With bloodied gloves, forensic teams uncover gruesome secrets of Bucha in Ukraine

Sometimes the dead have more to say than the living. Those lying beneath the soft, yellow earth in the grounds of the church of Andrew the Apostle, in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, have many terrible stories to tell.

All of the people they uncovered had died violently. One man was missing a large chunk of his skull; another body was so badly burned only his head and half of his torso remained, the whites of his eyes subsumed by charred flesh. One person appeared to have been beheaded.

As each new cadaver was laid in front of him, the lead investigator knelt over it and softly murmured an inventory while a colleague wrote it down: leather jacket, mobile phone, no ID. He checked inside decaying mouths, the range of motion of broken limbs, and documented burns, bullet wounds and injuries caused by shrapnel, before volunteers from the town helped put each corpse into a fresh body bag.

Their pink and blue plastic gloves were soon slick with blood. Between bodies, the workers plunged their hands into the metre-high pile of dirt taken out of the grave so far, rubbing clumps of it between their palms to restore their grip.

Heavy rain stopped work. At the end of the day, the team had exhumed 18 corpses. But many more missing people of Bucha are waiting to be found.

The first tranche of bodies numbered around 70, several locals said. Then there was a second mass burial of another 33 people. In total, around 150 civilians are believed to be lying in the church site.

A group of around two dozen Bucha residents were waiting on the other side of the church on Friday for the bodies of their loved ones to be unearthed.

Haylena Fiaktistava, 70, was among those hoping to find answers in the mass grave. She spent the occupation sheltering at home with her two sons, Dmitro and Andrei, but one day Dmitro left the house to find bread, and never came back. During a respite in the shelling three days later, Haylena and Andrei went out and found him lying face down in the middle of the road a few streets away, bullet holes in his back.

A military chaplain arrived soon after the exhumation of the mass grave began. He put a stole on over his fatigues and held a wooden cross while he blessed the pit with holy water and sang an Orthodox memorial service.

A biting wind blew as he covered his face and sobbed. Anna leaned over him, touching her head to his.