The Russian troops were "like a hologram" for Ukrainian schoolteacher Svitlana Bryhinets.
They disappeared as quickly as they rolled in to impose their brutal reign of terror on the 54-year-old's now ruined village in northern Ukraine.
Warning: This article contains images and details readers might find distressing.
As occupiers, the soldiers shifted between barbarity and sympathy.
Some tortured and murdered Ms Bryhinets' brothers.
Others got drunk and gave teary apologies during their month-long occupation of Yahidne, near the border to Belarus from where they invaded.
Yahidne, Ukranian for "berry", is known for its strawberry farms, but the village is now notorious for the atrocities inflicted on its people.
On March 5, Russian forces seized the village as a base to encircle and attack the nearby city of Chernihiv, 140 kilometres north of the capital Kyiv.
When they withdrew from northern Ukraine a month later, they left behind evidence of widespread attacks on civilians — both indiscriminate and targeted — using brutal tactics honed by Russia in the wars in Syria and Chechnya.
A cellar door bears the names of the dead
Russian soldiers took Ms Bryhinets at gunpoint from her home, along with 319 other men, women and children on the day they entered Yahidne.
The soldiers used them as human shields, holding them captive for 25 nights in the cramped, airless basement of the school where Ms Bryhinets has taught for 27 years.
Hostages slept on top of each other and used buckets for toilets.
The oldest captive was 91 years old, the youngest less than two months old.
On the damp walls, children depicted their new reality, drawing pictures with crayon of stick figures pointing guns, while the adults drew a calendar to mark the days.
Next to the door, they wrote the names of 12 elderly people who died in the cellar during the ordeal.
Shocked survivors recount the atrocities with devastating, expressionless clarity.
They came too close to their captors to understand them, she said.
"They were like a hologram," Ms Bryhinets said.
"It was like a paradox. Sometimes they were getting drunk and apologising for what they did here. Sometimes they were nice to the pets. It was very strange for us.
"Maybe they took pity on us. Some of them said that God probably saved us here."
Captives in the cellar served a purpose
The real reason for her survival was cynical and calculated.
"We were used as shields," said fellow captive Mykola Klymchuk, 60, a supermarket warehouse worker.
"In the mornings, they unlocked us and if someone died overnight, they would carry the body upstairs to the boiler room.
"They usually let 50 to 100 of us up to the schoolyard, where the tanks and military vehicles were kept, so that we could be seen from the air.
"The Ukrainian drone could see that there were civilians here and couldn't drop bombs."
Mr Klymchuk tied himself to a railing each night to sleep standing in the half-metre of space he occupied in the cellar.
Bodies piled up for days upstairs in the boiler room, he said, before captives were released to bury them in a shallow mass grave.
"When we were burying the first five people, the Russians started shelling the cemetery and wounded two of our people who were digging the graves," Mr Klymchuk said.
When Russians withdrew, more horrors awaited
It was only when the Russians withdrew that Ms Bryhinets saw the wreckage of her apartment building in Yahidne, where bombings and fierce battles have turned most homes into charred shells.
She then learned her brother's body was found buried in a backyard, with a bullet wound to the head.
Her family is searching for the remains of her second brother, who is feared dead.
According to Ms Bryhinets, he was last seen blindfolded, tortured and interrogated in the schoolyard.
"I don't know why they were killed," she said.
"They were normal civilians. One was a construction worker, the other worked for a farming enterprise."
Residents here are searching for explanations of the senseless violence.
Many suspect the Russians attacked Yahidne because of an outdated map. The ABC has been unable to confirm the theory.
“They thought they were targeting a military town,” Ms Bryhinets said.
The atrocities in Yahidne are among more than 6,000 alleged war crimes under investigation by Ukrainian prosecutors, who are planning to mount a case against Russia in the International Criminal Court (ICC).
An independent ICC forensics team is in northern Ukraine to investigate the widespread atrocities, with the court's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, last week describing the entire country as a "crime scene".
