Staff of The New York Times

Exclusive evidence obtained in a monthslong investigation identifies the Russian regiment — and commander — behind one of the worst atrocities in Ukraine.

By Yousur Al-Hlou, Masha Froliak, Dmitriy Khavin, Christoph Koettl, Haley Willis, Alexander Cardia, Natalie Reneau and Malachy Browne

When videos and photos emerged in April showing bodies of dozens of civilians strewn along a street in Bucha, Ukrainians and the rest of the world voiced horror and outrage. But in Russia, officials had a completely different reaction: denial.

President Vladimir V. Putin dismissed the gruesome scene as “a provocation,” and claimed that the Russian Army had nothing to do with it.

But an eight-month visual investigation by The New York Times concluded that the perpetrators of the massacre along Yablunska Street were Russian paratroopers from the 234th Air Assault Regiment led by Lt. Col. Artyom Gorodilov.

The evidence shows that the killings were part of a deliberate and systematic effort to ruthlessly secure a route to the capital, Kyiv. Soldiers interrogated and executed unarmed men of fighting age, and killed people who unwittingly crossed their paths — whether it was children fleeing with their families, locals hoping to find groceries or people simply trying to get back home on their bicycles.

Times reporters spent months in Bucha after Russian forces withdrew, interviewing residents, collecting vast troves of security camera footage and obtaining exclusive records from government sources. In New York, Times investigators analyzed the materials and reconstructed the killings along this one street down to the minute. Some of the most damning evidence implicating the 234th included phone records and decoded call signs used by commanders on Russian radio channels.

It all points to a brazen and bloody campaign that turned a quiet suburban street into what residents now call the “road of death.”

Historically, journalists and investigators relied on a single photograph or video to expose wartime atrocities. In 1992, Time magazine published a photo of an emaciated prisoner in Bosnia on its cover. Almost 20 years later, a video captured the execution of captured Tamil Tiger fighters in the final days of Sri Lanka’s civil war.

What differentiates the evidence discovered in Bucha are the scale and detail that link a single unit and its commander to specific killings, with possible implications for ongoing investigations. The International Criminal Court (I.C.C.) is already investigating possible war crimes and other atrocities in Ukraine.

“This kind of digital evidence is a sea change, especially compared to past investigations such as in the former Yugoslavia,” said Matthew Gillett, a senior lecturer at the University of Essex who previously worked at international criminal courts. “If any Ukraine cases end up at an international court such as the I.C.C., it has to have a significant video component.”

Here are some of the main takeaways of the investigation.

A Paratrooper Unit Emerges as the Culprit

While various military units were present in Bucha — and the death toll across the city reached over 400 — The Times identified the 234th Regiment, a paratrooper unit based in the city of Pskov in western Russia, as the main culprit in the Yablunska Street killings. Airborne units like this are considered some of the best trained and equipped in the Russian military. Evidence of the 234th’s involvement includes military equipment, uniform badges, radio chatter and packing slips on munition crates. Military experts from Janes and the Institute for the Study of War provided insights about Russian armored vehicles and their markings as well as tactical operations seen in the visual evidence.

Phone Records as Digital Fingerprints

Residents in Bucha said that when Russian soldiers interrogated them, they often seized their phones. Suspecting the soldiers may also have taken the phones of victims, our reporters obtained from Ukrainian authorities a database of all calls and messages placed from the Bucha region to Russia during March. As we interviewed victims’ relatives, we collected their phone numbers and checked if they were in the database. A chilling pattern emerged: soldiers routinely used the phones of victims to call home to Russia, often only hours after they were killed.

By analyzing the phone numbers dialed by Russian soldiers and uncovering social media profiles associated with their family members, The Times confirmed the identity of two dozen paratroopers as members of the 234th Regiment. In many cases, we interviewed their relatives and spoke to some of the soldiers themselves, two of whom confirmed they were in the 234th and served in Bucha. We cross-referenced our findings with personal data sourced from leaked and official Russian databases provided by the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit group focused on global security.

Mothers, Fathers, Children: Ordinary Citizens as Victims

The Times identified — for the first time — three dozen people who were killed along Yablunska Street in March. We reviewed death certificates for most of these victims, and the predominant cause of death was gunshot wounds.

The victims were residents of Bucha or neighboring towns, from all ages and professions. Among the victims killed by Russian paratroopers were 52-year-old Tamila Mishchenko and her 14-year-old daughter, Anna, on March 5. They were among four women fleeing Bucha when Russian soldiers fired on their blue minivan.

Nearly all the victims we identified on Yablunska Street were civilians or Ukrainian P.O.W.s. Killing them could be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court and deemed war crimes under international humanitarian law. Because of their systematic and widespread nature, the killings in Bucha could also amount to crimes against humanity. Russia has not joined the I.C.C. and is unlikely to cooperate on any potential future cases that involve Russian soldiers.

The Killings Were Not Random Acts of Violence

The victims on Yablunska Street did not die in the crossfire between Russian and Ukrainian forces, nor were they mistakenly shot in the fog of war. Our investigation shows that Russian troops intentionally killed them, apparently as part of a systematic “clearing” operation to secure the path to the capital. Dozens of civilians were shot dead. In other cases, men suspected of links to the Ukrainian military were rounded up and executed.

Dereliction in the Chain of Command

Lt. Col. Artyom Gorodilov, the regiment commander at the helm of the 234th, oversaw operations of the paratrooper unit in Bucha. Times investigators obtained documents that confirmed the call sign he used when communicating over the radio with his troops. Security cameras along Yablunska Street captured some of this radio chatter, establishing that Lt. Col. Gorodilov was in command, and two soldiers in the 234th who served in Bucha confirmed in interviews that he was there.

After Russian troops retreated from the Kyiv region, Lt. Col. Gorodilov received a promotion to colonel in April from the then-head of the airborne forces, Col. Gen. Andrey Serdyukov. The ceremony was held days after the shocking images from Bucha emerged.

Neither General Serdyukov nor Colonel Gorodilov’s immediate superior at the time, Maj. Gen. Sergey Chubarykin, has publicly announced any investigations into the carnage in the town despite the global outrage over the images. As superior officers, they ultimately answer for the actions of the forces under their command. By neither stopping nor investigating the atrocities in Bucha, they could ultimately bear responsibility for them.

The Russian Ministry of Defense, the Russian Embassy in Washington and Colonel Gorodilov did not respond to requests for comment.

Reporting was contributed by Evan Hill, Ishaan Jhaveri and Julian Barnes.

Translations and research by Aleksandra Koroleva, Oksana Nesterenko and Milana Mazaeva.

Russian soldiers go into battle with little food, few bullets and instructions grabbed from Wikipedia for weapons they barely know how to use.

They plod through Ukraine with old maps like this one from the 1960s, recovered from the battlefield, or no maps at all.

They speak on open cellphone lines, revealing their positions and exposing the incompetence and disarray in their ranks.

They have trained at dilapidated Russian bases hollowed out by corruption, including this one, home to a tank division badly defeated in Ukraine.

They are given wildly unrealistic timetables and goals for taking Ukrainian territory and complain of being sent into a “meat grinder.”

This is the inside story of historic Russian failures.

A Times investigation based on interviews, intercepts, documents and secret battle plans shows how a “walk in the park” became a catastrophe for Russia.

By Michael Schwirtz, Anton Troianovski, Yousur Al-Hlou, Masha Froliak, Adam Entous and Thomas Gibbons-Neff

They never had a chance.

Fumbling blindly through cratered farms, the troops from Russia’s 155th Naval Infantry Brigade had no maps, medical kits or working walkie-talkies, they said. Just a few weeks earlier, they had been factory workers and truck drivers, watching an endless showcase of supposed Russian military victories at home on state television before being drafted in September. One medic was a former barista who had never had any medical training.

Now, they were piled onto the tops of overcrowded armored vehicles, lumbering through fallow autumn fields with Kalashnikov rifles from half a century ago and virtually nothing to eat, they said. Russia had been at war most of the year, yet its army seemed less prepared than ever. In interviews, members of the brigade said some of them had barely fired a gun before and described having almost no bullets anyway, let alone air cover or artillery. But it didn’t frighten them too much, they said. They would never see combat, their commanders had promised.

Only when the shells began crashing around them, ripping their comrades to pieces, did they realize how badly they had been duped.

Flung to the ground, a drafted Russian soldier named Mikhail recalled opening his eyes to a shock: the shredded bodies of his comrades littering the field. Shrapnel had sliced open his belly, too. Desperate to escape, he said, he crawled to a thicket of trees and tried to dig a ditch with his hands.

Of the 60 members of his platoon near the eastern Ukrainian town of Pavlivka that day in late October, about 40 were killed, said Mikhail, speaking by phone from a military hospital outside Moscow. Only eight, he said, escaped serious injury.

“This isn’t war,” Mikhail said, struggling to speak through heavy, liquid breaths. “It’s the destruction of the Russian people by their own commanders.”

President Vladimir V. Putin’s war was never supposed to be like this. When the head of the C.I.A. traveled to Moscow last year to warn against invading Ukraine, he found a supremely confident Kremlin, with Mr. Putin’s national security adviser boasting that Russia’s cutting-edge armed forces were strong enough to stand up even to the Americans.

Russian invasion plans, obtained by The New York Times, show that the military expected to sprint hundreds of miles across Ukraine and triumph within days. Officers were told to pack their dress uniforms and medals in anticipation of military parades in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.

But instead of that resounding victory, with tens of thousands of his troops killed and parts of his army in shambles after nearly 10 months of war, Mr. Putin faces something else entirely: his nation’s greatest human and strategic calamity since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

How could one of the world’s most powerful militaries, led by a celebrated tactician like Mr. Putin, have faltered so badly against its much smaller, weaker rival? To piece together the answer, we drew from hundreds of Russian government emails, documents, invasion plans, military ledgers and propaganda directives. We listened to Russian phone calls from the battlefield and spoke with dozens of soldiers, senior officials and Putin confidants who have known him for decades.

The Times investigation found a stunning cascade of mistakes that started with Mr. Putin — profoundly isolated in the pandemic, obsessed with his legacy, convinced of his own brilliance — and continued long after drafted soldiers like Mikhail were sent to the slaughter.

At every turn, the failures ran deeper than previously known:

■ In interviews, Putin associates said he spiraled into self-aggrandizement and anti-Western zeal, leading him to make the fateful decision to invade Ukraine in near total isolation, without consulting experts who saw the war as pure folly. Aides and hangers-on fueled his many grudges and suspicions, a feedback loop that one former confidant likened to the radicalizing effect of a social-media algorithm. Even some of the president’s closest advisers were left in the dark until the tanks began to move. As another longtime confidant put it, “Putin decided that his own thinking would be enough.”

■ The Russian military, despite Western assumptions about its prowess, was severely compromised, gutted by years of theft. Hundreds of billions of dollars had been devoted to modernizing the armed forces under Mr. Putin, but corruption scandals ensnared thousands of officers. One military contractor described frantically hanging enormous patriotic banners to hide the decrepit conditions at a major Russian tank base, hoping to fool a delegation of top brass. The visitors were even prevented from going inside to use the bathroom, he said, lest they discover the ruse.

