Ivan Skiba, a taxi driver and father of four children, defended a street in the suburbs at the beginning of the war.
He narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Russians.
All the other Ukrainians who were with him were not so lucky.
Prosecutors are treating what happened in the small town of Buchi as a war crime.
Fergal Keane was there to meet Ivan, the only survivor.
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There is a need to exhale. Just one big exhale to relieve the pressure.
But Ivan knows that it could lead to his death.
The temperature is slightly above zero.
Warm breath rising into the cold air will create a small mist and alert the killers.
They are already checking the bodies of the men they just shot, making sure, firing the last shot where they see any sign of life.
He hears one of the Russians say, "He's still alive!"
Ivan wonders if they are talking about him?
Maybe it's one of the others. Still, he braces himself for the bullet. He's already bleeding from a wound in his side.
Another Russian says: "He will die alone!"
Then there's a shot. It hits someone else.
In those moments, he fights against various urges.
As well as needing to vent, there is a need to cry out loud about the wound in his side.
To run away as fast as he can.
All this will come back later in dreams. But for now he will lie among the dead.
He will be as peaceful as his slain comrades.
I meet Ivan Skiba in a small village in rural Poland, where he found refuge for his family.
He has a job. Children live in a place without fear.
Warm weather has arrived and in the evening the family goes to the local park where Ivan fishes in the lake.
Bruises on the face and body have disappeared. But at night, when the others fall asleep, the early memories are revealed.
Ivan Skiba is a man who came back from the dead.
When it all started in the early hours of February 24, Ivan was driving a taxi in Kyiv.
He heard explosions. Ivan could not believe that this was really happening.
"I never imagined it would come to that," he says.
The dispatcher called and told all taxi drivers to return to base.
Forty-three-year-old Ivan did everything he could to support his wife and four children.
He drove a taxi and sometimes renovated buildings.
His first thought that morning was to get the family papers.
If they were going to have to flee, they needed passports.
He quickly drove 40 kilometers to Brovari, where they lived - and from there to Buča, where the wife and children were visiting her mother.
That's where the family will stay until they make a plan.
"There were various rumors that (the Russians) were approaching Buca. We started arranging shelters in the basements, bringing things."
Three days later, on February 27, the Russians reached Buca.
Almost immediately they ran into a devastating ambush by Ukrainian artillery.
A column of Russian airborne troops took up position on Vokzalnaya Street when the shells whizzed by.
They temporarily withdrew. But they were angry, convinced that some local residents had told the Ukrainian military about their location.
By then, across Ukraine, people were mobilizing to defend their communities. Buca was no exception.
Ivan Skiba and friend Sviatoslav Turovski, the godfather of Zlata's two-year-old daughter, heard that some people who fought in the eastern Donbass region against Russian-backed separatists were forming a unit of the Territorial Defense Forces of Ukraine, a militia to protect local communities in times of war, in Bucha. Two men joined.
"We were on duty at checkpoints, checked documents and made sure that people were not carrying weapons," says Ivan.
"We helped organize the safe exit of people because we knew the area."
Ivan's unit was poorly armed. They had one rifle, a grenade and binoculars to share among the nine men.
He and his comrades worked in shifts at the checkpoint in Jablunska street.
In Ukrainian, it means "apple street," because of the trees that line much of its nearly six-kilometer length.
In peacetime, it is a pleasant place with a fishing lake.
Some houses overlook fields and orchards.
It is also the site of an old business complex, built in the Soviet era, part of which has been converted into workspace for local businesses.
These quarters in Jablunska street at number 144 will become the Russian base notorious in the story of wartime brutality.
By early March, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were fleeing the country.
Ivan and his wife decided that the family should try to take refuge in Buč for the time being.
He describes the atmosphere among the men as defiant.
"There was no fear. There was a desire to unite, to gather," he says.
"We were constantly on our toes. When we were off duty, we distributed food in the basements to those who took refuge there, women and children. There was no time to be afraid."
That changed dramatically on March 3. The Russians came back stronger "in the second half of the day, around lunch".
Immediately, Ivan and the others began to direct the cars away from the Russian advance.
There was indiscriminate firing. Rockets were falling.
He saw a white Renault rocketing and a woman and children trapped in a burning car.
There were eight men at Ivan's checkpoint and, as the Russians were rapidly approaching, they decided to try to hide.
Valera Kotenka's house was located directly opposite the checkpoint, at Jablunska Street No. 31.
The XNUMX-year-old gave them hot drinks and food.
He also offered shelter. Soon the Russians were out.
"We heard them, as well as the movement of their equipment. We were surrounded," says Ivan.
The men whispered. They couldn't run away.
The Russians had thermal imaging detectors that would surely catch any escape attempt at night.
The men had already discarded the few weapons and now decided on a story that would be their alibi - if the Russians found them, they would say that they were construction workers working in the district and that they had fled the fighting.
They sent messages to women and girls.
