Exclusive: Resident recounts her nephew’s murder, just one of the deaths during the carnage wrought by Russian forces
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 up at the bottom of Alexandrovna’s street, Ivan Franko, next to a pine forest and a train track.
The soldiers went from house to house. Alexandrovna 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.”