Bucha and the dark echoes of Srebrenica

High on a hillside not far from the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica the remains of dozens of young Muslim men had been left to rot.

By the time I found them most of the flesh had been eaten away by forest scavengers – bears, wolves, foxes and even stray dogs – but the skeletons and skulls remained, some with rags of clothing and scraps of hair still attached.

Personal possessions lay among the remains: tobacco tins – one inscribed with the name Suljo, a pair of broken glasses, family photographs. Most of these photos were taken with Polaroid cameras – a status symbol in the old Yugoslavia. The black backings had peeled away but the faces were still visible, if faded.

This week as locals began to gather bodies and exhume mass graves in Bucha and other suburbs around Kyiv, Ukrainian officials accused the Russian army of carrying out another ‘Srebrenica’.

The scale is, of course, vastly different.