A UKRAINIAN mother falls to her knees, clawing the earth behind a razed petrol station.

She had just peered inside a manhole and found the corpse of her adult son, sharing the pit with another man.

“My little son,” she wails into the gaping chamber.

His body is warped by water, shrouded in sediment and eclipsed by an army sleeping mat.

But she recognises him by his distinctive footwear and, devastated by grief, refuses to quit the crumbling lip of the shaft.

“Let me see him for a while,” she begs to a woman, who is trying to pull her away.

“I will not leave,” she weeps, hugging the ground where her son’s remains have been dumped out of sight.

Nearby, at the roadside, sits the remains of two tanks, mangled by combat.

One is scorched to black and orange, the other painted with a white “V”, the insignia of Russian invading forces, who had withdrawn from the region last week.

Assessing the damage

Since Russian President Vladimir Putin called off his northern offensive to capture the capital of Kyiv, Ukrainian authorities have had to take stock of what they left behind.

So far, the most shocking images emerge from the commuter town of Bucha, occupied for more than a month. It is here that Ukraine alleges Russian troops committed war crimes by shooting civilians in the street.

The Kremlin denies any hand in the slayings, denouncing photos of the dead as fakery.

But other villages, towns and roads on the northwest flank of Kyiv have their own stories to tell.

Yesterday, AFP saw the remains of two men – who seemed to be wearing civilian and military clothing – inside a shaft behind a motorway service station 15km west of the capital, near the village of Buzova.

Village official Lyudmyla Zakabluk said both were members of Ukraine’s Territorial Defence Forces, a reserve faction of Ukraine’s armed forces. They had been missing since March 16.

She said the distraught mother is also named Lyudmyla and her dead son, Yevhenii, was only 23 years old.

“My heart is just heavy,” said 60 year-old Zakabluk.

“This is a horror. How is it possible to do such things?”

The summary execution of prisoners of war is forbidden under the Geneva Conventions.

Although the cause of death of the two men is not immediately apparent, the head of one of the men is streaked with blood.

Grief in springtime

Once a tanker siphons water out from the bottom of the manhole, police ring it off with crime-scene tape and one man plunges inside.

A slim, white rope is tied to each body in turn. It takes 10 men to haul up the first one; nine to pull up Lyudmyla’s son, the lighter of the two.

A bumblebee buzzes around the melted metal of one of the devastated tanks. Tiny birds fly in and out of the looted grocery shop of the petrol station forecourt.

But the sounds of the mother’s grief cuts over everything.

Once her son is laid out in the open, Lyudmyla ducks under the tape, rushing over to his body.

“Let me look,” she pleads. “I want to look.”

It takes four men to hold her back. – AFP, April 11, 2022.