■ Once the invasion began, Russia squandered its dominance over Ukraine through a parade of blunders. It relied on old maps and bad intelligence to fire its missiles, leaving Ukrainian air defenses surprisingly intact, ready to defend the country. Russia’s vaunted hacking squads tried, and failed, to win in what some officials call the first big test of cyberweapons in actual warfare. Russian soldiers, many shocked they were going to war, used their cellphones to call home, allowing the Ukrainians to track them and pick them off in large numbers. And Russia’s armed forces were so stodgy and sclerotic that they did not adapt, even after enduring huge losses on the battlefield. While their planes were being shot down, many Russian pilots flew as if they faced no danger, almost like they were at an air show.

■ Stretched thin by its grand ambitions, Russia seized more territory than it could defend, leaving thousands of square miles in the hands of skeleton crews of underfed, undertrained and poorly equipped fighters. Many were conscripts or ragtag separatists from Ukraine’s divided east, with gear from the 1940s or little more than printouts from the internet describing how to use a sniper rifle, suggesting soldiers learned how to fight on the fly. With new weapons from the West in hand, the Ukrainians beat them back, yet Russian commanders kept sending waves of ground troops into pointless assaults, again and again. “Nobody is going to stay alive,” one Russian soldier said he realized after being ordered into a fifth march directly in the sights of Ukrainian artillery. Finally, he and his demoralized comrades refused to go.

■ Mr. Putin divided his war into fiefs, leaving no one powerful enough to challenge him. Many of his fighters are commanded by people who are not even part of the military, like his former bodyguard, the leader of Chechnya and a mercenary boss who has provided catering for Kremlin events. As the initial invasion failed, the atomized approach only deepened, chipping away at an already disjointed war effort. Now, Mr. Putin’s fractured armies often function like rivals, competing for weapons and, at times, viciously turning on one another. One soldier recounted how the clashes became violent, with a Russian tank commander deliberately charging at his supposed allies and blowing up their checkpoint.

Since the early days of the invasion, Mr. Putin has conceded, privately, that the war has not gone as planned.

During a meeting in March with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett of Israel, Mr. Putin admitted that the Ukrainians were tougher “than I was told,” according to two people familiar with the exchange. “This will probably be much more difficult than we thought. But the war is on their territory, not ours. We are a big country and we have patience.”

People who know Mr. Putin say he is ready to sacrifice untold lives and treasure for as long as it takes, and in a rare face-to-face meeting with the Americans last month the Russians wanted to deliver a stark message to President Biden: No matter how many Russian soldiers are killed or wounded on the battlefield, Russia will not give up.

One NATO member is warning allies that Mr. Putin is ready to accept the deaths or injuries of as many as 300,000 Russian troops — roughly three times his estimated losses so far.

Just days after facing blowback about the war from normally friendly leaders in September, Mr. Putin doubled down on the invasion, calling up hundreds of thousands of Russians in a draft that was supposed to turn the war in Russia’s favor, but has instead stirred growing anger at home. Soon after, hundreds of Russian soldiers were killed outside Pavlivka, including Mikhail’s drafted comrades in the blind advance of the 155th.

“Legs, guts. I mean, meat. Just meat,” another member of the platoon, Aleksandr, said from a hospital in Russia. “I know it sounds terrible, but you can’t describe it any other way. People were turned into hamburger.”

Aleksandr recounted how he and his fellow draftees had asked their instructor in Russia what they could possibly learn about firing a gun and becoming soldiers in the few weeks before being sent to Ukraine.

“He was honest: ‘Nothing,’” Aleksandr said the instructor responded.

The more setbacks Mr. Putin endures on the battlefield, the more fears grow over how far he is willing to go. He has killed tens of thousands in Ukraine, leveled cities and targeted civilians for maximum pain — obliterating hospitals, schools and apartment buildings, while cutting off power and water to millions before winter. Each time Ukrainian forces score a major blow against Russia, the bombing of their country intensifies. And Mr. Putin has repeatedly reminded the world that he can use anything at his disposal, including nuclear arms, to pursue his notion of victory.

As far back as January, with the United States warning that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was imminent, a retired Russian general named Leonid Ivashov saw disaster on the horizon. In a rare open letter, he warned that using force against Ukraine would threaten “the very existence of Russia as a state.”

In a recent phone interview, General Ivashov said that his warnings before the war echoed what he had been hearing from nervous Russian military officials at the time. Though the Kremlin insisted an invasion was not on the table, some could tell otherwise. Service members told him that “victory in such a situation is impossible,” he said, but their superiors told them not to worry. A war would be a “walk in the park,” they were told.

The last 10 months, he went on, have turned out to be “even more tragic” than predicted. Nimble Ukrainian generals and soldiers have outmaneuvered a much bigger, more lethal foe. The West, cheered by Ukraine’s successes, has provided ever more powerful weapons to drive the Russians back.

“Never in its history has Russia made such stupid decisions,” General Ivashov said. “Alas, today stupidity has triumphed — stupidity, greed, a kind of vengefulness and even a kind of malice.”

Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, blames the West, and the weapons it has given Ukraine, for Russia’s unexpected difficulties in the war.

“This is a big burden for us,” Mr. Peskov said, depicting Russia as taking on all of NATO’s military might in Ukraine. “It was just very hard to believe in such cynicism and in such bloodthirstiness on the part of the collective West.”

Some of the war’s original supporters are starting to reckon with the idea of defeat. Before the invasion, American intelligence agencies identified Oleg Tsaryov as a puppet leader the Kremlin could install once it took over Ukraine. His faith in the war has since slipped away.

“I was there. I participated” in the invasion, Mr. Tsaryov told The Times during a phone interview. But, he said, he was never told the final details and “the Russian Army didn’t understand” the Ukrainians would fight back, thinking “everything would be easy.”

Now, Mr. Tsaryov, a businessman from Ukraine, says he will be happy if the fighting simply ends along the current battle lines — with Russia having failed to capture and keep hold of a single regional capital since the invasion began.

“We’re losing Ukraine,” Mr. Tsaryov said. “We’ve already lost it.”

BLUNDERS

Russian invasion plans obtained by The Times ordered troops to sprint hundreds of miles across Ukraine from multiple directions, anticipating little resistance.

The attack came by land, sea and air.

As missiles struck the southern city of Mykolaiv before dawn, a Ukrainian pilot, Oleksii, woke up to a phone call: Get to the runway, a fellow pilot told him.

Oleksii bolted across the tarmac in the dark as the first Russian missiles landed, clambered into his Su-27 fighter jet and took off just as buildings across the airfield began to explode.

“At that moment, I understood that it was really something bad,” said Oleksii, 26, on condition that only his first name and rank, captain, be used. Some other soldiers and officials in this article were not authorized to speak publicly, or faced reprisals.

Just before 6 a.m. Moscow time, Mr. Putin declared the opening of his “special military operation” in a televised address. It began with an aerial bombardment to take out Ukraine’s air defenses, communications and radar installations — to overwhelm its military and shatter its ability to fight back.

More than 150 missiles thundered into Ukraine from bombers, submarines and ships. As many as 75 Russian aircraft streaked into Ukrainian skies, about the size of Ukraine’s entire working air combat fleet, analysts and officials said.

On his radar screen, Oleksii saw the blips of incoming missiles and enemy aircraft before getting his orders: Fly to a backup air base in central Ukraine. When he landed, he was astonished. Not only was his unit there, but a good portion of Ukraine’s remaining air force as well.

For days, he and his fellow pilots flew missions from their new base, wondering when Russian radar operators would finally notice them. A strike on their position could have been disastrous, gutting the Ukrainian defense, and the pilots assumed it was only a matter of time until one came. But it took four days for the Russians to attack, and most of the aircraft had moved to new locations by then, leaving Oleksii in amazement.

“It was really simple,” he said. “I don’t know how they missed this opportunity.”

The failure to destroy Ukraine’s modest air defenses was one of the most significant blunders of the war, foiling Russia’s mighty air force early on. Interviews revealed why that happened — and how the Ukrainians managed to stay a step ahead of their invaders.

Ukraine should have been overwhelmed. By one count, its fighter jets were outnumbered 15 to one in some early air battles. Russia’s planes were also more advanced, helping its pilots see farther and strike from greater distances. Russia had thousands of cruise and ballistic missiles that should have smothered Ukraine’s aging, Soviet-era defenses. That is what American and Ukrainian intelligence officials assumed, anyway, leading to predictions that Ukraine would fall within days.

So, Ukraine shuffled the deck. It moved some of its defenses — like Buk and S-300 missile launchers, along with its primary radio intelligence command and control center — to new sites before the war began, senior Ukrainian officials said. Russian missiles often hit the old locations instead. In all, as many as 60 percent of Russian cruise missiles missed their intended targets, American officials said.

Part of Russia’s problem was agility. Even if Russian forces had spotted Oleksii and his fellow pilots bunched together at their new rendezvous point, American officials said, Russia’s military was so rigid and centralized that it typically needed 48 to 72 hours to update its intelligence and get approval to go after new targets — by which time the Ukrainians were gone.

That same inflexibility made the Russians easy to hit. After failing to take out Ukraine’s defenses, many Russian pilots kept flying as if they had. Their ground-attack planes often flew sorties without backup from other fighter jets, the Ukrainians said, enabling outgunned pilots like Oleksii to catch them off guard by flying at low altitudes, hidden from radar, and roaring up from below to shoot them down.

“Maybe the Russian Army didn’t read the Soviet books,” Oleksii said. “They flew straight without any cover. They had bombs, they had rockets, but they didn’t cover their attack aircraft.”

Then in March, when Russian pilots finally changed tactics and started flying low enough to duck under Ukrainian air defense radar, they fell into the sights of Ukrainian missiles, including shoulder-fired Stingers provided by the United States.

For Russian troops on the ground, it was a disaster.

Without air cover, they were suddenly far more vulnerable, throwing their troubled march toward Kyiv and other large cities further into disarray.

Though tens of thousands of them had amassed along Ukraine’s borders, hovering menacingly as if eager to strike, many never thought they were actually going to war. Like most of Russia, they figured it was just for show, to extract concessions from the West.

Interviews with Russian soldiers show how stunned they were when the orders came to invade. Cpl. Nikita Chibrin, a 27-year-old soldier in a motorized infantry brigade, said he had spent the month before in Belarus on what he and his fellow soldiers were told was a training exercise. On Feb. 23, he said, he and his unit were at their camp celebrating the Defender of the Fatherland holiday, snacking on candy they had been given for the occasion, when their commander approached.

“Tomorrow you are going to Ukraine to fuck up some shit,” he said the commander told them. There was no further explanation.

Before dawn on the 24th, Corporal Chibrin and his comrades loaded into a tracked armored personnel carrier. They had no instructions and no idea where they were headed, he said.

Another Russian soldier stationed in Belarus said he found out he was going to war only an hour before his unit began to march. The order was both simple and wildly optimistic: Follow the vehicle in front of you and reach Kyiv within 18 hours.

According to the unit’s schedule and logbook — which were obtained by The Times and reviewed by three independent military analysts, who considered them authentic — the first vehicles in his convoy were supposed to punch down from Belarus and arrive on the outskirts of Kyiv by 2:55 p.m., even faster than the soldier was told.

They didn’t come close. The massive vehicles were so heavy, ripping up the roads as they tried to move forward, that the convoy got bogged down immediately, the soldier said. It took more than a day just to cross the border into Ukraine.

It got worse from there. The logbook recorded day after day of delays, Ukrainian attacks and hundreds of injuries, deaths and destroyed vehicles.

Secret orders for a different Russian force — obtained by The Times and shared with four independent military analysts, all of whom said they were credible — were issued only hours before Mr. Putin’s announcement.

