‘This land is in blood’: A Ukraine village digs up the dead

MYKULYCHI, Ukraine (AP) — On a quiet street lined with walnut trees was a cemetery with four bodies that hadn’t yet found a home.

All were victims of Russian soldiers in this village outside Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. Their temporary caskets were together in a grave.

Volunteers dug them up one by one on Sunday — two weeks after the soldiers disappeared.

This spring is a grim season of planting and replanting in towns and villages around Kyiv.

Bodies given hurried graves amid the Russian occupation are now being retrieved for investigations into possible war crimes. More than 900 civilian victims have been found so far.

All four bodies here were killed on the same street, on the same day.

That’s according to the local man who provided their caskets.

He bent and kissed the cemetery’s wrought-iron crosses as he walked to the makeshift grave.

The volunteers tried digging with shovels, then gave up and called an excavator.

As they waited, they recounted their work secretly burying bodies during the monthlong Russian occupation, then retrieving them.

One young man recalled being discovered by soldiers who pointed guns at him and told him “Don’t look up” as he dug a grave.