Live Updates: Russia-Ukraine War – The New York Times

Before he left the town in March, he said, he had arranged for a local backhoe operator to dig a mass grave in the yard of an Orthodox Church. Without electricity for refrigeration, the morgue had become inoperable, and another solution was needed. “It was a horror,” he said.

After he left, the mass grave filled up with about 40 bodies, he said, of people who died during the Russian occupation. Local coroners from his office who had stayed in the town had collected some of those bodies, he said.

On a visit on Sunday to the mass grave — about a dozen yards long and two yards wide — a pile of excavated dirt lay nearby to pile onto bodies. In one corner, two pairs of shoes and an arm protruded from a thin layer of dirt, and in another, a hand stuck out. On top of the pile, a half-dozen black body bags had been tipped into the pit.

Mr. Kaplishny said that before he left Bucha — as back-and-forth fighting raged and then the Russian army established control — he buried 57 bodies in a cemetery, 15 of whom had died of natural causes. The rest died from gunshot wounds, including point-blank shots in executions, or from shrapnel. Three of these bodies were Ukrainian soldiers, he said.

On Sunday, after he had returned to the town, he said he picked up about 30 bodies in a white van. Thirteen of them were men whose hands were tied and had been shot execution-style in the head. He said he did not know the circumstances of their deaths but believed, based on their apparently recent deaths, that they were prisoners killed before the Russian army withdrew.

“They were civilians,” Mr. Kaplishny said, showing cellphone pictures of bodies of men in civilian clothes with their hands bound behind their backs and in one case in the front.

In the images, eight bodies with hands bound lay in a courtyard of a house and five in a basement, he said. “Look, that one was shot in the eye,” Mr. Kaplishny said.