B2 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, APRIL 10 , 2022
corpse — and sometimes just body p arts — into
a black body bag and bringing them to a local
cemetery. While I was there, I watched police
authorities divide 56 bodies into two groups:
those that had visible signs of war crimes and
those that were either shot to death or burned
in explosions. The second group included a
family of six who had been burned beyond
recognition in a nearby home. The body bags
were unzipped one at a time as police officers
took notes, and then they w ere zipped closed.feels as though I am uncovering another layer
of Russian atrocities. Following a Ukrainian
investigative t ask force one day this past week, I
documented the corpse of a male civilian who
had been shot and beheaded, left lying next to
another body near a field. Farther ahead, an-
other corpse had slits across its neck, evidence
of an apparent attempt to sever its head.
Volunteers have f or days collected t he corps-
es of civilians found everywhere. I documented
one b ody t hat had t o be demined the d ay b efore
so it could be investigated. The volunteers are
faced with the gruesome task of placing eachcorpses of eight m en in the b ack of w hat looked
like an office building. Several had their hands
tightly bound together with clear tape behind
their backs. They appeared to have been exe-
cuted at close range, and many had bruises. It
was a scene that I knew had to be documented
for e vidence, but I w orried t hat my i mages were
too graphic for publication. I was relieved that
The Washington Post did publish my shocking
photographs.
Now I return to B ucha each day from Kyiv —
since the R ussians have retreated f rom the area
surrounding the capital, it is safe. Each time, itallowed me to embrace the power of photogra-
phy to allow others to connect to the people I
see. I understand that many of my images are
difficult to look at, but this is the reality of this
war. The world needs to know that Russia, a
superpower, has been targeting civilians every
day since the start of the war in February and
continues to do s o more than a month later.
The first scenes I photographed along a
main road c aptured burned corpses of Russian
soldiers lying near destroyed military vehicles
and trucks. One corpse was missing the lower
part, from the waist down. Inside Bucha, sol-
diers warned me to follow the footsteps of a
commander because there were mines — and
even corpses could be booby-trapped. I docu-
mented the bodies of civilians found inside
their homes and in their yards. It was snowing
and freezing, but traumatized civilians who
had been seeking shelter underground
throughout the fighting were out a mong all t he
mangled Russian military equipment. They
looked both relieved and traumatized. I met
Larisa Savenko, 72, who held her hands up and
fought back tears as she explained that she’d
had no way to escape, nor did she want to
abandon her home. “Five gunmen entered my
house,” she said. “They looked at our docu-
ments a nd t ook our p hones away. The Russians
told us that we are lucky to have them, because
other troops would have a lready s hot us.”
Another man I met on the same street,
Andrii Zabarylo, 55, said that every group of
Russian soldiers he encountered was more
aggressive than the ones before. “They told me
and my neighbor and his son to lay on the
ground, and then they fired shots within 20
centimeters from our heads,” he said. “One of
the soldiers said that they would kill the older
men and take my neighbor’s son with them. At
that moment, we thought we will be dead. But
then their commander told the soldiers not to
kill us.”
In another area of the city, I witnessed and
documented volunteers at work placing theBUCHA FROM B1What it’s like
to document
atrocities of war
PHOTOS BY HEIDI LEVINE FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTABOVE: Sitting among destroyed vehicles in Irpin, Ukraine, Vera Taradaynik, 78, a resident of Bucha,
waits for help as she tries to flee to safety on April 1. TOP RIGHT: A grave outside an apartment
building in Bucha on Wednesday. BOTTOM RIGHT: Blood and bullet holes mark a site in Bucha that
authorities believe was used as a torture chamber by Russian forces.TOP: Charred Russian military equipment is strewn in a residential street in Bucha on Wednesday. Russian troops occupied the city, a
suburb of Kyiv, for about a month. ABOVE: Andriy Leshbon, left, and Larisa Savenko outside her damaged home in Bucha last weekend.
“A Russian APC was parked at my garden for three days,” she said. “ The gunfire did not stop for a moment.”Heidi Levine is a freelance photojournalist.