The orders, for a unit of the 26th Tank Regiment, were oddly overconfident, to the point of being contradictory. They anticipated a tangle of possible resistance from Ukrainian troops and planes, yet they still laid out a mostly uninhibited, 24-hour dash from Ukraine’s border with Russia to a point across the Dnipro River, about 250 miles away.

There, the unit would dig in, about two hours outside Kyiv, and block Ukrainian troops sweeping in from the south and east, the Russian war plans said. And no matter how fierce the enemy was, the unit was expected to complete the mission on its own.

“There are no forces or equipment for reinforcements,” the orders said.

Sure enough, the lumbering, largely unprotected Russian columns proved enticing targets.

On March 17, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the commander of Ukrainian forces, posted a video of burning tanks that he said belonged to the 26th Tank Regiment in northeastern Ukraine — hundreds of kilometers short of its intended destination.

The unit lost 16 vehicles in less than three weeks, according to Russian documents seized and published by Ukraine. The mother of one young tank soldier on the unit’s roster told Russian media that her son was brought home in pieces, identified only by his DNA.

Across Ukraine, the Russian losses mounted. A giant armored column of more than 30,000 troops at the core of Russia’s force pushing south toward the city of Chernihiv was eviscerated by a motley group of Ukrainian defenders outnumbered five to one, soldiers and senior officials said. The Ukrainians hid in the forest and picked apart the Russian column with shoulder-fired antitank weapons, like American-made Javelins.

One Russian soldier in the unit said he was shocked by the swiftness of the Ukrainian attack.

“In the first battle, the column was ambushed, and I was wounded, and that’s it,” he said. “For 24 hours, I was missing a leg, lying in a field waiting for my unit to come get me.”

The rout near Chernihiv spoiled part of Russia’s plan to envelop Kyiv.

A massacre at the Antonov Airport spoiled another.

Russian forces had counted on the element of surprise when wave upon wave of helicopters descended on the airport, home to the largest aircraft in the world: the An-225 Mriya, a cargo plane with a 290-foot wingspan that was an object of Ukrainian national pride.

Taking the airport would give Russian forces a beachhead to ferry in troops for the assault on Ukraine’s capital. But the Ukrainians expected as much. Using shoulder-fired missiles, they shot down Russian aircraft and killed as many as 300 Russian paratroopers, according to senior American and Ukrainian officials and the captured Russian logbook.

Fierce battles in the following days destroyed much of the airport, including the prized Mriya cargo jet, but thwarted Russia’s plans.

“Yes, we lost our Mriya,” said Col. Yuriy Ignat, the spokesman for Ukraine’s Air Force Command. “But as a result the airport wasn’t lost.”

Russia not only botched the attack by land and air, but also put too much faith in another wing of its vaunted arsenal: hacking.

Even before the first missiles and shots were fired, unit 74455 of the Russian Military Intelligence Directorate, or G.R.U., tried to infiltrate Ukrainian networks and shut them down.

Officials in Washington, who had been working closely with the Ukrainians to bolster their cyberdefenses for years, had been holding their breath. States had mainly used hacking for acts of espionage and financial thievery, for subversion and sabotage. But nobody really knew how it would play out in a full-scale military conflict.

“All this stuff that has been written about cyberwar has been speculative,” said a senior U.S. defense official. “For the first time, you have war and cyber together — the real thing.”

The Russian hacking unit, known as Sandworm, had long menaced Ukraine, waging attacks against the power grid starting in 2015. But it was labor intensive, and only somewhat effective. By one estimate, it took Sandworm about 19 months to prepare the attack on a power station in western Ukraine, yet it only caused a six-hour power outage.

A cyber cat-and-mouse game ensued, with the United States, Britain and other allies helping to shore up Ukrainian computers and stave off Russian intrusions.

On Feb. 23, hours before the invasion began, Sandworm took another swing, launching malware that infected several hundred Ukrainian government computers, officials said. The intrusion was detected quickly, the damage contained.

Then Sandworm struck again. But the code it used looked like it had been thrown together at the last minute, with programming errors — another fail.

Sandworm wasn’t done. In its boldest stroke yet, it went after the Ukrainian military’s satellite communications, used by soldiers in the field. It worked, and by 6:15 a.m. on Feb. 24, the system went down, right at Ukraine’s most vulnerable moment.

It could have been a crippling blow. But the Ukrainian government had a backup plan: a separate satellite communications system, which it had tested only two months before, to make sure it was ready in the event of a Russian invasion.

Russia had assumed its forces would march largely uncontested into Kyiv. When that didn’t happen, American officials suspect that Sandworm — like the rest of the Russian military — was caught off guard.

Soon, Russia’s missteps went from the sophisticated to the mundane.

With their plans for a speedy victory stymied, Russian forces were suddenly confronted with the most basic of problems: They hadn’t brought enough food, water or other supplies for a prolonged campaign. Soldiers resorted to looting grocery stores, hospitals and homes.

“The guys were going from apartment to apartment and taking out large bags — looting in all its glory,” one Russian soldier wrote in mid-March in his diary, which was recovered by Ukrainian troops in eastern Ukraine and shared with a Times reporter embedded with them. “Some take only what they need, some take everything, from old nonfunctional phones to plasma TVs, computers, and expensive alcohol.”

In the diary, the soldier recounts hunting for medicine, food and other essentials, describing the joy his men felt entering a grocery store.

“We found everything that we lacked so much, even sweets,” the soldier wrote. “Everyone rejoiced like children.”

He recounts nearly dying in a mortar attack and stalking a Ukrainian armored personnel carrier. But just as often, he appears concerned with basic provisions for himself and his comrades, describing how they scoured a hospital and came up with jam, cookies and raisins.

Two days later, he had more luck. “I found socks that are now worth their weight in gold,” he wrote.

Some Russian troops panicked, and even resorted to self-sabotage. One Pentagon intelligence report said that Russian military drivers were poking holes in their gas tanks, disabling their own vehicles to avoid going into battle.

The commander of a Ukrainian tank repair depot said some 30 Russian T-80 tanks in seemingly perfect condition were taken and delivered to him at the beginning of the war. When his mechanics inspected, they found sand had been poured into the fuel tanks, rendering them inoperable.

Ukrainian law enforcement officials started noticing something else suspicious as well: a spike in foreign cellphone numbers near the border, in the forests between Ukraine and Belarus.

Russian soldiers were using cellphones to call home, and suddenly popping up on Ukrainian networks. Officials who monitor the traffic during peacetime for criminal activity quickly realized they could see and hear the invaders approaching in real time.

“We listened to the Russian soldiers as they panicked and called their friends and relatives,” said an official who oversees the phone intercepts. “They used ordinary phones to make decisions about their further moves.”

Down long corridors guarded by locks with facial detection, behind doors sealed with wax to detect intruders, teams of women tracked the Russian troops from small listening booths while their friends and relatives grabbed rifles to patrol the streets.

“We understood where the enemy was, what numbers they were using,” the official said.

The eavesdroppers passed the details to Ukraine’s armed forces to carry out ambushes and counterattacks. Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, said Ukrainian forces used cellphone signals and even TikTok videos to target a unit of Chechen soldiers known as the Kadyrovtsy, named for the strongman leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.

It took 40 minutes from the time one video was uploaded to pinpoint the unit’s location near the Hostomel airport northwest of Kyiv, he said. The Ukrainian military then hit them with three Tochka-U ballistic missiles, he said.

The Russians kept closing in on Kyiv, forcing the eavesdroppers tucked in listening rooms to make a quick decision: destroy their equipment and flee for their own safety, or hang on and continue gathering intelligence.

They stayed.

“We didn’t lose Ukraine. We didn’t let the enemy move further,” the official said. “On the first days, when they made foolish mistakes, we used their foolish mistakes to our advantage.”

HUBRIS

Consumed by his legacy, stewing in resentment against the West, Mr. Putin drove his country to war to seal his place in Russian history.

Fawning allies and aides fueled the conviction that Russia would easily overwhelm its neighbor.

He boasted of wielding a modernized military behemoth, a far cry from its post-Soviet shell. Watching from afar, the West believed him.

William J. Burns, the director of the C.I.A., flew to Moscow, sat in a conference room near the Kremlin and waited until the formalities were over before explaining the real reason he had come.

It was early November 2021. The United States believed Mr. Putin was considering a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Burns explained. If he proceeded down this path, Mr. Burns warned, the West would respond — decisively, in unison — and the consequences for Russia would be severe.

Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Mr. Putin’s security council, stiffened and looked Mr. Burns in the eye, officials in the room said. He abandoned his notes and extolled the prowess of Russia’s armed forces. They had been so thoroughly modernized under Mr. Putin that they now rivaled the United States militarily, he said.

“Patrushev didn’t qualify it,” said John Sullivan, the American ambassador to Russia at the time, who was there. “He was just looking at Burns and saying: ‘We can do this. We’re back.’ The way I would describe it was that this was already decided, and they were supremely confident. His message was, ‘It’s not going to be a problem for us to do what we want to do.’”

Mr. Burns briefed Mr. Biden upon his return to Washington, officials said. Mr. Putin had all but made up his mind to take over Ukraine, Mr. Burns told him, and the Russians had absolute confidence victory would come swiftly.

To Mr. Putin, Ukraine is an artificial nation, used by the West to weaken Russia. He describes it as a cradle of Russian culture, a centerpiece of Russian identity that must be wrested back from the West and returned to Russia’s orbit.

In his eyes, that is the biggest unfinished mission of his 22 years in power, people who know him say.

He began as an unassuming bureaucrat-turned-president on New Year’s Eve, 1999, seen by the inner circle of his predecessor, Boris N. Yeltsin, as a proficient manager who could bring stability without threatening the ruling elite.

By his third decade in power, Mr. Putin seems transformed, people who have known him since the 1990s say. He styles himself as a pivotal figure astride a millennium of Russian history — as he hinted when he unveiled a statue of Vladimir the Great, the medieval prince of Kyiv, outside the Kremlin walls in 2016.

That Vladimir “entered history as a uniter and protector of Russian lands,” Mr. Putin said.

The Vladimir at Russia’s helm in the 21st century, Mr. Putin has increasingly made plain, sees himself as carrying on that tradition.

“If everyone around you is telling you for 22 years that you are a super-genius, then you will start to believe that this is who you are,” said Oleg Tinkov, a former Russian banking tycoon who turned against Mr. Putin this year. “Russian businesspeople, Russian officials, the Russian people — they saw a czar in him. He just went nuts.”

Mr. Putin rose to power as a deft politician. He could flash charm, humility and a smile, painting himself as a reasonable leader to Russians and foreigners. He knew how to control his facial muscles in tense conversations, leaving his eyes as the only guide to his emotions, people who know him said.

But during his presidency, he increasingly wallowed in a swirl of grievances and obsessions: the West’s supposed disregard for the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazi Germany; the fear that NATO would base nuclear missiles in Ukraine to strike Moscow; modern-day gender politics in which, Mr. Putin often says, Mom and Dad are being replaced by “Parent No. 1 and Parent No. 2.”

In the personalist system he has built, those quirks have global consequences.

“What he thinks about obsessively, and quite possibly falsely,” has ended up shaping “the biography of the whole world,” said Konstantin Remchukov, a Moscow newspaper editor.

Mr. Putin seemed to think that only he truly understood Ukraine. After annexing the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014, Mr. Putin bragged that he had overruled his own advisers, who had considered the move too dangerous because of the risk of sanctions and a Ukrainian military response.

