This place is now a battleground.
Bucha, Gostomel, Irpin ...
They were sort of garden suburbs
where you'd move out with your family and kids because you wanted to avoid the big city.
I mean, there's a graveyard we just passed of Russian vehicles: tanks, BMPs
lying by the side of the road next to a bus stop, I mean, it's quite an extraordinary scene.
So we're just heading to Bucha, which is a town north-west of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital,
where Russian troops were basically living in Bucha, occupying the place
for over a month after the invasion on February 24th.
What we're going to try and find today are
people to talk to who witnessed and survived the invasion and who can tell us
what happened here and what exactly Vladimir Putin's forces did.
They were heading further north to Irpin? OK.
Essentially they were cut off.
Yeah.
What's striking about this is
the contrast between the sort of suburban vibe you've got here with bird song, with dogs wandering around,
with very nice dachas, bungalows, and horror.
Debris on the road, Russian uniforms ...
What's your name?
Viktor.
And Viktor, you're from Bucha?
From first day of the war? – Yeah.
And stupid question, but what happened? Tell me what happened.
Yeah, the Russians came in.
Machine, machine, machine, machine, machine, machine ...
A lot of Russian soldiers died here.
You can see.
I mean, do you feel sorry for them at all?
Or not?
You didn't feel sorry for them?
No.
Why not?
'I've got no words.'
No, no – 'I have no words.' 'Look at what they did.'
Understood. Thank you very much.
OK, nice to meet you. Thanks a lot. Cheers.
It's a crazy mess, isn't it?
We're just heading towards a house of someone called Natasha who lives in Bucha
who's actually a friend of a friend.
Her nephew was shot dead by Russian soldiers
and she apparently was also threatened by a guy
who said he would blow her up with a grenade.
Oh my God.
So, I'm in a cellar where where Vova, the nephew of Natasha who we've
just been speaking to, was kept and interrogated and we think eventually shot.
There's remains of a sleeping bag, I mean, it smells of
death, really.
So, for three weeks Nadia, the mother, had thought her son was alive.
Instead he met a kind of grim extinction in the cellar. He's just been exhumed and he was buried
in a garden just around the corner.
Natasha was saying that ... she was crying that he was buried with Russian prayers.
The Russian checkpoint was just at the end of this road.
It was hit by a Ukrainian missile strike
and there's a whole lot of debris, but this is basically where the Russians were
living and, I mean, it was almost like they were holidaymakers.
They would each find a house, each tank, they would park it in the garden,
they would live in the house,
they would drink a lot and when they were drunk, they would steal cars like this one, they'd sort of
race around the streets, and then the tank would roll over them.
I mean, you can see this one here,
it belongs to a friend of Natasha's, has been completely flattened because the tank went over it.
There's a sort of cab of a truck just over there and the Russian soldiers would just
sit on it of an evening and just watch the street.
It's incredible, I mean,
it's a sort of nightmare, actually, just on an ordinary suburban street.
This place used to be Gostomel, a town just down the road from Bucha, north of Kyiv.
To the right was a Ukrainian plane factory and when Russia began its invasion, one of the things they did
early on was to smother this quiet suburb with rockets and then there was the second phase of the
operation when Chechen soldiers moved in, lived here, built a machine gun post.
We saw graffiti saying when they arrived.
'Wolves' is written in Cyrillic letters with a date the 5th of March.
And we also saw the remains of a Russian soldier amid the debris.
You've stopped, you've broken off from your studies to come here?
So why did you volunteer?
The story of Vladimir Putin's war is, I think, one of anger.
This is the road west of Kyiv
where Russian tanks were sort of trundling towards victory when they were ambushed by
Ukrainian forces.
Now, the resistance was much bigger than probably anyone really expected but
what I've also seen today, visiting these garden towns north-west of Kyiv, is enormous destruction.
Destroyed high rise buildings, wreckage all over the place, blown-up armoured columns
in the middle of suburban streets and also tales of horror told by survivors.
For the people who live here, it's been a disaster
and for Vladimir Putin's Kremlin, this has been a humiliation.