One of the men, Anatoly Prihidko, aged 39, called his wife Olha that evening - March 3 - and whispered "he can't speak because I can hear him. It was so quiet. He said they were hiding."
The next morning, Julija, the wife of Andrij Dvornikov, a delivery driver, received a message that read:
"We are surrounded, we are sitting here, but I will leave here as soon as the opportunity arises".
He told her to delete all messages and photos from her phone. And he told her he loved her.
With tears streaming down her face, Olha Prihidko tells me about her last communication with Anatoly on the morning of March 4:
"At 10 in the morning he sent me a message saying 'we're still waiting.' That was his last message."
Less than an hour later, the Russians invaded.
Ivan Skiba remembers being beaten and shouting questions.
Mobile phones and shoes were taken.
By 11 a.m., two different security camera footage captured the men being led across and then down Jablunska Street toward number 144.
Each had one hand on the belt of the man in front and the other on his own head.
They were lined up against the wall next to the Russian base and forced to kneel.
The Russians pulled their shirts and sweaters over their heads so they couldn't see.
They beat them with butts and verbally abused them.
According to Ivan, they shouted:
"You are banders (an anti-Soviet nationalist group in World War II). You wanted to burn us with molotov cocktails! Now we're going to burn you alive!"
Ivan says that the Russians decided to intimidate the others by shooting XNUMX-year-old Vitaly Karpenko, a worker in a cooperative store.
After that, a younger man from the group panicked and told the Russians that they all belonged to the Territorial Defense unit. The beatings intensified.
Ivan Skiba and another man, Andrij Verbovij, a father of one child and a carpenter, were brought to the building.
At the hearing that followed, a bucket was placed over Ivan's head and he was forced to bend over and lean against the wall.
Bricks were piled on his back, one after another, until he collapsed.
He was beaten again and the brick was repeatedly smashed against the bucket.
At some point, he heard the police telling Andrije Verbovije that they were going to shoot him in the leg. A shot was heard.
After that, he didn't hear from Andrij again.
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Ivan was then led out of the building to join the other men.
Some of what was happening was seen by local residents who were ordered by the Russians to gather in front of number 144, but were kept apart from the arrested.
Lucy Moskalenko remembers being told by a Russian officer to cover her daughters' eyes because they would see things they would never forget.
"He told us: 'Don't look at those people lying on the ground. They are not human. They are absolute filth. Dirt. They are not human. They are beasts'."
Her sister, Irina Volinec, accompanied Lucy.
Both recall the noise of Russian armored vehicles, the sound of shelling, and the neighborhood dogs fighting each other.
It was as if madness had descended on the place.
Then Irina got a shock.
She saw that her old classmate, Andrij Verbovij, the boy who sat next to her from kindergarten until school, was lying on the ground bleeding.
Just a few weeks earlier, they had walked home from the mall together.
A sheet was thrown on the ground near him.
"He was lying there, all twisted from the cold. He was looking right at me. We looked into each other's eyes," she says.
Irina wanted to go and cover her old friend with a sheet, anything that could keep him warm.
But it is not.
“Was she too scared?” I asked.
"It wasn't so much fear as desperation," she replies.
"And then I was really confused and I couldn't understand how it happened and why my classmate was lying there on the ground."
Everything was happening so fast.
Besides, she had just seen that her son Slavik was among the men.
He was captured separately and beaten, before being brought to join the others.
While waiting in line, Slavik saw blood on the ground nearby and heard Russians talking about a wounded man.
It was almost certainly Andrij Verbovij.
"I heard them talking among themselves to finish him off because he won't succeed," Slavik recalls.
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He began to fear for his own life.
Irina found the officer and begged him for Slavik's life. The soldier listened.
Then he called a Ukrainian informant - probably an arrested man who had broken down after the shooting of Vitaly Karpenko - and asked him:
"Is he one of them?"
"No," came the answer. Slavik was released to his mother.
Residents were told to go home, but Irina remembers an ominous feeling as she left.
"I was afraid that terrible things would happen."
The next day, March 5, Andrij Verbovi's wife, Natalija, sent him a message.
"Where are you? Your (lucky) chain is with me, the charm too. I protect you from everything bad. We are praying for you. We are waiting for your call. Write us at least two words."
Andrij was already dead then.
Ivan Skiba felt that time was running out.
By late afternoon on March 4, two of the eight men captured with him had been killed.
"The Russians started talking about what to do with us. The conversation was as follows: 'What are we going to do with them?' Another man says, 'Finish them off, but just throw them out so they don't lie here'."
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The remaining men were led around the corner into a small courtyard.
Beneath the edge of the clothes, Ivan saw the body of a man lying on a small concrete platform. Apparently he had been shot before.
The Russians began to mock the victims. They enjoyed the execution, using curse words, saying:
"That's it. Kapooey (death) for you!", Ivan recalls the last exchange of words with his comrades. "We greeted each other. That was it."
