“Yes, I saw corpses of civilians,” said Ilya Ivanov, who reached Poland after fleeing a village outside Sumy where Russian forces rolled through. “They shoot at civilians with machine guns.”
As more than 2 million refugees from Ukraine begin to scatter throughout Europe and beyond, some are carrying valuable witness evidence to build a case for potential war crimes, AP reports.
More and more, the people who are turning up at border crossings are survivors who have fled some of the cities hardest hit by Russian forces.
“It was very eerie,” said Ihor Diekov, one of the many people who crossed the Irpin river outside Kyiv on the slippery wooden planks of a makeshift bridge after Ukrainians blew up the concrete span to slow the Russian advance.
He heard gunshots as he crossed and saw corpses along the road.
“The Russians promised to provide a (humanitarian) corridor which they did not comply with. They were shooting civilians,” he said. “That’s absolutely true. I witnessed it. People were scared.”
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