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Ukraine war: Bucha street littered with burned-out tanks and corpses


A suburban avenue in Bucha became one of the first graveyards for Russia's hopes of encircling and entering Kyiv and then deposing the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The moment came two or three days after the first Russian forces crossed into Ukraine on 24 February, when Ukrainian forces destroyed a column of Russian tanks and armoured personnel carriers moving through the town of Bucha to the city of Kyiv.

The convoy was destroyed in one of the first of many Ukrainian ambushes that stopped the Russian advance dead.

Our BBC team was able to get to Bucha because during Friday the final Russian soldiers pulled out, as part of what the Kremlin has presented as a calm and rational decision to concentrate on the war in eastern Ukraine.

Moscow says, without proof or any reliability, that its war aims in central Ukraine have been achieved, and they never included capturing Kyiv.

The truth is that unexpectedly fierce and well organised Ukrainian resistance stopped them outside the capital, and the evidence includes the rusting and twisted wreckage of the column that still lies where it was destroyed on that suburban street.

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