Devastating images have emerged showing the wife of a Ukrainian man murdered by Russian soldiers sobbing as his body is exhumed from a shallow grave.
The heartbroken widow can be seen collapsing on the ground next to her husband’s body, which was found near their home in the village of Andriivka, near Kyiv, on Monday.
The Ukrainian man is one of at least 40 people who have been killed by Russian soldiers before they were driven out by Ukrainian forces.
He was pictured lifeless, his body lying on a blue tarpaulin still dressed in jeans and a striped top, t he Mail Online reports.
His wife, who had not been named, cried as she was held up by Ukrainian police officers.
Among the other citizens of Andriivka who have lost their loved ones at the hands of Russian troops was the family of 23-year-old Anton Ischenko.
Anton was murdered and mutilated so badly by Vladimir Putin's men that his relatives were forced to identify his dead body by his clothes.
His grandmother Tetiana told the BBC that he was a “very nice boy” and “very clever” with a passion for reciting poetry.
“Maybe if he had gone to fight somewhere else, he would have returned here in one piece,” Tetiana said.
“When my husband told the Russians, 'Take me instead,' they pointed a machine gun at him and said, 'Go home - or we will take you both'.”
The grandmother, who has only now been able to bury Anton, added: “We wanted to bury him separately and with a priest, not just in a mass grave”.
Accounts of the devastated families burying their loved ones are the latest stories of horror to come out of Andriivka, which has in recent days been blitzed by Russian shelling.
Last week The Mirror spoke to father-of-three Piotr Kachenko, 66, who was sitting by the side of the road, in the wake of the devastation.
This quietly-spoken elderly man told us: “They ran into the basements of private homes, spraying them with bullets. It is unbelievable.
“They came here and killed a lot of people , mostly young men, burning their faces when they were dead, after pouring petrol on them.
“They had their hands tied and then they were taken into the fields and shot dead - then burned so that they cannot be recognised.”
It seemed that everybody here knew someone who had disappeared in the field, where at least 48 young men were executed, their faces mutilated with petrol.
At the end of last week the Russians had left the town, retreating hastily north to Belarus or east to be re-deployed in the contested Donbas region, where Moscow is preparing a massive offensive.
But they have left behind a legacy of murder and depravity that is etched on the bullet-pock marked walls, blackened ruins of Ukraine ’s communities and the faces of everyone The Mirror met.
Houses in Andriivka are riddled with bullets, shell holes and huge blast marks and holes, unexploded shells lying discarded on the ground, at the side of the road.
Ten miles away the mostly destroyed town of Borodyanka looks like a monster has trampled through it breathing fire onto everything in its path.
Entire apartment blocks are smashed in half, reduced to rubble by wave after wave of airstrikes and then tank shells and small arms.
As marauding Russians came into town at the beginning of the now six weeks-long war they sprayed almost every home with bullets, leaving as many as 200 people below the rubble.
On Friday last week rescue teams sifted and dug through several mini “ground zeros,” having found 26 corpses the previous day.
Some wounded survivors have been found but hope is now fading for those who fled underground and were unfortunate to be crushed to death or buried alive.
In Borodoyanka Eugene Yenin, Kyiv’s First Deputy to the Minister of the Interior, was meeting devastated locals to discuss their future.
Afterwards he told us: “What you see here and elsewhere in Ukraine is a lot of tears and horror.
“We are here to reassure and support the locals that we are here to help with the infrastructure and their future, water, power.”
