ELLIOT HARTLEY

BUCHA, Ukraine — When the soldiers of Russia’s 64th Motorized Rifle Brigade arrived in Bucha in mid-March, they brought a new level of death and terror to the city.

Over the next 18 days, in just one corner of this Kyiv suburb where the brigade took control, 12 people were killed, including all of the inhabitants of six houses where the soldiers set up camp.

Olha Havryliuk’s son and son-in-law, along with a stranger, were shot in the head in the yard of their house. The Russian soldiers smashed the Havryliuks’ fence, parked their armored vehicle in the garden, and moved into the house. They cooked in the neighbor’s garden, killing and plucking chickens and roasting them on a barbecue while the men lay dead yards away across the alley.

By the time the troops pulled out at the end of March, two brothers, Yuriy and Viktor Pavlenko, who lived at the end of the street, lay dead in a ditch by the railway line. Volodymyr Cherednychenko was found dead in a neighbor’s cellar. Another man, caught by the Russian soldiers as he ran along the train track and taken into a cellar of a house at the end of the street, was also found shot dead.