The devastation discovered in the suburb of Bucha, just a few miles outside of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital city, has become one of the defining images of the war which Russia has waged over Ukraine in the past year.

It was a scene which was witnessed first-hand by The Malta Independent’s Neil Camilleri and Giuseppe Attard, who were in Ukraine over the past two weeks and who shared their experiences in an interview after their return to Malta.

Camilleri and Attard flew out of Malta almost two weeks ago in order to cover the war which has enveloped Ukraine and shocked Europe and the rest of the world over the past month.

Starting first in Poland and Slovakia, they were welcomed by the Salesians and where they had the opportunity to interview those escaping the areas of Ukraine which have been worst hit by the Russian invasion – areas such as the still besieged Mariupol.

Camilleri and Attard made their way to the city of Lviv soon after, and then to Kyiv, which for a number of weeks has had Russian forces on their doorstep.

It was there that the reality of the situation really set in. 

“We had a plan to get to Lviv, but from then on we weren’t quite sure what we were going to do.  Eventually we made arrangements and got on a train to Kyiv, but when we finally got there after a 10 hour trip we realised we had arrived at 9pm, just as the curfew was going to start, and therefore had to spend a very uncomfortable night in the train station,” Camilleri explains.

It wasn’t just that, however:  the city was pitch black, and only minutes after their arrival, an air raid siren – signalling a possible air attack or a missile attack – went off.  Even the train itself some miles out of Kyiv, Attard adds, was blacked out so that any Russian reconnaissance does not see it arriving in the city centre.

The environment and atmosphere in Kyiv is one, Camilleri says, where you can immediately feel like it is under siege.  Defensive positions and checkpoints pock-mark roads every 50 metres, many of the shops are closed, and not a soul can be seen after 9pm when the curfew is imposed.

Despite this, however, the much talked about Ukrainian resilience is also ever-present. People who previously had perfectly normal day jobs, they explain, are now volunteering either in the army, or the police force, or as drivers for supplies, or as volunteers working with journalists on the ground or with refugees.

“One local told us that there are so many Ukrainians who have volunteered to join the army that there are six people for every weapon in the country,” Attard remarks.

“Someone told us that in the 1990s people used to offer bribes so that they are not conscripted into the army… today they are paying bribes so that they can be allowed into the army to fight,” Camilleri adds.

The Malta Independent’s team’s arrival in Kyiv coincided with a slow withdrawal of Russian forces from the suburbs around the capital, with areas such as Irpin and Hostomel having been the scene of heavy fighting in the first weeks of the war.

One of these suburbs to be liberated from Russian occupation was that of Bucha: a suburb which has now become one of the defining images of the scale and gravity of this war.  No sooner had journalists started to arrive in the suburb that reports began to emerge of the shocking scenes which the Russians had left behind.

In their path to Bucha, Attard and Camilleri first came across what was formerly a Russian armoured column.  The convoy had been ambushed by Ukrainian forces not long before, and dead soldiers were strewn across the road.

It was here that Ukrainian soldiers directed them to the scene at a house, not far off the road.

“They directed us to a garden where two men lay, shot dead.  They had been killed with shots to the head, execution style. They were wearing tracksuits and very clearly civilians.  One of them was named Aleks, we were later told,” Camilleri says.

“The house belonged to a man and these two men were relatives or close friends of his who went to hide there.  At some point, the Russians arrived.  The house owner managed to hide in a garden shed, but his two friends were not so lucky.  They were caught outside and executed on the spot,” he continues.

This was not an isolated case.

Outside of an Orthodox Church in Bucha, a mass grave with 300 or so people – mostly civilians – buried in it was found.

“We met an Orthodox Priest while we were there, and he told us of how he saw the Russians digging the mass grave and throwing people in there.  These were innocent people, trying to escape Bucha, and they were brutally killed,” Attard says.

On the image which will remain with them the most from their coverage of this conflict, Attard says that it is the image of a young family they saw, all killed as they were trying to escape, and it is the smell of decomposition in places such as Bucha which will remain with him.

Camilleri says that it was that of the two men found dead outside the house they saw when they first arrived in Bucha.

Their close proximity to the bodies, which were uncovered and untouched, made the scene all the more personal and made it easier to understand what had happened.

“I feel very hurt when I hear comments – even from Russian officials – that this is all staged, that it’s an act, that it’s fake.  We were there.  We saw these things with our own eyes.  It’s very real… there’s nothing staged in what we saw.  We saw dead people; people killed, and people killed in a manner which is no less than a war crime,” Camilleri reflects.