Among those he said goodbye to was Sviatoslav Turovski, his daughter's godfather.
According to Ivan, Anatoly Prihidko suddenly decided to run away, but was immediately shot.
Then the Russians opened fire on the others.
"I felt a bullet hit my side," Ivan remembers. "It hurt me and I fell."
Ivan cannot remember exactly how long the Russians stayed, but it was more minutes than hours.
When he felt that they were gone, he risked a glance under his jacket.
The yard was empty. Now was his chance.
He reached out for a pair of feet near him—the dead man's feet he had noticed when they first entered the courtyard.
He took off the man's shoes to put on his exposed feet.
Then he crawled to the fence and dragged himself into the nearby gardens.
He had to cross another fence before he was able to enter the house that the owners had abandoned during the shelling.
What followed was another terrifying ordeal.
Inside the house, Ivan treated the wound with some antiseptic liquid he found in the bathroom and changed into the clothes left by the host. He wrapped himself in a blanket and tried to sleep.
But he was disturbed by the voices. Russian voices. It turned out that several Russian soldiers were also resting in the house.
"They saw me and started questioning me about who I was and what I was doing there."
He convinced them that he was the owner of the house and that his family had been evacuated.
His wounds, as he explained, were the result of shelling.
The soldiers believed his story, but told him that he could not stay where he was.
Instead, they said they would take him to the base for treatment. Back to Jablunska Street 144.
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But Ivan's luck continued.
At the base, war doctors treated his wounds.
If the troops who shot him were still around, they either didn't see him come back, or didn't recognize him.
He was placed with the civilians who took refuge in the bunker building.
After a few days, they were allowed to leave.
The bodies of those killed who defended Buča with Ivan were left lying in the yard, where the Russians threw garbage for the remaining month of the occupation.
Ivan found the family, still in hiding since the war, at home.
They managed to escape from Bucha and eventually from Ukraine to Poland, but not from the legacy of the terrible hours in Jablunska 144.
The military defeat forced the Russians to retreat. Disturbed by Ukrainian forces, the Russians withdrew from Bucha on March 31 and headed north towards the border with Belarus.
The conquerors left behind numerous traces.
From banal - obscene graffiti scrawled on walls - to potentially significant.
We found a military debit card on the floor of 144 Jablunska and tracked the owner to Pskov in northwestern Russia, the main base for the Airborne Forces.
Other journalists found evidence leading to the same units - the 104th and 234th Airborne Regiments.
A resident of Buča found Ivan Skiba's mobile phone, which the Russians left behind when they retreated.
It contained records of calls made to several numbers in Russia. Records do not link any of the callers directly to the massacre.
The phone could easily be used in a large group of soldiers. But the call records could help narrow down the search for the perpetrators to smaller units within the regiments present when Ivan and the others were shot.
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The murders at 144 Jablunska Street and elsewhere in Buca are the focus of a major war crimes investigation by the International Criminal Court and Ukraine.
The Ukrainian investigation is led by a police lawyer who until recently was best known for investigating cases of brutality within the country's police force.
Walking with me around the crime scene, Yuri Belousov hopes that the perpetrators will eventually face justice.
"These Russian soldiers who committed this crime could be captured somewhere," he says, pointing to the recent trial of a Russian prisoner of war accused of killing a civilian near Kiev.
But the big targets of the investigation are President Putin and the Russian military and political elite.
"It was planned in advance," says Belousov.
"Instructions were sent from the top on how the soldiers should behave. So the suspects would be the top of the top, the guys who, say, started the war. It's like a chain of people whose decisions led to the invasion of Ukraine."
Barring regime change in Moscow, any immediate prosecution seems unlikely.
If there is a criminal prosecution, Ivan Skiba will be a key witness.
For now, he is working with a Pole who gave his family shelter.
The Russians seem physically distant. But there is a terror that comes at night.
"You wake up because you're expecting that shot in the head. I have that feeling. It comes like a wave."
As we walk to a nearby lake in the evening, I notice that a teenager has joined the family group.
He hangs out with Ivan's son, who is a few years younger.
Ivan tells me that the teenager is the child of his murdered friend and godfather to his daughter, Svjatoslav Turovski.
The boy and his mother moved to Poland with the Skiba family.
It's a perfect early summer evening - the boys are fishing, Ivan is leaning against a tree and watching, the woman is keeping her daughter away from the water's edge.
But for Ivan and his family, for their Turovske friends, for all the families and people from 144 Jablunska Street, the Russian invasion and the massacre it unleashed changed everything.
I remember the words of Olha Prihidko, whose husband Anatoly tried to escape to save his life, and whose grave she visits every day with two cups of coffee, one for him and one for her.
"When no one can hear me," she says, "I call him by his name." Day after day it calls out to him, from silence to silence, into the void created by the war.
Additional reporting by Sofia Kočmar-Timošenko, Vyacheslav Šramović, Rostislav Kubik, Alice Dojard and Orsi Soboslay
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