Russian forces are now amassing in Ukraine's east for a major assault on the Donbas region.
But many soldiers who retreated from northern Ukraine remain stationed just across the border in Belarus, and civilians fear they could return any day.
'Beasts' who occupied Lukashivka
For more than seven weeks, the invasion has torn families apart, separating millions of children who have fled their homes from men required by martial law to stay in Ukraine.
The relentless bombing of the besieged city of Chernihiv separated Valentina Bobyr from her family.
They lived just 10km away from Chernihiv in another farming village, Lukashivka, which was also occupied by Russian forces.
This week, Ms Bobyr's was finally able to reunite with her elderly mother, Oleksandra Movpan, who lived through World War II.
Weeks of hiding in a cellar in the occupied village left Ms Movpan unable to walk.
When they were reunited, she had no idea whether her daughter's home had come under attack.
Ms Bobyr said they had quickly lost contact during the invasion.
"The Russians took people's phones and didn't allow them to make calls," Ms Bobyr said.
"We couldn't reach our relatives. We found out that the village was shelled but couldn't check how they were.
Lukashivka is scarred by weeks of fierce battles and vicious tactics. The remnants of cluster bombs litter the farms surrounding the house that Ms Bobyr shares with her family.
Some landed in their garden, damaging their house. The bombs are banned by a UN convention because they cause indiscriminate carnage.
The carcasses of cattle rot in the fields.
Cows and calves were slaughtered by the Russian occupiers for no apparent reason. Some were beheaded.
"Every day, around 10 soldiers came to our house — not even soldiers, beasts," said Ms Bobyr's daughter-in-law, Olha Movpan.
"The first thing they did was to cut the tyres in all the cars so we couldn't escape."
Locals say some civilians were tied up, stripped, beaten and tortured in and around a church the Russians used as a base in the village.
After their withdrawal, scores of bodies were discovered in the ruined church.
This week, Ukrainian authorities said they found more bodies showing gruesome evidence of torture.
Cluster bombs maim Chernihiv villagers
Russian forces never made it into the encircled city of Chernihiv.
Instead, they inflicted a relentless campaign of bombardment on civilians, who hid in basements for a month with no power, heat or running water.
Residents braved shelling and artillery fire to find scarce food.
People queuing for bread died in a Russian air strike that killed 47 civilians in a public square.
"I believe that all this was on purpose, to cause panic, to finish our people off with direct attacks against ordinary civilians," said Dr Vladyslav Kukhar, the director of the region's biggest medical institution, Chernihiv City Hospital No. 2.
Russian attacks destroyed homes, medical facilities, schools, gas pipes and water infrastructure.
Dr Kukhar was inside his hospital when the emergency department was destroyed by shelling on March 17.
The shock wave sent glass, shrapnel and doors through the building, injuring doctors and patients.
"The hospital shook and the corridors filled with a dense fog from white dust," Dr Khukar told the ABC.
"Patients were screaming. We were worried about the patients who were already on the operating table.
"Despite the direct risk to their lives, the doctors didn't leave, knowing that if the operations were stopped, the patients wouldn't survive. It was true heroism."
Russian forces have attacked more than 100 Ukrainian health facilities, in what the World Health Organization describes as a deliberate campaign.
Chernihiv City Hospital No. 2 is now pockmarked by artillery fire, its shattered windows boarded up.
But civilians still pile into its outdated wards, with lost limbs and devastating injuries.
Valentyn Osypenko suffered burns and shattered bones when his house was hit with cluster bombs.
He shielded his teenage son's body in the attack, which killed the boy's godfather.
"I don't understand it, we had no significant infrastructure or military units around," Mr Osypenko's wife, Svitlana, said.
Her toe had to be reattached after the bombing.
"We have lost our future in this war. We've lost our health, our house, our car, everything we had. We had a very good life," she said.
"We can't bring it back."
