Ukrainian officials have warned of further massacres being committed by Russian forces.
Video / AP
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
A man pushes his bike along an empty suburban street in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, 25km outside the capital city Kyiv.
What he cannot see around the corner ahead are dozens of Russian military tanks and troop vehicles in convoy moving slowly towards him.
As hepasses empty houses left abandoned by fleeing locals and rounds the corner to his left, he is confronted by two Russian tanks. Unarmed, he poses no threat to the invading forces.
But video footage shared this week shows one of the tanks fire several rounds anyway. A cloud of white smoke fills the air where he was standing.
The Times reports the Russian vehicles in the video are BMD-4 infantry fighting vehicles "which are commonly mounted with a 100-millimeter gun and 30-millimeter cannon".
With global revulsion solidifying over civilian killings in Bucha, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy likened Russia's assault to Nazi war crimes.
News reports this week revealed how children were being slaughtered in Bucha and Russian soldiers were using them as human shields.
But Bucha may not be the worst of it.
New warnings emerged from Ukraine that other shattered communities, notably the town of Borodianka, may have suffered even worse fates than Bucha.
Zelenskyy, in an impassioned speech by videolink from Kyiv to the 15-member Security Council, demanded stronger action as he delivered a chilling account of Putin's six-week-old war.
People "were killed in their apartments, houses … civilians were crushed by tanks while sitting in their cars in the middle of the road", Zelenskyy said.
"They cut off limbs, slashed their throats, women were raped and killed in front of their children.
Cemetery workers in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine. Photo / AP
"Accountability must be inevitable," he added, calling for Russia's exclusion from the Security Council — on which it holds veto power.
"Are you ready to close the UN" and abandon international law, the president asked.
"If your answer is no, then you need to act immediately."
In a subsequent address to Spanish politicians, Zelenskyy compared Russia's devastating assault to the Nazis' 1937 bombing of the town of Guernica.
During a grim clean-up in Bucha, local workers placed the remains of partially burned bodies into black bags and lifted them into a van.
After touring the devastation, Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky told journalists that "dozens of bodies" remain in Bucha apartments and in nearby woods.
"What we've seen in Bucha is not the random act of a rogue unit. It's a deliberate campaign to kill, to torture, to rape, to commit atrocities," US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.
Looking ahead, Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance expects a Russian push in "coming weeks" to try to seize Ukraine's entire eastern region of Donbas, and create a land bridge to occupied Crimea.
The Kremlin has denied any civilian killings, claiming the images emerging from Bucha and other sites are fakes produced by Ukrainian forces, or that the deaths occurred after Russian soldiers pulled out.
Policemen work to identify civilians who were killed during the Russian occupation in Bucha. Photo / AP
But one Bucha resident named Olena told AFP she saw Russian soldiers shoot a man in cold blood after "brutal" troop units moved in.
"Right in front of my eyes, they fired on a man who was going to get food at the supermarket," said the 43-year-old, who did not wish to give her family name.
Zelenskyy himself is sharing graphic footage of what Russians are doing in towns like Bucha, Irpin, Dymerka, and the besieged southern port of Mariupol.
A 90-second video he shared showed partially uncovered dead people, including children, in shallow graves, bodies in a courtyard, burned corpses in the streets, and slumped victims with hands tied behind their back.
