The smell of explosives still hung in the cold, dark air, mixed with the stench of death.
Sixty-six-year-old Vassily, who did not give any last name, looked at the remains of more than a dozen civilians scattered on the street outside his home, his face distorted by grief.
Residents said they had been killed by Russian troops during their monthly occupation.
To Vasili’s left, a man was standing on a grass next to his bicycle, his face pale and his eyes sunken.  Another was in the middle of the street, a few meters from its front door.  Vassily said he was his son’s godfather, a lifelong friend.
The still unburied dead of Bouha were not wearing uniforms.  They were citizens on bicycles, with their stiff hands still holding shopping bags.  Some were clearly dead for many days, if not weeks.
For the most part, they were whole and it was not clear if they had been killed by shrapnel, an explosion or a bullet – but one had the top of his head missing.
“The bastards!”  said Vassily, weeping in rage with a thick coat and a woolen hat.  “Sorry. The tank behind me was shooting. Dogs!”
“We sat in the cellar for two weeks. There was food but no light, no heating to keep warm. We put water in candles to keep warm … We slept in felt boots.”


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Local officials gave Reuters reporters access to the area and a police officer drove into the streets now patrolled by Ukrainian tanks on the street where the bodies were found.
It was not clear why they had not yet been buried.
Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk said more than 300 city residents had been killed and a mass grave in a church was still open, with arms and legs piercing the red clay that was filled to the brim.
Several roads were littered with the wreckage of burned Russian tanks and armored vehicles.  Non-explosive rockets hit the road and, at one point, an unexploded mortar shell sprang from the asphalt.
A column of Ukrainian tanks patrolled, with blue and yellow national flags.  A resident who had survived the ordeal hugged a soldier and gave the military shout: “Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes!”
Mariya Zhelezova, 74, worked as a cleaner in an airplane factory, whose ill health prevented her from leaving before the Russians arrived.
Walking with her 50-year-old daughter Iryna, she remembered with tears the brushes of death.
“The first time I left the room and a bullet broke the glass, the window and stuck in the drawer,” he said.  “The second time, broken glass almost came into my leg.
“The third time, I was walking and I did not know he was standing with a rifle and the bullets went right next to me. When I got home, I could not speak.”
He removed a white cloth armband that he said residents were instructed to wear.
“We do not want them to return,” he said.  “I had a dream today – that they left and did not return.”
The Kremlin and the Russian Defense Ministry in Moscow did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
(Written by Simon Gardner, edited by Kevin Liffey)