The grisly images of battered bodies left out in the open or hastily buried led to calls for tougher sanctions against the Kremlin, namely a cutoff of fuel imports from Russia.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy left the capital, Kyiv, for his first reported trip since the war began nearly six weeks ago to see for himself what he called the “genocide” and “war crimes” in Bucha. He said dead people had been “found in barrels, basements, strangled, tortured.”
In one photo, a stunned woman clutches her cat to her chest as she stands outside a brick house, the bodies of her husband and brother lying in different parts of the yard in front of her. Another woman kneels in the mud, her hands clasped together and her face distorted in anguish as she sobs over the death of her husband.
In another, a distraught 6-year-old boy stands in front of a dirt mound covered by a simple wooden cross that marks the grave of his mother.
Ukrainians both horrified and numbed by the ongoing death and destruction buried bodies in mass graves, or attended funerals for those whose remains were identified, placed in a casket and properly mourned.
At a funeral in the western city of Lviv, a woman places a hand on her bowed head as she sobs at a church in the western city of Lviv during the funeral of her husband, a 44-year-old Ukrainian soldier who died fighting the Russians.
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