[40][41] According to Ukrainian military intelligence, Russian forces occupying Bucha included the 64th Motor Rifle Brigade, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Azatbek Omurbekov, a part of the 35th Combined Arms Army.

[44] Matilda Bogner, the head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, also raised concerns about the precise documentation of civilian casualties, specifically in regions and cities under heavy fire, highlighting the lack of electricity and reliable communications.

[55] Soldiers of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces said they had found eighteen mutilated bodies of men, women and children in a summer camp's basement in Zabuchchya, near Bucha.

[60] A report published by The Kyiv Independent included a photo and information about one man and two or three naked women under a blanket whose bodies Russian soldiers had tried to burn on the side of a road before fleeing.

The photos show that Russian forces had singled out and killed Ukrainian civilian men in an organised fashion, with many bodies found with their hands tied behind their backs.

[70] On 21 April, Human Rights Watch published an extensive report that summarized their own investigation in Bucha, implicating Russian troops in summary executions, other unlawful killings, enforced disappearances, and torture.

[38] The BBC and The Guardian cited eyewitness accounts, from inhabitants of Bucha and the nearby villages of Obukhovychi and Ivankiv, of Russian troops using civilians as human shields as they came under attack by Ukrainian soldiers.

[78] According to a Kyiv resident, who was present at the Bucha headquarters of the territorial defence force, Russian soldiers checked documents and killed those who had participated in the war in the Donbas region of Ukraine.

[81] Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraine's human rights commissioner at the time, stated that sexual violence against civilians was weaponized by the Russian soldiers as part of what she referred to as "genocide of Ukrainian people".

A separate video, filmed after the Russian withdrawal, showed a dead person wearing civilian clothing matching the drone footage, lying next to a bicycle.

[87] Kaplishny said that before leaving, he had hired a backhoe operator to dig a mass grave near the church, as the morgue was unable to refrigerate bodies due to the lack of electricity, and "It was a horror".

[16] On 8 August 2022, officials released a count of civilian deaths in the town of Bucha alone: 458 bodies—419 with signs of shooting, torture, or violent trauma—and 39 of apparently natural causes but being scrutinized for their relationship to the Russian occupation.

[102][103] On 6 April 2022, CNN cited an unnamed US official as saying that identification of the Russian units involved in the Bucha atrocities was "an extremely high priority" for the US intelligence agencies, which had been using all available tools and assets in their work and were "at the point of 'narrowing down' responsibility".

[104] According to a report from Der Spiegel, the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) briefed parliamentarians on 6 April 2022 regarding radio intercepts of Russian soldiers in the area north of Kyiv, linking them to specific atrocities in Bucha.

According to the report, the BND provided evidence that an airborne regiment and an army unit were initially responsible for the crimes, and that the Wagner Group later played a leading role in the atrocities.

[105][106] Ukrainian activists said that the 64th Motor Rifle Brigade under the command of Lt. Col. Azatbek Omurbekov,[107] a part of the Eastern Military District's 35th Army, was occupying Bucha when the atrocities took place.

[84] An investigation by the Associated Press revealed that the 76th Guards Air Assault Division was running the Russian occupation headquarters at the 144 Yablunska street from where the cleansing operation of Bucha was coordinated.

[116][117] Russia requested a special meeting of the United Nations Security Council, of which it is one of five permanent members, to address what it called a "heinous provocation of Ukrainian radicals", the footage of dead bodies in Bucha, which it said was staged.

[123] Speaking to the United Nations Security Council on 5 April, Zelenskyy said that the massacre was "unfortunately only one example of what the occupiers have been doing on our territory for the past 41 days",[124] and that "Russian tanks had crushed people 'for pleasure'".

[126][11][127] The massacre was condemned by the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, who said he was "shocked by haunting images of atrocities committed by [the] Russian army in Kyiv" and promised the EU would assist Ukraine and human rights groups in collecting evidence for use in international courts.

[136] European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen visited Bucha on 8 April, viewing mass graves and describing the massacre as "the cruel face of Putin's army".

[140] Moldovan President Maia Sandu called the event "crimes against humanity" and declared 4 April 2022 a day of national mourning in memory of all Ukrainians killed in the Russo-Ukrainian war.

[145][146] These events led to numerous European Union members – including Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden – ordering the expulsion of more than 200 Russian diplomats from their countries.

[156][157][158][159] The Cuban state newspaper Granma also claimed that the incident was staged, reporting that the images from Bucha "distort reality and give the world an unreal version of what happened, after the abandonment of Russian troops",[160][161] while Telesur, owned and operated by the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, described the massacre as "a fake news story".

In announcing the sanctions, European Commission vice president Josep Borrell stated that they were adopted "following the atrocities committed by Russian armed forces in Bucha".

[173] He said that the Western media "suppressed all objective facts and evidence and disseminated blatant fakes instead" and that the report published by The Guardian proved that the Ukrainian army was responsible for the killings.

The Times concluded, on 4 April, that "many of the civilians were killed more than three weeks ago, when Russia's military was in control of the town" and that the images refute Russian claims of the contrary.

[178] Similarly, a video showing Ukrainian soldiers pulling dead bodies with cables in Bucha was widely shared by pro-Russian social media, supposedly to prove that the scene was staged.

[187] On 9 December 2022, a Moscow court sentenced Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin to eight years and six months imprisonment for his statements about the circumstances of the killings in Bucha, on charges of "spreading false information" about the armed forces.

Popular Odesa-born Russian "activist-journalist", and moderator of one of the channels, Yuliya Vityazeva, compared Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol to "cockroaches" and stated that gassing them was unnecessary since there were "simpler and cheaper" ways to murder them, a type of comment that resembled narratives observed in the run up to the Rwandan genocide.