nd body processed at the small morgue since the start of the year, nearly twice as many as any normal year, with hundreds crammed into just one week.
The policemen take his fingerprints and tell Vladimir and Sergej that, due to the backlog of cases, it will take about a month for formal identification, but otherwise they are free to take him to the cemetery and bury him.
Instead of waiting for the van to transport the body, Vladimir and Sergey again carefully load Vitaly into the trunk of their car.
They drive him for an hour back to Buča, past a series of destroyed houses and places where bodies have been lying on the streets for weeks.
In the cemetery, which is already full, people are digging new graves in front of the fence, on a thin strip of land next to the road.
The priest holds the service over the coffin.
The mother of the deceased wails.
Not far from there, next to the tree line, loud explosions can be heard from the detonation of unexploded ammunition.
Vladimir and Sergey arrive at the cemetery and unload Vitaly next to a long line of body bags stacked on the ground.
Because Vitaly has already been identified and will be buried here in Buča, he is placed in a simple wooden coffin covered with a maroon fabric and given a little dignity to be laid to rest in a brick building in the yard of the cemetery.
He will be buried in two days.
Vladimir and Sergei leave the cemetery and Vladimir decides that, even though it is far from their home in Kiev, he will buy a burial plot here for his wife Lili, Vitaly's mother, who is suffering from terminal cancer, so that she can be close to her son when the time comes.
Two days later, on a clear, cold morning in Buca, the family gathers at the cemetery.
Once again, Vladimir and Sergei take the initiative and enter the brick building to prepare to carry the casket.
Lily sits outside on a bench, smoking a cigarette, alone among the body bags.
The coffin is carried to the stone plinth and the family gathers around it, while the priest conducts the funeral ceremony, and two elderly women from the church wave a censer with incense and sing.
After that, Vitaly was taken by a van marked with the number 200 to one of the freshly dug graves along the road in front of the cemetery to be laid to rest there.
Vladimir is still consumed by doubt.
"I'm still hoping that the fingerprints will show that this is not my son," he says.
Later that day, in an abandoned school in Buca, Chief Lobas sits in his school desk, listening intently to a man who came in person to ask for help in finding a relative he heard was in a mass grave.
He was going to the large mass grave next to the church, the man says, but they diverted him to the police.
He wants to give the picture to Chief Lobas, but Lobas explains that it is not done that way.
"We can't go around opening all the body bags holding this picture," he says.
"Do you understand me? We would waste too much time."
Lobas explains that they had to start burying unidentified bodies, because there is not enough room in the morgues.
But he assures the man that fingerprints have been taken and photographs have been taken and that it will all be preserved.
"Even though the people themselves are buried, the information remains," he says.
"The photos will remain."
The calls are still coming in - a body was found in Jablunska Street, another one next to the school.
"We already cleared those two addresses, give us more to collect," says Lobas.
He grabs the window for a cigarette and goes out to the playground.
The body count is starting to drop every day, he says.
He thinks the job could be done soon.
"There are no more weekends here, we will continue to work until all the bodies are collected," he says.
He throws away the cigarette. His phone rings.
In writing this text psaid Rita Bukovska.
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