Photographs from the Ukrainian village of Buzova make up a tableau of horrific images: charred corpses strewn across the road, mangled bodies piled on top of each other, one man lying in a field with a bullet in his head.

Together, the images confirm the accounts of local Ukrainians who say that Russian forces killed as many as 50 civilians as they tried to flee fighting northwest of Kyiv last month. The bodies lay along or near the M06 highway, which runs west from Kyiv, the capital, to the city of Zhytomyr.

The scene, another potential example of Russian war crimes, was found 17 miles from Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv where Russian soldiers killed hundreds of civilians during their occupation before pulling out of the area last week.

“I now call it the road of death,” said Taras Didych, the mayor of the district, Dmytrivka, where most of the bodies were found. The highway strings together the towns and villages that were recently retaken from Russian forces, who were pushed back and retreated after their failed attempt to take the capital. “We are just coming back to life.”

Didych shared the grim findings he encountered when he returned to the road last week. “Some were burned. Others had their hands tied. Others were shot in the head outside their cars,” he said. Those descriptions corresponded to images he shared with The New York Times that Didych said he had taken on his phone at the scene.

Most of the bodies appear to have been shot and burned, either because the vehicles they were riding in caught fire, or because the cars were intentionally torched.

(New York Times News Service)