Woman in Bucha said Russian troops came to her house, said 'we have come to liberate you,' then killed her husband in front of her

• A woman in Bucha said Russian soldiers claiming to be liberators shot her husband before her.
• Iryna Abramov said in interviews that troops dragged her husband, Oleg, into the street on March 5.

A resident of the Ukrainian town of Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, said Russian soldiers came to her house professing to be liberators and then killed her husband in front of her.

After being controlled by Russian forces for weeks, Bucha was recently reclaimed by Ukraine, with authorities later saying that Russian troops had killed more than 300 civilians while there.

In a video interview shared by Ukraine's Ministry of Culture and in a separate interview with the BBC, Iryna Abramov, a Bucha resident, said Russian troops stormed her home on March 5 and dragged her husband, Oleg, into the street.

"They didn't ask anything or say anything, they just killed him," she told the BBC. "They only told him to take off his shirt, kneel down, and they shot him."

According to a translation of the interview posted to social media, Abramov said the Russian troops had first told them: "We are the liberators. We have come to liberate you."

Abramov told the BBC that after shooting Oleg, the soldiers told her and her 72-year-old father, Volodymyr, that they had three minutes to leave the house, meaning they had to leave Oleg's dead body on the street.

She said the body was on the street for a month while they sheltered nearby, before Ukrainian forces collected it and took it away, the BBC reported. Volodymyr Abramov told the BBC he does not know where his son-in-law's body is.

Iryna Abramov said her husband's blood still stained the street on the spot where he was killed, the BBC reported.

After reports and images surfaced of bodies in Bucha, both Ukraine and US President Joe Biden labeled Russian President Vladimir Putin a war criminal, and the US called for Russia to be suspended from the UN Human Rights Council.

Russia said images of the dead were fabricated to paint Russian troops as villains. Insider's Tom Porter has published a timeline undermining that claim.

Speaking from Bucha on Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that there could be worse war crimes yet to be discovered as Ukrainian forces reclaim land in the north of the country.

"There is already information that the number of victims may be even higher in Borodyanka and some other liberated cities" near Kyiv, he said.