Bucha's murder: 40-year-old husband Oleg into the courtyard

Desperate to put out the fire in his house in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, Vladimir Abramov turned to his son-in-law for help.

Russian troops broke down the front gate of Vladimir's house, opened fire on the house, and dragged 72-year-old Vladimir, his 48-year-old daughter Irina and her 40-year-old husband Oleg into the courtyard.

The soldiers led Oleg through the sidewalk gate, Vladimir said, and threw a grenade through the house's front door, which exploded with loud cracks and set the house on fire.

Vladimir took a small fire extinguisher and tried in vain to put out the fire. "Where's Oleg? Oleg will help!" He shouted at his daughter. But the answer came from one of the Russian soldiers, he said. Oleg won't help you anymore.

Oleg was found on the pavement in front of the gate, and from the way he lay, it was clear he was forced to his knees and shot in the head at close range, Irina said. He was a welder living quietly on the corner of Yablonska Street in Bucha who was taken from his home and murdered in an execution.

The murder was one of the dozens, if not hundreds, to come to light in Bucha after Russian troops recently withdrew from the outskirts of Kyiv. Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk said Monday that at least 300 civilians had been killed. There is no official release yet.

Russia has denied involvement in the atrocities. But his burned-out tank filled the city. On the church's territory, there are open mass graves where the dead are still there, some in black bags, others in the sand. Bullet-cut civilian cars were parked in the streets - at least once with the body still inside. Their houses were destroyed by shelling; tanks crushed their roads. Residents described Russian soldiers shooting civilians outside their homes without provocation, and satellite images showed bodies lying in the streets while the Russians remained in control.

"They didn't ask for anything, and they didn't say anything; they just killed him," he said. "They just told him to take off his shirt, get down on his knees and shoot him.

When he ran outside and found his disfigured body, the four Russian soldiers who pulled him out stood nonchalantly drinking water. Finally, he shouted at them to shoot him, and one of them raised his gun, then lowered it, then raised it again and lowered it until Vladimir pulled it back through the gate.

"These soldiers told us we had three minutes to leave and forced us to run in our sandals," said Vladimir. "It sounded like the apocalypse - corpses everywhere, the streets full of smoke."

Vladimir and Irina had no choice but to leave Oleg's body on the street, and the corpse lay there for almost a month while they took refuge in the house of the closest relatives. Finally, when it was safe to return, Vladimir attempted to bury his son-in-law in a patch of uneven ground near the pavement, and the half-dug hole was still visible there Tuesday.