‘They made him kneel and shot him in the head’: the savage occupation of Bucha

Natasha Alexandrova outside the house in Bucha where her nephew Volodymyr was held prisoner and then killed by Russian troops. Photograph: Volodya Yurchenko/The Guardian

Natasha Alexandrova was at home when three Russian soldiers banged on her front gate. It was 4 March. Vladimir Putin’s army had captured the city of Bucha, 18.5 miles (30km) north-west of Kyiv, after ferocious fighting. One unit parked at the bottom of Alexandrova’s street, Ivan Franko, next to a pine forest and a train track.

The soldiers went from house to house. Alexandrova lived at No 10, together with her 26-year-old nephew, Volodymyr Cherednichenko, and his mother, Nadezhda. “They wanted to know who was living there. They demanded to see our documents and our mobile phones,” she said. “They didn’t beat us. But they had guns.”