Back then, Mr. Putin’s instincts mostly proved right. The Ukrainian military withdrew swiftly from Crimea — some soldiers and sailors switched sides to join Russia — and the West’s limited sanctions scarcely affected Russia’s economy, sealing Mr. Putin’s confidence.

“I took responsibility for everything,” Mr. Putin said after taking Crimea, according to a confidant. “I will be gone sooner or later, but Crimea will have been returned to Russia forever.”

Many of the people closest to Mr. Putin had an incentive to cater to the boss’s rising self-regard — and to magnify the external threats and historical injustices that Mr. Putin saw himself as fighting against.

A former Putin confidant compared the dynamic to the radicalization spiral of a social media algorithm, feeding users content that provokes an emotional reaction.

“They read his mood and they start to slip him that kind of stuff,” he said.

By the summer of 2021, during a meeting that was supposed to be about the economy, Mr. Putin railed instead against the West and President George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, which Mr. Putin often cites as one of America’s great post-Cold War sins.

“We tried to partner with the West for many years, but the partnership was not accepted, it didn’t work,” Mr. Putin said, recalled his guest, who sat on the other end of a long table.

The words had a sort of finality to them, the visitor said: “It was like he was talking to himself, not to me.”

The guest had spent three days in quarantine before meeting with Mr. Putin at a distance of roughly 15 feet. It was a “light” option the Kremlin offered to people who sought face time with Mr. Putin but wanted to avoid the lengthy quarantines required for an up-close meeting with him, even in the pandemic’s second year.

Mr. Putin’s isolation deepened his radicalization, people who know him say. He went 16 months without meeting a single Western leader in person. He held just about all his meetings by videoconference from nondescript rooms that left his exact location a mystery. Those who got to see him in person saw their influence rise in a system in which access to Mr. Putin — referred to as “the boss” or “V.V.,” his first initials, by insiders — is the most valuable of currencies.

“Our most important resource is not a medal, not money and not possession of anything,” said Konstantin Zatulin, a member of Parliament in Mr. Putin’s United Russia party. “Our main, most important resource is access to the president.”

On that score, Yuri Kovalchuk, a conservative physicist and banking magnate who befriended Mr. Putin in the 1990s, did well during the pandemic. Mr. Kovalchuk bragged last year that he had spent several months in 2020 with Mr. Putin at his residence on Lake Valdai, between St. Petersburg and Moscow, according to a person who met with him then.

Mr. Kovalchuk told the person that Mr. Putin’s main achievement was “militarization” — the creation of an army and a society ready for war.

The secretive Mr. Kovalchuk prides himself as a strategist who sees Russia locked in an existential battle with the West, according to people who know him. In the last decade, he has expanded his television and newspaper holdings, key parts of the Kremlin’s propaganda apparatus.

A onetime Putin confidant said Mr. Kovalchuk sees himself “as a visionary,” and the pandemic, given the extraordinary precautions Mr. Putin took, emerged as an opportunity for Mr. Kovalchuk to deepen his imprint on the president — and the nation.

Mr. Putin’s unfinished business with Ukraine also fed a growing personal animus toward Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

When Mr. Zelensky was elected in a landslide in 2019, the Kremlin saw him as someone it could work with: a Russian-speaking comedian who had lived in Moscow, performed on Russian television and won with a message of ending the war in eastern Ukraine that Russia had fueled.

And partly because Mr. Zelensky is Jewish, some in Moscow expected him to be tough on Ukraine’s nationalist wing, which venerated Ukrainian independence fighters who had fought alongside the Nazis in the closing battles of World War II.

“I think he is sincerely willing” to compromise with Russia, Mr. Putin said of Mr. Zelensky in 2019. “It is his sincere conviction, at least his striving.”

By early 2021, the Kremlin’s hopes had been dashed. Mr. Zelensky cracked down on pro-Russian interests in Ukraine, shutting down pro-Russian television channels and sanctioning Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch close to Mr. Putin.

Mr. Putin showed his frustration in a long meeting at his Sochi residence with Mr. Bennett, the new prime minister of Israel, in October 2021.

Mr. Putin charmed his guest, taking him into his private residence and pouring him a glass of whiskey. But when it came to Ukraine, Mr. Putin flashed anger. Mr. Bennett noted that Mr. Zelensky was interested in meeting Mr. Putin face to face.

“I have nothing to discuss with this person,” Mr. Putin shot back, according to two people familiar with the exchange. “What kind of Jew is he? He’s an enabler of Nazism.”

Some Western officials believe that, by that point, Mr. Putin may have already decided to go to war. But in Russia, even among those with access to Mr. Putin or his inner circle, almost no one thought that the president was seriously considering a full-scale invasion, people close to the Kremlin said. They were sure he was bluffing.

Mr. Remchukov, the newspaper editor, was one of them. As the chairman of the 2018 election campaign of Mayor Sergei S. Sobyanin of Moscow — Mr. Putin’s former chief of staff — he felt well-connected enough to happily announce to his wife a week before the invasion, “Lena, there won’t be a war!”

That day, he had met for two hours with several senior military officials. Rather than betray any hint of tension, they bantered about Mr. Remchukov’s newly svelte physique, queried him in detail about his weight-loss regimen and casually discussed their vacation plans for early March.

After he came home and described the meeting to his wife, he said, “she kissed me and said: ‘What happiness!’”

The Americans, by contrast, feared the worst.

On Feb. 22, two days before the invasion, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, went to the Pentagon and said his nation desperately needed Stingers, the shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III offered to help before asking how the Ukrainian government planned to keep running after the Russians invaded. “If you get pushed out of Kyiv,” he said, “where are you going to go?”

Mr. Kuleba replied: “I can’t even acknowledge that. We’re not even going to talk about that or think about that.”

“Ya, I got that,” Mr. Austin said. “But you need a plan.”

Soon, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined in, launching into what a senior American defense official described as a “‘you’re going to die’ speech.”

“They’re going to roll into Kyiv in a few days,” General Milley said. “They’re coming in with tanks and columns of formations. You need to be ready for that. You need to be prepared. If you’re not, it’s going to be a slaughter.”

As General Milley spoke, Mr. Kuleba and members of his delegation sat back in their chairs, their eyes widening.

The Ukrainian air force had trained with NATO members since 2011, and the partnership deepened after Russia took Crimea in 2014. Wary of another invasion, they carried out combat exercises in Ukraine and California, preparing the nation’s air force to take on its technologically superior enemy. In February, a secretive U.S. Air Force and Air National Guard team called Grey Wolf was set up at Ramstein Air Base in Germany to support the Ukrainians.

But General Milley still harbored serious doubts about Ukraine’s state of readiness. He had walked the halls of the Pentagon that winter with an enormous green map of Ukraine, with increasingly ominous projections from U.S. intelligence agencies of Russia’s invasion plans. What’s more, the American defense attaché at the embassy in Kyiv had spent weeks trying to get Ukraine’s defensive plans, and the ones she received minimized, in the Pentagon’s view, the Russian threat.

Mr. Austin seemed somewhat uncomfortable at General Milley’s blunt admonishment of the Ukrainian foreign minister and chimed in, reassuringly: “We’re going to do what we can to help these guys.”

The reality was slow to sink in for many in Moscow, too. Mr. Zatulin, a senior Putin ally in Russia’s Parliament, said he got his first inkling that the president was serious about an invasion in mid-February. Though known as a leading expert on Ukraine, Mr. Zatulin said he was never consulted on the possibility.

To the contrary, Mr. Zatulin said he was scheduled to give an address to the Russian Parliament on behalf of Mr. Putin’s United Russia party on Feb. 15 that was supposed to signal the opposite — that there would be no invasion unless Mr. Zelensky himself went on the offensive in Ukraine’s divided east. But just five minutes before the session was scheduled to start, Mr. Zatulin said, he got a message from an aide: The party’s leadership had canceled his speech.

“I was not ready for this turn of events,” Mr. Zatulin said. “Everything connected to this decision turned out to be a surprise not just for me, but also for a great many of the people in power.”

Mr. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, insisted that he found out about the invasion only once it had begun. Likewise, Anton Vaino, Mr. Putin’s chief of staff, and Aleksei Gromov, Mr. Putin’s powerful media adviser, also said they did not know in advance, according to people who spoke to them about it.

The best that senior aides could do was to try to read Mr. Putin’s body language. Some reported with concern that “he’s got this warlike twinkle in his eyes,” a person close to the Kremlin said.

Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser, said that amid Russia’s military buildup around Ukraine late last year, a deputy minister asked him if he knew what was going to happen.

“That means that no one has told the deputy minister,” Mr. Markov said. “Even some members” of Russia’s security council “weren’t told until the last moment.”

Many elites found out too late.

Russia’s main industrial association had been expecting to meet with Mr. Putin in February. On the agenda, among other things: the regulation of cryptocurrencies. But the meeting kept getting rescheduled, until finally, on Feb. 22 or Feb. 23, the Kremlin notified participants of the date: Feb. 24, the day Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine.

Andrey Melnichenko, a coal and fertilizer billionaire in that lobbying group, described how he woke up that day to the “madness” in Ukraine. But the meeting with Mr. Putin was still on, so a few hours later, he was at the Kremlin, as scheduled. In an anteroom, stunned tycoons were munching on sandwiches while awaiting the results of their coronavirus swabs to clear them to share Mr. Putin’s air.

When Mr. Putin finally appeared, the television cameras were rolling. He told the assembled billionaires that he had no choice but to invade.

“What happened, in my view, is irrational,” said Mr. Melnichenko, describing his reaction to the invasion. “It was shock.”

Another magnate recalled realizing — too late — that Mr. Putin was parading them in front of the television cameras, for all the world to see, for a carefully planned purpose. The point was “specifically to tar everyone there,” he said, “to get everyone sanctioned.”

There was no going back. They, like the rest of Russia, were in this with Mr. Putin now.

Sure enough, Mr. Melnichenko and all the other businessmen who appeared with Mr. Putin that day were hit with sanctions by the West in the months that followed.

INTERNAL ROT

Even as the Ukrainians rallied to beat back the Russian advance, Russian intelligence officers emailed instructions to state media, telling it to portray generous and triumphant Russian troops saving civilians from Ukraine’s villainous leaders.

Russia’s main security service, the F.S.B., worked hand in glove with the military and state television to project the illusion of success — and to conceal the dysfunction.

Defeats became accomplishments, as if reflected through a carnival mirror. Despite Russia’s humiliating failure to seize Ukraine’s capital, its military sent TV crews a video about Ukrainians supposedly throwing down their NATO-provided guns.

As Russian troops retreated from areas around Kyiv in March, the F.S.B. boasted about the heroics of Russian special forces, claiming they stopped Ukrainians who terrorized pro-Russian civilians. In some cases, the agency even offered language to hide the source of the information: “A SOURCE CLOSE TO THE POWER STRUCTURES OF RUSSIA!!!!”

The messages, drawn from tens of thousands of emails leaked from Russia’s largest state-owned media company and reviewed by The Times, show how at least one engine of the Russian war effort purred along smoothly: the nation’s propaganda machine.

At times, Russia’s military and the F.S.B. directed coverage down to the video clips played and the time of publication. The emails, leaked from V.G.T.R.K., the state media giant that oversees some of Russia’s most-watched channels, portrayed Mr. Putin’s military as backed into a corner by NATO.

