Scenes of death and destruction haunt the bucolic town of Irpin following the retreat of Russian forces who occupied it from March 14th. Nestled along the meandering Irpin river near Ukraine’s capital, the enclave was known for its leafy avenues and verdant parks – a choice destination for middle-class families and professionals willing to commute the twenty kilometres to Kyiv city.

Today its roads are snarled with burnt-out cars, felled trees, and grounded electrical cables ripped from their posts by indiscriminate shelling. Upmarket detached homes, architecturally designed and carefully manicured, are now charred, crumpled or have collapsed in rubble. Gardens are criss-crossed with yards of twisted corrugated fencing hanging from their frames. Starving, confused pets, abandoned by their owners in the rush to evacuate, forage through the debris.

The silence, punctuated by an eerie soundtrack of spring birdsong and distant shelling, gives an impression of calm but the sheer scale of devastation leaves no doubt about what went on here. Irpin was the last line of defence before Kyiv – the front line of Russia’s major northern offensive for over two weeks and the site of some of the fiercest battles in Ukraine’s month-long war with Russia. It’s also the site for what is now agonisingly familiar in many Russian-controlled areas – atrocities committed against civilians.

A random blanket of corrugated fencing half covers the body of an old man discarded on a roadside. The contorted corpse of a young man hangs out the back of a bullet-ridden car. The remains of another is crushed into the ground near a pile of clothes. Some of the dead bodies lying openly in Irpin streets have been boobytrapped, so all of them remain untouched until specialist teams arrive to demine them. Their deaths reveal an unspeakable horror witnessed by Irpin’s residents, many of whom are still too frightened to leave their homes, two days after the town’s liberation.

Some who have left arrive in a community centre in Kyiv, where they are provided with food and access to transport. Among them are retired chemist, Yekaterina Vladimirovna 66, and her husband Yuri, 69, who spoke to The Currency about their ordeal. They have two daughters, one of whom lives with their two grandchildren in Sevastopol, a garrison city in Russian-controlled Crimea and a major base for Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. “She lives near a military airport,” according to Yuri, “Every hour, she sees military planes leaving, on their way to attack us.”

Yekaterina and Yuri are transiting to Czech Republic to join their other daughter who evacuated Irpin with her newly-born on March 5th. Mobile phone and internet connections were cut off in Irpin on March 6th.

All other utilities followed a couple of days later. For over three weeks, Yekaterina and Yuri had no heat, water, electricity, or contact with their daughters. Shelling from artillery, tanks and mortar was constant throughout this period. A lull came on March 14, when Russian troops entered the town, “They were just kids, but they didn’t act like humans,” according to Yekaterina, “Wild teenagers with tanks and automatic weapons – half the time they were drunk, shooting up cars and buildings for no reason. Anything they couldn’t steal, they destroyed – furniture, windows, doors, even children’s toys.” Their chaotic behaviour on entering the town foreshadowed what came next.

“They took a family of five from their home. One of them was 34 years old. I knew them all,” said Yekaterina. Despite the horrors she witnessed or perhaps because of them, she was eager to tell The Currency what she saw, “They shot them at the children’s playground, around the corner from our yard.” She described how they laid on the ground for days, but the Russians refused to allow the neighbours to bury them. “The dogs were sniffing at them all day long. They wouldn’t even allow us cover them up.”

Yuri described another atrocity which also took place in their immediate neighbourhood. “A young couple who owned a small grocery shop were killed in front of everyone. Now their young baby is with the grandfather.” This story was corroborated by Valentina Markova, 72, another Irpin evacuee at the community centre and a neighbour of Yekaterina and Yuri, “We had to bury them in the street outside their store.” Valentina told The Currency about another mother who ventured out one day with her 30-year-old son. “He was accused by two Russians of being a Ukrainian soldier because he wearing black. They shot him and killed him in front of his mother.”

Irpin is a snapshot of what has been happening in Russia-controlled areas across Ukraine. The coastal city of Mariupol has seen over 5000 innocent lives lost. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said in her daily press briefing that 45,000 residents from Mariupol have been illegally deported to Russia and the Russian occupied territories of Donetsk Oblast. According to her, the most striking atrocities in Mariupol, however, are sexual crimes. “Occupiers are targeting our children, underage girls and women. Such facts are evidenced by women who managed to leave Mariupol. The whole world should know about this,” said the Deputy Prime Minister.

Ukraine’s second biggest city, Kharkiv, the northern city of Chernigiv and countless smaller towns and villages across the country have witnessed similar attacks against civilians. Despite this, Ukrainians are doing their best to bring a semblance of normality back to areas not under direct attack. With the entire country consumed by the intense push for battlefield advantage and a dynamic support and supply effort, there’s a sense that the true horror of this war has yet to sink in.

A few miles across the Irpin River, Kyiv’s city centre is slowly coming back to life. The city’s evening curfew was reduced by one hour this week to 9pm. Downtown restaurants are tentatively re-opening to take advantage of this extension. “It’s hard to be normal in these circumstances”, said IT Worker Vova, 28, as he sucked on a cigarette while waiting to play outdoor table tennis in Kashtan, a downtown Kyiv café recently re-opened for business. “But we have to keep trying. War isn’t going to last forever.” Designers, IT Workers and students have been venturing over to Kashtan’s outdoor yard every day for a week. “There were only about five or ten people here at the beginning of the week. Now there are twenty” said Vova, as he stepped over to take his place at the tennis table.

The need for normality is as human as the need for safety or shelter but there’s a marked contrast between the laid-back atmosphere in Kashtan and the horrific scenes in Irpin, just a few miles away. This new sense of security felt by Kyiv residents is due partly to a natural adaptation to war’s rhythms, but also to Russia’s temporary retreat from the city.

The Pentagon and Ukraine’s Defence minister have confirmed that Russia has retreating some of its troops from Kyiv and Chernigiv as promised. NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg warned that Russia is simply “trying to regroup, resupply and reinforce” its offensive in eastern Ukraine’s separatist Donbas region.

The Donbass is a region of flat steppes, more suited to Russia’s battlefield tactics where the overwhelming military force is likely to stand a better chance against Ukraine’s nimble guerrilla approach. Whether Putin foresees the battle for Donbass as the climactic battle in this war is anyone’s guess. So far, his rationale for this senseless war and his battlefield tactics have baffled leaders and military analysts worldwide.

For Valentina, this lack of rationale is what upset her most. She described the horrors she witnessed in Irpin without shedding a tear. However, she broke down when she tried to rationalise the behaviour of the young Russian soldiers who committed them. “The worst thing was that we could talk to them. But they couldn’t understand us. When we asked why they were here, they said they had come to save us from the Americans.”