Within days of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, soldiers claimed Serhii Tepliuk's small village.
Warning: This article contains images and details readers might find distressing.
Just hours after their arrival, they took Serhii's home. For the weeks that followed his family were tortured in their own basement.
Russian troops lived on top of them, pointed guns at them, yelled at them and subjected them to brutal mental and physical interrogations.
The father of three remembers the moment it all started, before he knew what horrors could be unleashed on his community.
"On March 8, at around 12pm we saw tanks … there were around 50 soldiers on this street and they just started shooting women, near the store you can find their graves," he told the ABC.
"People started to escape then, but I was here with my family — my wife and three children.
"We decided to hide."
But within hours troops were stomping through his house — at first ordering the family to hand over their phones, before questioning them at gunpoint and then forcing them into the underground cellar.
Russians arrived in Bohdanivka and just 'took over'
Serhii's family would spend the next 17 days living inside that small room.
"They inspected us over and over and told us that from now on they will live in our house," he said.
"They kept asking, 'where are the women for us?' They were pointing weapons at us — what was I to do?"
When Serhii was asked about exactly what happened to his family during their confinement, he simply shook his head.
His eyes welled with tears, and he waved his hand in front of his face to make it clear he did not want to give more details.
He summarises it in two words: "We suffered."
When Russians took control of the village of Bohdanivka, about 40 kilometres from Kyiv, it became a base for their eastern advance on the capital.
Soldiers set up military headquarters in the local school and claimed the properties around it — including Serhii's — for their troops to live in.
"The town was not really defended, as the Armed Forces of Ukraine were some way away … so Russians just arrived and took over," Anatoliy Bochkariov, the leader of the local village council, told the ABC.
He said the village came under heavy bombardment as Ukrainian forces tried to fend off the occupiers and Russian troops fought to gain ground.
"I know people who stayed here during the occupation, most of them are elderly people who couldn't travel, and they have deep psychological problems now, breakdowns," he says.
His community is still uncovering the extent of the death and destruction.
"Around 70 bodies have been taken away for criminal investigators to look at … but we continue to look for our dead."
Hundreds of houses have been reduced to rubble in the community. There is no power, no gas and the fields around the village are littered with explosives.
Serhii's home was destroyed after it caught fire in intense shelling while Russians were still inside.
The troops fled as the flames engulfed his home, and he managed to escape just in time.
"I do not wish my experience on anyone," Serhii said.
He has now turned his attention to repairing his home. When asked if he plans to keep living here, he replied with a faint smile: "Of course."
A doctor's nightmare confronting the 'worst' wounds
One of the senior doctors at the Brovary Central Hospital, close to Bohdanivka, said that in the last six weeks he has "seen the worst wounds in my 20-year career".
"The war wounds will continue for years … the wounds from [left-over explosives] will continue for so long, definitely years," Volodymyr Andriiets told the ABC.
For weeks on end, he and other staff members at this hospital have slept on the wards.
The Soviet-era facility was the closest to the eastern front line in the fight for Kyiv.
"Of all the damaged people [we treated], most of these patients were civilians," he said.
"Too many women were damaged, there were children damaged, it was very terrible."
He visited one of his patients, Volodymyr Doroshenko, who suffered severe wounds to his leg when he was caught in a warehouse explosion while trying to move food to people in need.
His mother cried over him as he grasped her hand tightly, while listening to the doctor with a pained gaze.
He is "lucky" compared to many others, Dr Andrieets remarked as he left his room.
He said in recent weeks there were a few patients whose stories kept playing on his mind: A teenager who lost their eyes, a young man who needed both legs amputated, and a young girl with a bullet in her back.
Families arrived carrying the bodies of their dead loved ones into the hospital, hoping that doctors could somehow save them, he said.
"The world cannot understand this feeling, we are here and we wonder every day, why is the world not doing more?" he said.
When asked how he is feeling about the war ahead, and whether his community will recover, he replied earnestly: "This is just the beginning."
'We will overcome anything'
Just weeks ago, Tetyana Filipova was a principal in the neighbouring suburb of Velyka Dymerka, teaching hundreds of children.
Now she runs the humanitarian aid efforts for the area.
She wants the world to know what happened to her community, even if she cannot quite comprehend it herself.
"Our village was turned into a war zone, and throughout this month we had to endure a lot. A lot of villages suffered."
As she paced through her village's school, where every single door is broken, she described the massive efforts underway in the village to help those in need.
"We distribute not only food, but also clothes both for adults and children, around 700 people receive humanitarian aid here daily," she told the ABC.
She wants people to know something else about her community: They can rebuild.
"After time passes, our village will become prosperous again, we have very good people, we will restore everything, and we will overcome anything," she said.
"For our kids, we must."