Once the full invasion began, the machine downplayed Russian atrocities, bolstered conspiracy theories and tried to portray Ukrainian troops as abandoning their posts. (After the emails were released by a group that publishes hacked documents, The Times verified the documents by confirming identities, email addresses and broadcasts on the air.)

Off camera, state media employees had little to no idea what was actually happening. A state television journalist said in an interview that as late as April, his Kremlin sources were still assuring him that the war would be over within days.

“Tomorrow morning, there’ll be a statement,” the journalist recalled one of his sources saying, only to be proved wrong the next day. “It was really kind of weird.”

But while state broadcasters kept delivering upbeat assessments, Mr. Putin privately acknowledged that his military was struggling.

During the meeting in March with Mr. Bennett of Israel — when Mr. Putin conceded that the war would be “much more difficult than we thought” — he returned to the theme that has become a fixation of his presidency: his place in Russian history.

“I won’t be the Russian leader who stood by and did nothing,” he told Mr. Bennett, according to two people familiar with the exchange.

Once again, Mr. Putin seemed convinced that future generations of Russians could be threatened by the West. He had spent years preparing for precisely such a clash, devoting hundreds of billions of dollars to Russia’s military, supposedly to modernize it and strip out the corruption that had sapped it in the 1990s.

But while Russia made significant headway, Western officials said, a culture of graft and fraud persisted under Mr. Putin that emphasized loyalty above honesty, or even skill. The result was a hodgepodge of elite troops and bedraggled conscripts, advanced tanks and battalions that were powerful only on paper.

“Everyone was stealing and lying. This was a Soviet, and now Russian, tradition,” said Col. Vaidotas Malinionis, a retired Lithuanian commander who served in the Soviet military in the 1980s. Looking at satellite images of the army camp where he served, he said the old barracks and mess hall were still there, with no sign of modernization, and a few buildings had fallen down. “There has been no evolution at all, only regression,” he said.

European, American and Ukrainian officials warned against underestimating Russia, saying it had improved after its muddled invasion of Georgia in 2008. The defense minister overhauled the armed forces, forcibly retired about 40,000 officers and tried to impose more transparency on where money went.

“He made a lot of enemies,” said Dara Massicot, a RAND researcher who studies the Russian military.

Then, in 2012, that minister — in charge of dragging the military out of its post-Soviet dysfunction — became embroiled in a corruption scandal himself. Mr. Putin replaced him with Sergei K. Shoigu, who had no military experience but was seen as someone who could smooth ruffled feathers.

“Russia drew a lot of lessons from the Georgia war and started to rebuild their armed forces, but they built a new Potemkin village,” said Gintaras Bagdonas, the former head of Lithuania’s military intelligence. Much of the modernization drive was “just pokazukha,” he said, using a Russian term for window-dressing.

Contractors like Sergei Khrabrykh, a former Russian Army captain, were recruited into the stagecraft. He said he got a panicked call in 2016 from a deputy defense minister. A delegation of officials was scheduled to tour a training base of one of Russia’s premier tank units, the Kantemirovskaya Tank Division, whose history dates to the victories of World War II.

Billions of rubles had been allocated for the base, Mr. Khrabrykh said, but most of the money was gone and virtually none of the work had been done. He said the minister begged him to transform it into a modern-looking facility before the delegation arrived.

“They needed to be guided around the territory and shown that the Kantemirovskaya Division was the coolest,” Mr. Khrabrykh said. He was given about $1.2 million and a month to do the job.

As he toured the base, Mr. Khrabrykh was stunned by the dilapidation. The Ministry of Defense had hailed the tank division as a unit that would defend Moscow in case of a NATO invasion. But the barracks were unfinished, with debris strewn across the floors, large holes in the ceiling and half-built cinder-block walls, according to photos Mr. Khrabrykh and his colleagues took. A tangle of electrical wires hung from a skinny pole.

“Just about everything was destroyed,” he said.

Before the delegation arrived, Mr. Khrabrykh said, he quickly constructed cheap facades and hung banners, covered in pictures of tanks and boasting the army was “stronger and sturdier year by year,” to disguise the worst of the decay. On the tour, he said, the visitors were guided along a careful route through the best-looking part of the base — and kept away from the bathrooms, which had not been repaired.

After the invasion started, the Kantemirovskaya Division pressed into northeastern Ukraine, only to be ravaged by Ukrainian forces. Crews limped away with many of their tanks abandoned or destroyed.

Russian prosecutors have pursued thousands of officers and others for corruption in recent years: One colonel was accused of embezzling money meant for vehicle batteries, another of fraud around mobile kitchens. The deputy chief of the general staff was charged with defrauding the state over radio gear, and a major general sentenced to prison in the case.

In 2019, Russia’s chief military prosecutor said that more than 2,800 officers had been disciplined over corruption violations in the past year alone.

After the invasion, American officials noticed that much of Russia’s equipment was poorly manufactured or in short supply. Tires on wheeled vehicles fell apart, stalling convoys, while soldiers resorted to crowdfunding for clothes, crutches and other basic supplies as the war wore on.

But even more consequential than the corruption, officials and analysts said, were the ways Mr. Putin fundamentally misunderstood his own military.

Russia had, in fact, spent 20 years getting ready for a radically different kind of war.

It had not prepared its military to invade and occupy a country as big and powerful as Ukraine, officials and analysts said. Instead, Russia had largely organized its military to keep U.S. and NATO forces away by inflicting maximum damage from afar.

Central to this strategy was a series of outposts — Kaliningrad by the Baltic, Crimea in the Black Sea, and the Syrian port of Tartus on the Mediterranean — to use long-range missiles to keep Western forces at bay. In the event of conflict, Russia intended to blind the enemy and destroy it from a distance, American officials said.

But in this case, Russia did not crush Ukraine with weeks of missile strikes in advance. It marched in quickly with forces on the ground.

Unlike its more limited campaigns in places like Syria — or the big hypothetical war with NATO it had long planned for — the invasion of Ukraine was simply “not what the Russian military was designed to do,” putting it in a position it was probably “least prepared” to deal with, said Clint Reach, a researcher at RAND.

In other words, the Kremlin picked the “stupidest” of all potential military options by rushing forward and trying to take over Ukraine, said General Budanov, the Ukrainian military intelligence chief.

Russia had not trained its infantry, air and artillery forces to work in concert, move quickly and then do it all again from a new location, officials said. It did not have a clear Plan B after the march on Kyiv failed, and commanders had long been afraid to report bad news to their bosses.

“The collective system of circular, mutual self-deception is the herpes of the Russian Army,” the pro-Russian militia commander Aleksandr Khodakovsky wrote on Telegram in June.

The mounting failures drove a cadre of pro-Russian military bloggers to a boiling point. While still cheerleaders for the war, they began to openly criticize Russia’s performance.

“I’ve been keeping quiet for a long time,” the blogger Yuri Podolyaka said in May, after hundreds of soldiers died in a river crossing. “Due to stupidity — I emphasize, because of the stupidity of the Russian command — at least one battalion tactical group was burned, possibly two.”

The fury eventually reached Mr. Putin himself. On the sidelines of his marquee annual economic conference in St. Petersburg in June, the president held a meeting that had become a tradition: a sit-down with news media chiefs. This time, though, the bloggers were the headline guests.

Mr. Putin sat alone at one end in a cavernous hall, according to one attendee, who provided a photo of the private gathering. Some of the bloggers took the floor and peppered Mr. Putin with messages and complaints from the front.

“It became a very concrete conversation, a surprising one for us,” the person present said. “We’d never had such conversations.”

It appeared to the person there that Russia’s intelligence agencies were using the bloggers to shift the blame for the war’s failings to the Ministry of Defense. Mr. Zatulin, the Putin ally in Parliament, insisted he supported the war, but said a blame game has broken out, and took a side himself.

“Of course, to a certain degree, we now have an element of everyone wanting to dump the responsibility on someone else,” Mr. Zatulin said.

“But I think that the main miscalculations,” he added, “were made by the Defense Ministry and the General Staff” — the military’s top brass.

COLLAPSING FRONT

Ruslan was 54 years old, at war in Ukraine, and seemed to be learning to use his weapon on the fly.

In his pack, he had printouts from Wikipedia describing the rifle he was carrying and instructions to help him shoot accurately.

He also carried pictures of enemy commanders, stamped “WANTED” in red.

A photocopied letter offered motivation: “Soldiers, take care of yourself and come back home swiftly to your family and close ones healthy and alive,” it read. “Goodbye.”

His mission seemed clear enough. With his marksman’s rifle, bundle of papers and copies of his Russian passport in his pack, Ruslan was one of thousands of poorly trained, underequipped men asked to defend a huge swath of territory that Russia had seized in northeastern Ukraine.

By summer’s end, Russian leaders had sent their best troops far to the south, leaving skeleton crews behind. So when the Ukrainians swept in and attacked the northeast, hoping to recapture occupied land, soldiers like Ruslan were cut down or melted away in a chaotic retreat.

Military analysts had warned of such a danger before the invasion. Even as tens of thousands of Russian soldiers massed ominously along Ukraine’s borders, they said, the Kremlin had not sent enough to occupy the entire country. The Russian war plans for the 26th Tank Regiment signaled the same problem: Expect no reinforcements.

Russia managed to take territory, frequently at enormous cost. But how to keep it was often an afterthought.

“The army, the generals, the soldiers weren’t ready,” said Mr. Tsaryov, the man American officials identified as a puppet leader the Kremlin could install in Ukraine.

He said the Russian Army had spread itself so thin across Ukraine after invading that it “would move through cities and not leave behind even a garrison, even a small one to stick up a Russian flag and defend it.”

In the northeastern region of Kharkiv, Russian commanders put men like Ruslan at roadblocks and moved on.

He had little else besides the printouts in his pack, which Ukrainian soldiers recovered with what they believe to be his body in September. The rifle next to him suggested he was a sniper. But while snipers in modern militaries often go through weeks of additional special training, Ruslan’s teacher appeared to be the internet.

“Hello dear soldier!” read the unsigned letter in his pack. “You have to risk your life so that we can live peacefully. Thanks to you and your comrades our army remains so strong, mighty and can protect us from any enemy.”

More than 50 pages of Russian documents, collected from three towns in the Kharkiv region and reviewed by The Times, show a timeless truth: Foot soldiers bear the outsize burden of combat.

The documents — shared with three independent military experts, who considered them credible — detail how Russia relied on bedraggled backup forces, many of them separatist fighters from Ukraine’s long conflict in its divided east, to hold territory as the regular Russian Army fought hundreds of miles away.

The 202nd Rifle Regiment of the Luhansk People’s Republic — Kremlin-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine — was one of them. It had nearly 2,000 men, but was almost completely dependent on foot soldiers.

More than a dozen pages of its rosters detail the particulars of the unit’s suffering, down to a lack of warm clothing and boots.

Several of its soldiers were in their 50s, including one who experienced “cardiac failure,” while one of its youngest casualties, a 20-year-old named Vladimir, endured “frostbite of the lower limbs.” Yet another complained on a phone call intercepted by the Ukrainians that he had no armored vest and a helmet from the 1940s.

“Our battalion, for instance, has already gone more than three weeks without receiving ammunition from the army,” the pro-Russian militia commander, Mr. Khodakovsky, said on Telegram in September.

In an interview, another soldier described having only the vaguest sense of how to use his weapon.

He recounted being advised to fire judiciously, one round at a time, rather than blasting his rifle uncontrollably. But he wasn’t sure how to do that. So, shortly before going into combat, he said, he turned to a commander and asked how to switch his rifle off fully automatic.

