Viktoria Kovalenko bore witness to the demise of her husband and elder daughter when their automotive was hit by a shell in northern Ukraine. By the point her family members acquired a correct funeral, she was about 300 miles away, in a position to watch the burial solely on a cellphone video despatched to her by relations.
Even within the relative peace of Lviv, a metropolis little touched by violence within the battle with Russia, it was an ordeal she could not endure.
"Tears don't let me watch till the top," she stated as she performed the video in a wooded space the place she was pushing her 1-year-old daughter Varvara in a stroller.
In early March, Kovalenko and her household have been of their automotive, fleeing the realm of town of Chernihiv, one of many battle's most intensely besieged.
At a Russian checkpoint close to the village Yahidne, a shell exploded. The home windows of the automotive shattered, she stated, and he or she and 12-year-old daughter Veronika have been injured by the damaged glass.
The subsequent factor she remembers is the voice of her husband shouting at them to go away the automotive.
"Veronika began to shout, her arms have been shaking, so I attempted to calm her. She acquired out of the automotive and I went to observe. As I acquired out, I noticed her fall. After I appeared, her head was gone," she instructed the BBC final week.
It was in these stunning moments that Viktoria's husband additionally misplaced his life.
Viktoria and her youthful daughter Varvara escaped, solely to be caught by the Russian troops and brought to the basement of a faculty in Yahidne.
Locals stated greater than 300 villagers have been compelled into the basement. Then, throughout weeks of stress and deprivation, some started to die.
The BBC has visited the basement, and spoken to different folks held there. Captives describe the our bodies mendacity uncollected for hours, typically days.
Kovalenko and Varvara spent weeks within the basement of the college, doing their greatest to remain alive.
Residents of Yahidne instructed The Related Press they have been made to stay within the basement day and evening aside from the uncommon instances once they have been allowed outdoors to cook dinner on open fires or to make use of the bathroom.
As folks died one after the other within the basement, neighbors have been allowed once in a while to position the our bodies in a mass grave in a close-by cemetery.
Kovalenko's husband Petro and Veronika have been at first buried within the woods, however later reinterred within the Yahidne cemetery, carried there in coffins alongside a tough path as pals and relations wept and a few positioned flowers and within the grave and scooped in handfuls of grime.
The re-burials befell after Russian troops left Yahidne in early April, when forces pulled again to pay attention their battle within the japanese a part of Ukraine.
Kovalenko's searing recollections are enmeshed within the twisted wreckage of their automotive.
And on a concrete block at a village checkpoint somebody has spray-painted a macabre joke: the phrases "well mannered folks," the time period that Russian authorities dubbed the forces who annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.
The BBC requested Viktoria what she would say to the individuals who did this to her household.
"If I used to be given the potential of capturing Putin, I might do it," she stated. "My hand wouldn't shake."