Russia came to rely on such battered, inexperienced troops after months of tactics that more closely resembled 1917 than 2022. Commanders sent waves of troops into the range of heavy artillery, eking out a few yards of territory at grievous tolls.

When one Russian unit arrived in eastern Ukraine, it was quickly whittled down to a haggard few, according to one of its soldiers.

During fighting in the spring, he said, his commanders ordered an offensive, promising artillery to support the attack. It never came, he said, and his unit was devastated.

Yet commanders sent them right back into the melee all the same.

“How much time has passed now? Nine months, I think?” he said. “In this whole time, nothing has changed. They have not learned. They have not drawn any conclusions from their mistakes.”

He recounted another battle in which commanders sent soldiers down the same path to the front, over and over. On each trip, he said, bodies fell around him. Finally, after being ordered to go a fifth time, he and his unit refused to go, he said.

In all, he said, his unit lost about 70 percent of its soldiers to death and injury, ruining any faith he had in his commanders.

“Nobody is going to stay alive,” he said. “One way or another, one weapon or another is going to kill you.”

American officials realized early on that they had vastly overestimated Russia’s military. The morale of rank-and-file soldiers was so low, the Americans said, that Russia began moving its generals to the front lines to shore up morale.

But the generals made a deadly mistake: They positioned themselves near antennas and communications arrays, making them easy to find, the Americans said.

Ukraine started killing Russian generals, yet the risky Russian visits to the front lines continued. Finally, in late April, the Russian chief of the general staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, made secret plans to go himself.

American officials said they found out, but kept the information from the Ukrainians, worried they would strike. Killing General Gerasimov could sharply escalate the conflict, officials said, and while the Americans were committed to helping Ukraine, they didn’t want to set off a war between the United States and Russia.

The Ukrainians learned of the general’s plans anyway, putting the Americans in a bind. After checking with the White House, senior American officials asked the Ukrainians to call off the attack.

“We told them not to do it,” a senior American official said. “We were like, ‘Hey, that’s too much.’”

The message arrived too late. Ukrainian military officials told the Americans that they had already launched their attack on the general's position.

Dozens of Russians were killed in the strike, officials said. General Gerasimov wasn’t one of them.

Russian military leaders scaled back their visits to the front after that.

DIVIDED RANKS

They deployed tanks, heavy artillery and fighter jets.

They pushed out their own propaganda and ran recruiting centers.

And they fought on the front line in Ukraine.

But they didn’t answer directly to the Russian military. They belonged to a mercenary group, known as Wagner.

And they became one of Mr. Putin’s shadow armies in Ukraine, often acting as a rival to the Russian military.

Wagner’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has long been a crony of the Russian president.

To join in Mr. Putin’s war, he has recruited prisoners, trashed the Russian military and competed with it for weapons.

More than 20 years into a murder sentence, Yevgeny Nuzhin saw his chance at salvation swoop in by helicopter.

Mr. Prigozhin — the close confidant of Mr. Putin, known for stirring up trouble across the Middle East and Africa with his mercenary army, Wagner — came to Mr. Nuzhin’s prison south of Moscow in August, looking for recruits.

Heaving with patriotic fervor, Mr. Prigozhin gave the kind of speech he has delivered at other Russian prisons in recent months, some shared online. In one, also from August, Mr. Prigozhin, dressed in a drab beige uniform, promised pardons for the inmates who made it back from Ukraine alive. Those who didn’t, he said, would “be buried in the alleys of the heroes.”

He also issued a warning: Anyone thinking of deserting his forces once in Ukraine, he said in the video, would be shot.

Mr. Nuzhin accepted Mr. Prigozhin’s offer, but ignored the warning.

After two days at the front, where he spent his time collecting the bodies of dead Wagner soldiers, he used the cover of darkness to slip away and surrender to Ukrainian troops.

“What good has Putin done in the time that he has been in power? Has he done anything good?” Mr. Nuzhin told The Times after being taken into Ukrainian custody. “I think this war is Putin’s grave.”

Mr. Putin’s reliance on mercenaries and convicts is one of the more unusual features of his war in Ukraine. Mr. Prigozhin is just one of a handful of strongmen active in the war, all of them managed by Mr. Putin, who has carved up the administration of much of Russia into competing fiefs run by people loyal to him above all.

Beyond the mercenaries controlled by Mr. Prigozhin, who rose to prominence as a caterer of Kremlin events, there is also the Russian national guard, overseen by Mr. Putin’s former bodyguard. And there is the unit commanded by the Chechen leader, Mr. Kadyrov — whose fighters were found and attacked because of their misadventures on TikTok.

As far as officials can tell, the Russian military has limited coordination with any of them.

“There was no unified command, there was no single headquarters, there was no single concept and there was no unified planning of actions and command,” said General Ivashov, the retired Russian officer who warned the war would go badly. “It was destined to be a defeat.”

The splintered Russian forces have sparred openly. After Russian forces withdrew from northeast Ukraine in late summer, Mr. Kadyrov called for the Russian commander responsible to be demoted to private and shipped to the front, “to wash his shame away with blood.”

Mr. Prigozhin weighed in, too: “All these bastards should go with machine guns barefoot to the front.”

The public finger-pointing has added to a sense of disarray within the Russian war effort. Mr. Putin has replaced several top military commanders. Yet he has stuck with Mr. Shoigu, his defense minister, and with General Gerasimov, the chief of the military’s general staff, because firing them would amount to a public acknowledgment that the war is going badly, an admission Mr. Putin is loath to make, argued General Budanov, the Ukrainian military intelligence chief.

“They are still trying to maintain the illusion that everything is going well,” he said.

The friction has, at times, run all the way down to the troops in the battle zone.

After a battlefield argument in the Zaporizhzhia region over the summer, a Russian tank commander drove his T-90 tank not at the enemy but toward a group of Russian national guard troops, firing at their checkpoint and blowing it up, said Fidar Khubaev, describing himself as а Russian drone operator who witnessed the episode.

“Those types of things happen there,” said Mr. Khubaev, adding that he fled Russia in the fall.

Of all the supplementary armies charging into Ukraine, Mr. Prigozhin’s Wagner has become especially pivotal. Its troops have received glowing coverage on Russian state television, and in November they were profiled in a documentary film called “Wagner: Contract with the Motherland” produced by RT, one of the Kremlin’s primary propaganda outlets.

“Until recently, Wagner has been one of the most closed and secretive organizations, but for us they have made a huge exception,” Andrey Yashchenko, the film’s presenter, says in the opening montage, which shows tanks rolling through rubble-strewn villages.

In the first five months of the war, there was almost no public mention of Wagner or Mr. Prigozhin’s involvement in Ukraine. By late summer, as the Russian military began to collapse under Ukrainian campaigns in the northeast and south, Mr. Prigozhin stepped into the spotlight.

After years of denying any links to Wagner — and sometimes its very existence — Mr. Prigozhin suddenly went public, making a show of visiting his troops in Ukraine, handing out medals, attending funerals and trumpeting his independence on the battlefield.

“Wagner almost always fights alone,” he said in an Oct. 14 post on page of his catering company on VK, a Russian social media site.

A Times analysis of videos in Ukraine found that Wagner troops are often showcasing some of Russia’s most advanced weaponry, including tanks, fighter aircraft and thermobaric rocket launchers. And because of his connection with the president, Mr. Prigozhin is given priority over other military units for arms and equipment, a senior European official said.

Mr. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, denied that Russia’s separate fighting forces were causing confusion or division, insisting they all report to Russia’s top military brass. The prominence of Mr. Prigozhin and Mr. Kadyrov, he said, was merely a function of their public-relations efforts.

“Some people are more active in the information space, some people are less active,” Mr. Peskov said. “But it doesn’t signify any, let’s say, independence.”

Despite its weaponry and bravado, Wagner has struggled on the battlefield. Some Ukrainian soldiers say it is a formidable foe. Yet for nearly six months, Wagner’s troops have been trying to seize the small industrial city of Bakhmut, in the eastern Donetsk region, and have been kept at bay by Ukrainian forces at great cost to both sides — prompting a rare public acknowledgment of Ukraine’s fighting prowess.

“The situation is difficult but stable,” Mr. Prigozhin said in the Oct. 14 post. “The Ukrainians are offering dignified resistance. The legend about Ukrainians running away is just that, a legend. Ukrainians are guys with steel balls just like us. This isn’t a bad thing. As Slavs, we should take pride in this.”

Hundreds of Wagner troops have been killed in the war, and several of the group’s fighter jets have been downed. The convicts Mr. Prigozhin has recruited appear to be little more than cannon fodder and make up a vast majority of casualties among Wagner forces, according to an assessment by Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, which said in October that about 8,000 Wagner troops were fighting in Ukraine.

Another former Russian inmate recruited by Mr. Prigozhin said he was left in a shallow trench at the front lines near Bakhmut for four days with no food or water and little sense of what he was supposed to be doing, other than dragging away the many bodies of his dead comrades.

It was no wonder, he said, that some of Wagner’s recruits decided to flee.

To keep control, Mr. Prigozhin has resorted to extreme punishment, showing how the war has whittled away the vestiges of rule of law in Russia.

Like Mr. Putin, whose spies have been accused of poisoning and assassinating perceived traitors all over the world, Mr. Prigozhin has said that treachery is the worst sin any Russian can commit. He has proposed setting up his own Gestapo-like police force to hunt down the disloyal, including, he has said, Russian businessmen “who leave our country in their business jets.”

The fate of Mr. Nuzhin serves as a grisly warning.

Mindful of the pressures on prisoners of war and the risks they face, The Times has chosen to withhold their names. And, as with the other people we interviewed, we use documents and other evidence to vet their claims.

In Mr. Nuzhin’s case, we did not publish our interview with him, but he also spoke to Ukrainian media, which broadcast portions of his account. Soon after, he was released in a prisoner swap — and ended up back in the hands of Wagner.

He then appeared in a video on a pro-Russian Telegram account. In it, Mr. Nuzhin’s head was taped to a block. Looming over him was a man in camouflage, holding a sledgehammer.

“I woke up in this basement, where I was told that I will be judged,” Mr. Nuzhin says in the video, his voice dry and gravelly. The sledgehammer then swings down and crushes his skull.

Shortly after, Mr. Prigozhin released a statement endorsing Mr. Nuzhin’s murder.

“Nuzhin betrayed his people, betrayed his comrades, betrayed them consciously,” the statement said. “He planned his escape. Nuzhin is a traitor.”

A day later, asked about the video on his daily conference call with journalists, Mr. Peskov said, “It’s not our business.”

CANNON FODDER

For much of the war, Russian forces held onto a bright spot: the city of Kherson, the only regional capital they had captured since the invasion began.

But the Russians withdrew from the city in November. Intercepted phone calls from Russian soldiers in the region showed their bitterness as they were coming under fire — with much of their anger directed at their commanders.

“What is going on?” a woman asks in one of the intercepted calls.

“Darling, I fucking don’t know,” a soldier responds. “Everybody asks just like you do: Why the fuck are we retreating? Where is this fucking Russian Army?”

The defeat carried a particular sting, because Russia had tried to assimilate the population of Kherson and stamp out Ukrainian identity.

“What is the news from Putin?” said another soldier. “What is this bastard scumbag saying?”

Some soldiers felt sacrificed by hypocritical commanders trying to save themselves.

“‘You could be sentenced if you leave your position,’” said one soldier, recounting the warning he got from a commander. “Then, fucking imagine. When mortar shelling began,” he continued, “do you know how fast they fucking left? His wheels didn’t even get stuck in the mud.”

Bracing for death, some soldiers slipped into despair.

“They’re preparing you to be cannon fodder,” said another soldier. “They’ll remember you for five fucking minutes. They’ll have a glass of vodka for you. And then fucking forget clean about you.”

The resignation exists in Moscow, too, where opposition to the war is common, but rarely expressed above whispers.

“We’re giving each other looks, but to say something is impossible,” one former Putin confidant in Moscow said, describing the atmosphere in the halls of power.

Mr. Tinkov, the former tycoon who founded one of Russia’s biggest banks, posted on Instagram in April that the war was “crazy” and excoriated Mr. Putin in an interview with The Times, thinking he’d set the stage for more of Russia’s powerful to follow suit.

“Why didn’t anyone speak out after me?” Mr. Tinkov lamented.

One prominent Russian public figure who privately described the war as a “catastrophe” explained his silence by quoting the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

In the day of Galileo, one of his poems says, another scientist was also “well aware the earth revolved” around the sun, but he “had a large family to feed.”

By keeping Russia’s borders open, despite calls from hard-liners to shut them, Mr. Putin has allowed Russians unhappiest with the war — who might have otherwise protested — to leave the country. And the West’s wide-ranging sanctions have not turned the elite against Mr. Putin, at least not publicly.

“In textbooks, they call this political terrorism,” said Mr. Melnichenko, the coal and fertilizer billionaire. “To say anything at gunpoint, even if you want to say it — it’s better not to.”

Mr. Melnichenko has been penalized — unfairly, he insists — for the Russian invasion. The Italians said they seized his 468-foot sailboat featuring an underwater observation pod in the keel, and sanctions forced him to abandon his longtime home in Switzerland. He now holds court on white couches in the lobby of a luxury hotel in Dubai.

Mr. Melnichenko offered some veiled criticism of the invasion, declaring that “any war is horrible — the faster it ends, the better.” But he insisted he was powerless to do anything to hasten its end, and that any further opinions “would trigger immediate risks.”

Despite the sanctions, Mr. Putin sees himself on a far grander timeline than the election cycles and shifting political winds steering Western leaders, who come and go, those who know him say. In June, he compared himself to Peter the Great as a leader “returning” and “strengthening” Russian lands.

When the 18th-century czar founded St. Petersburg, Mr. Putin said, the Europeans did not consider that territory to be Russian — suggesting that Mr. Putin expects the West to someday come around and recognize his conquests as well.

In late November, at his suburban Moscow residence, Mr. Putin met with mothers of Russian soldiers. It was a distant echo of one of the lowest moments of his tenure: his encounter with the families of sailors aboard a sunken submarine in 2000, when a crying woman in a remote Arctic town demanded, “Where is my son?”

Twenty-two years later, the Kremlin was careful to prevent such outpourings of grief. Around a long table with individual teapots for the handpicked women — some of them state employees and pro-Kremlin activists — Mr. Putin showed no remorse for sending Russians to their deaths.

After all, he told one woman who said her son was killed in Ukraine, tens of thousands of Russians die each year from car accidents and alcohol abuse. Rather than drinking himself to death, he told her, her son died with a purpose.

“Some people, are they even living or not living? It’s unclear. And how they die, from vodka or something else, it’s also unclear,” Mr. Putin said. “But your son lived, you understand? He reached his goal.”

He told another mother that her son was not only fighting “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine, but also correcting the mistakes after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Russia “enthusiastically indulged in the fact” that the West was “trying to control us.”

“They have a different cultural code,” he told her. “They count the genders there by the dozens.”

It was a stark display of Mr. Putin’s preoccupations and revanchist politics. But several people who have known him for decades rejected any notion that he had grown irrational.

“He’s not crazy and he’s not sick,” a person who has known Mr. Putin since the 1990s said. “He’s an absolute dictator who made a wrong decision — a smart dictator who made a wrong decision.”

Mr. Putin has shown few hints that he’s willing to turn back now. Last month, the C.I.A. director, Mr. Burns, met for the first time since the invasion with Sergei Naryshkin, the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia. The meeting, at the headquarters of Turkish intelligence in Ankara, took place to reopen a direct, in-person line of communication between Washington and Moscow, but the tone was not one of reconciliation.

According to senior officials present, Mr. Naryshkin said Russia would never give up, no matter how many troops it lost on the battlefield. This month, Ukrainian leaders warned that Russia might be massing troops and arms to launch a new offensive by spring.

The world has been debating Mr. Putin’s willingness to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine. People who know him don’t discount the possibility, but they also believe he expects to defeat the West and Ukraine in a long-term, non-nuclear test of wills.

As one senior NATO intelligence official put it, Russian generals “acknowledge the incompetence, lack of coordination, lack of training. They all recognize these problems.” Still, they seem confident of an “eventual victory” because, the official said, “Putin believes this is a game of chicken between him and the West, and he believes the West will blink first.”

Mr. Putin has already shown a talent for the long game, agreed Mr. Tinkov, the banking magnate who turned against the Kremlin, noting how the Russian leader had spent decades bringing Russia’s elite to heel.

“He slowly outplayed everyone, because the thing was: It was like he had unlimited time,” Mr. Tinkov said. “He is still behaving in this war as though he has an unlimited amount of time — as though he plans to live for 200 years.”

Domestically, the pressure on Mr. Putin has been fairly muted. For all the losses his army has endured, there have been no significant uprisings among Russian troops. Even the newly drafted continue to go without serious protest.

Aleksandr, the soldier drafted into the 155th, is still enraged at the way he and his comrades were dropped into Ukraine with few bullets for their aging rifles and forced to live in a cowshed with only a few meal packets to share. His commanders flat-out lied, he said, telling them they were going for additional training — when in fact they were sent to the front lines, where most were killed or grievously wounded.

After months of fighting, Russia announced last month that it had finally captured Pavlivka, but soldiers said it came at tremendous cost.

Aleksandr had been drafted in September along with three close childhood friends, he said. He and another suffered concussions. One lost both legs. The fourth is missing.

But when he is discharged from the hospital, he said, he fully expected to return to Ukraine, and would do so willingly.

“This is how we are raised,” he said. “We grew up in our country understanding that it doesn’t matter how our country treats us. Maybe this is bad. Maybe this is good. Maybe there are things we do not like about our government.”

But, he added, “when a situation like this arises, we get up and go.”

Reporting was contributed by Aaron Krolik, Adam Satariano, Alan Yuhas, Andrew Higgins, Carlotta Gall, Christiaan Triebert, Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper, Ivan Nechepurenko, Julian E. Barnes, Mykola Ponomarenko, Natalia Yermak, Oleg Matsnev, Paul Mozur, Ronen Bergman, Stanislav Kozliuk and Valerie Hopkins.

Aleksandra Koroleva, Oksana Nesterenko and Milana Mazaeva contributed translations.

Produced by Gray Beltran, Rumsey Taylor, Adam Dean, Mona Boshnaq, Gaia Tripoli and James Surdam.

Maps by Scott Reinhard.

Tank video: operativnoZSU, via Telegram. Playground video: milinfolive, via Telegram. Helicopter video: Yuriy Martyniuk, via Facebook. Explosions video: AdiDenos, via Twitter. Putin videos: Kremlin and Russian Ministry of Defense, via YouTube. Russian aircraft video: Rossija 24. Wagner tank video: milinfolive, via Telegram. Soldiers video: Federal News Agency (RIA FAN). Rocket launcher video: zhdanovrt, via Telegram. Prigozhin photo: Reuters. Prigozhin video: SOTA, via Telegram. Kherson video: bro8607, via TikTok.

‘They shot my son. I was next to him. It would be better if it had been me.’

As the Russian advance on Kyiv stalled, a campaign of terror and revenge against civilians nearby in Bucha began, survivors and investigators say.

Russian soldiers set up in this school. A sniper in a high-rise fired at anybody who moved. Other soldiers tortured, raped and executed civilians in basements or backyards.

We visited Bucha, documented dozens of killings of civilians, interviewed scores of witnesses and followed local investigators to uncover the scale of Russian atrocities.

Photographs by Daniel Berehulak

Written by Carlotta Gall

BUCHA, UKRAINE — A mother killed by a sniper while walking with her family to fetch a thermos of tea. A woman held as a sex slave, naked except for a fur coat and locked in a potato cellar before being executed. Two sisters dead in their home, their bodies left slumped on the floor for weeks.

Bucha is a landscape of horrors.

From the first day of the war, Feb. 24, civilians bore the brunt of the Russian assault on Bucha, a few miles west of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. Russian special forces approaching on foot through the woods shot at cars on the road, and a column of armored vehicles fired on and killed a woman in her garden as they drove into the suburb.

But those early cruelties paled in comparison to what came after.

As the Russian advance on Kyiv stalled in the face of fierce resistance, civilians said, the enemy occupation of Bucha slid into a campaign of terror and revenge. When a defeated and demoralized Russian Army finally retreated, it left behind a grim tableau: bodies of dead civilians strewn on streets, in basements or in backyards, many with gunshot wounds to their heads, some with their hands tied behind their backs.

Reporters and photographers for The New York Times spent more than a week with city officials, coroners and scores of witnesses in Bucha, uncovering new details of execution-style atrocities against civilians. The Times documented the bodies of almost three dozen people where they were killed — in their homes, in the woods, set on fire in a vacant parking lot — and learned the story behind many of their deaths. The Times also witnessed more than 100 body bags at a communal grave and the city’s cemetery.

The evidence suggests the Russians killed recklessly and sometimes sadistically, in part out of revenge.

Unsuspecting civilians were killed carrying out the simplest of daily activities. A retired teacher known as Auntie Lyuda, short for Lyudmyla, was shot midmorning on March 5 as she opened her front door on a small side street. Her body lay twisted, half inside the door, more than a month later.

Her younger sister Nina, who was mentally disabled and lived with her, was dead on the kitchen floor. It was not clear how she died.

“They took the territory and were shooting so no one would approach,” a neighbor, Serhiy, said. “Why would you kill a grandma?”

Roman Havryliuk, 43, a welder, and his brother Serhiy Dukhli, 46, sent the rest of their family out of Bucha as the violence intensified, but both insisted on staying behind. They were found dead in their yard. “My uncle stayed for the dog, and my father stayed for the house,” Mr. Havryliuk’s son, Nazar, said. An unknown man also lay dead nearby, and the family’s two dogs were riddled with bullets.

“They were not able to defeat our army so they killed ordinary people,” said Nazar, 17.

Constant threat from snipers

Bucha had been one of the most desirable commuter suburbs of Kyiv. Nestled between fir tree forests and a river, it had modern shopping malls and new residential complexes as well as old-fashioned summer cabins set among gardens and trees. The Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov had a summer house there.

Days after Russian troops drove into town, the Ukrainian Army struck back, setting tanks and armored vehicles ablaze in an attack on a Russian column. As many as 20 vehicles burned in a huge fireball that ignited homes all along one side of the street. Some Russian soldiers fled, carrying their wounded through the woods.

Russian reinforcements arrived several days later in an aggressive mood. They set up base in an apartment complex behind School No. 3, the main high school on Vokzalna, or Station Street, and posted a sniper in a high-rise building still under construction. They made their headquarters farther south in a glass factory on the Bucha River.

Until then, the residents of Bucha had been sheltering from Russian missile and artillery strikes, many of them sleeping in basements and cellars, but some had ventured outside from time to time to get water or sneak a look at the damage. Shelling had been sporadic, and much of the Russian artillery fire was aimed over their heads at Irpin, the next town over.

After the assault on the column, the atmosphere hardened. On March 4, Volodymyr Feoktistov, 50, set out on foot around 5 p.m. to pick up a loaf of bread from neighbors who were baking at home. His mother and brother had told him not to go out, but he insisted, his mother recalled later.

Russian vehicles were driving along a road at the end of their street and the neighbors heard two gunshots. They found him the next day, dead on the street. Days passed before they could load him into a wheelbarrow and push him to the hospital morgue before hurrying home.

On March 5, a Russian sniper began firing on anything moving south of the high school.

Auntie Lyuda was shot in the morning. That afternoon, a father and his son stepped out of their gate to go for a walk along their street, Yablunska, or Apple Tree Street. “They shot my son,” his father, Ivan, said. “I was next to him. It would be better if it had been me.”

He asked that only his first name be published. Many residents in Bucha were frightened after weeks under Russian occupation and asked that their surnames not be published for fear of retribution at a later stage.

“He was suffering the whole night and died at 8:20 a.m.,” Ivan said of his son. The family buried him in the front garden under a huge mound of earth. “It’s very hard to bury your child,” Ivan said. “I would not wish that on my worst enemy.”

His son left behind an 8-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter. “I cannot look my grandson in the eyes,” Ivan said.

Yablunska Street, where they lived, soon became the deadliest stretch of road for passing civilians. A man on his bicycle was struck by fire from an armored vehicle in early March, as video recorded by the Ukrainian military showed. By March 11 there were at least 11 dead bodies lying on the street and sidewalks, satellite footage showed.

A ransacked house, a body in the cellar

It soon became apparent why the bodies had remained in place so long.

Troops started searching homes and ordered residents not to go outside. “They were going yard by yard,” said Valerii Yurchenko, 42, a mechanic living near the river. A Russian commander warned him not to go out on the street. “We have orders to shoot,” the commander said.

The soldiers confiscated cellphones and computers. Some were polite but still ordered families to leave their homes near the bases and go to a nearby kindergarten.

“They handed me my walking stick,” said Tetiana Masanovets, 65, who was among those told to leave. The soldiers turned her house into a pit, using one room as a toilet. “They stole everything,” she added.

As more troops arrived, they drove their armored vehicles straight into people’s gardens, crushing metal gates and fences and parking with their guns trained on the street.

Volodymyr Shepitko, 66, fled with his wife when a Russian armored vehicle barreled through their back fence. They took shelter in a basement of School No. 3. Russian soldiers were also using the school and the residential complex behind it for mortar positions.

On March 9, Mr. Shepitko, a retired water engineer, slipped back to fetch some food from the house and found Russian soldiers living there. He described them as “kontraktniki” — contract soldiers, men who are often experienced fighters but notorious for abuses and acting with impunity. They had parked their armored vehicles across the street and were sleeping and heating water in the house, Mr. Shepitko said.

The soldiers made a sarcastic comment about Ukrainian fascists, testing his loyalty. “I thought I would be shot,” he said, “and I kept silent.” They demanded his cellphone but his dog barked so furiously at them that they backed off and let him go.

It was only when he returned after the Russians pulled out of Kyiv that Mr. Shepitko discovered just how far the Russian soldiers had gone. His house had been ransacked, filled with rubbish and beer bottles. Then, in a cellar under the garden shed, his nephew discovered the body of a woman. Slumped sitting down, bare legs akimbo, she wore a fur coat and nothing else.

She had been shot in the head, and he found two bullet casings on the ground. When the police pulled her out and conducted a search, they found torn condom wrappers and one used condom upstairs in the house.

The abuse of the woman was one case of many, said Ukraine’s official ombudswoman for human rights, Lyudmyla Denisova. She said she had recorded horrific cases of sexual violence by Russian troops in Bucha and other places, including one in which a group of women and girls were kept in a basement of a house for 25 days. Nine of them are now pregnant, she said.

She speculated that the violence came out of revenge for the Ukrainian resistance, but also that the Russian soldiers used sexual violence as a weapon of war against Ukrainian women.

A walk to fetch water turns deadly

The city had been without electricity, running water, gas or internet since early March, and thousands of residents, still in their homes, were living in freezing temperatures, sleeping in their clothes, under layers of blankets.

Six people in a home for seniors perished from hunger, cemetery workers who collected the bodies in early April said. The lobby was icy cold, and four of the dead had congregated in a sunroom across the garden. At the house next door, the same workers had cut down a woman who had hung herself from a branch.

For 10 days in the middle of March, Tetiana Sichkar, 20, took to walking with her parents to see her grandmother, whose house had a wood fire and an outdoor stove where they could heat water and cook. Every day they took the same route, through the woods and over the railway tracks.

On March 24, it had seemed quiet again, until a shot rang out on the way home.

“It was so loud, I could not hear anything,” Ms. Sichkar said. They all fell to the ground at the same time. Her mother lay silent. “I called to her but she did not move,” she said. She lifted her head and saw the blood — on her mother’s face, her hair, and pooling on the road.

Her mother, who is also called Tetiana, a homemaker, 46, died where she fell. The Russian soldiers later detained her husband, cuffing him and putting a bag over his head when he asked to retrieve his wife’s body. They let him go later that night, dumping him still handcuffed and blindfolded in a different part of town.

In a bizarre episode, they allowed her stepfather to retrieve Ms. Sichkar’s body and gave him a brand new red car — which turned out to be stolen — to take her away in. The family buried her in the garden the next morning and parked the car inside the gate.

Lyudmyla, the mother of the dead woman, echoed what many civilians in Bucha noted: As the war progressed, the mood and behavior of the Russian troops grew uglier. “The first lot were peaceful,” she said of the Russian soldiers, asking for her surname not to be published. “The second lot were worse.”

Some of the violence seemed cynical, designed to terrorize, but Russian troops were particularly suspicious of men of fighting age, often accusing them of being members of the Ukrainian defense forces before taking them away for questioning.

Natalya Oleksandrova, a retired optician, said soldiers detained her nephew, saying they would take him for two days of questioning. They held him for three weeks. After the Russian troops left, neighbors found him dead in a basement. “They shot him through the ear,” she said.

Revenge killings add another threat

In the last week of March, Ukrainian forces mounted a counterattack to retake the northwestern suburbs of Kyiv. Fighting intensified sharply in Bucha, and Russian units began preparing to pull out.

One of their last acts was to shoot their detainees or anyone else who got in the way. In a clearing on one street, the police later found five members of a family, including two women and a child, their bodies dumped and burned.

At least 15 people were found dead with their hands bound, in various places around the city, indicating that more than one Russian unit detained and executed people. Five bodies were found in a cellar in a children’s summer camp, which Russian units had used as a base. Others were found on Yablunska Street, and more in the glass factory.

In the nearby village of Motyzhyn, revenge played a large part in the death of the mayor, her husband and her son, who were found buried on the edge of the village. There were signs of torture: broken fingers on their son and contusions on the mayor’s face, inflicted before they were shot by Russian forces angry that the Ukrainians had destroyed a truck and an armored vehicle.

“It was revenge,” said Anatoly Rodchenko, a retired high school physics teacher whose son is married to the daughter of the slain mayor, Olha Sukhenko. Mr. Rodchenko had watched the excavation of the grave, which also held three other bodies.

In accounts corroborated by a local military commander, residents described how a Ukrainian ambush that blew up the armored vehicle and supply truck led to a flurry of Russian violence targeting civilians.

The following day, a Russian armored personnel carrier drove down a street, firing randomly into homes with a heavy machine gun, said Serhiy Petrovsky, the head of a local unit of civilian volunteer soldiers. He doesn’t know how many people were wounded or killed, but said that after the Russians departed, he collected 20 bodies in and around the village, from this episode and others.

“They shot everything,” said Mr. Rodchenko. “They shot at houses. They shot a woman on the street. They shot at dogs.”

The same day, Russian soldiers detained Ms. Sukhenko, 50, her husband, Ihor Sukhenko, 57, and their son, Oleksandr, 25, Mr. Rodchenko said. The bodies of all three were found in the grave.

“I just don’t understand,” said Mr. Rodchenko. “OK, the mayor helped the Ukrainians. But why Oleksandr? What did he do?”

Of the Russian Army’s presence in the village, he said, “it was like a nightmare.”

A joyous phone call, then silence

In the days after Ukrainian troops retook control of Bucha, the police and cemetery workers began collecting the corpses scattered everywhere, heaving black body bags into a white van. In the mud on the back doors, workers had written, “200,” the word in Soviet military slang for the war dead.

By April 2, they had collected more than 100 bodies, and by Sunday the number had risen to more than 360 for the Bucha district. Ten of the dead were children, officials said.

On April 3, Marta Kirmichi was searching frantically on the internet for news from Bucha. Originally from Moldova, she had lived in Ukraine, near the city of Chernihiv, with her husband and son for 10 years.

She had last spoken to her husband, Dmitrii Shkirenkov, 38, in mid-March. A construction worker, he had left home a month earlier to go back to his job on one of the new property developments in Bucha.

Cellphone coverage was patchy, but he had managed to call his wife early on March 9. “He said, ‘People are being shot here but I am alive,’” she said. The second time he called, it was around 5.30 a.m. and he woke her up. “He said in such a voice, ‘Honey, I am alive.’ He sounded really happy.” The call, just 30 seconds long, made her happy, too, but she did not hear from him again.

Then she came across the first horrifying photographs of men lying with their hands bound on Yablunska Street, beside pallets and construction materials. She recognized her husband instantly. He was lying face down, his hands hidden underneath him.

Later, she found another photograph — he had been removed, but the two bodies nearby still lay there. She hopes that, just maybe, he had been wounded and taken to a hospital.

Of the 360 bodies found through this weekend in Bucha and its immediate surroundings, more than 250 were killed by bullets or shrapnel and were being included in an investigation of war crimes, Ruslan Kravchenko, chief regional prosecutor in Bucha, said in an interview. Many others died from hunger, the cold and the lack of medicine and doctors, among other reasons.

Sitting in his car, Mr. Kravchenko flipped through files and photos of corpses on his cellphone. He said he expected more cases as the police continued to find bodies and information kept pouring in. Over all, in the broader Bucha region, there were at least 1,000 deaths in the war, he said.

The dead are overwhelmingly civilians. Only two members of the Ukrainian military were among those killed in Bucha city, according to Serhiy Kaplychny, an official at the city cemetery.

The Russian brutality has outraged most of the world and stiffened the resolve of the West to oppose President Vladimir V. Putin’s bloody invasion.

“The level of brutality of the army of terrorists and executioners of the Russian Federation knows no bounds,” the ombudswoman, Ms. Denisova, wrote. She appealed to the United Nations Human Rights Commission to “take into account these facts of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.”

Some of the worst crimes — including torture, rape and executions of detainees — were committed by troops based at the glass factory in Bucha, local residents and investigators said. The regional prosecutor, Mr. Kravchenko, said investigators found a computer server left behind by the Russians that could help them identify the men behind the violence.

“We have already established lists and data of servicemen,” Mr. Kravchenko said. “This data runs to more than a hundred pages.”

Ukrainian investigators also have an immense resource from organizations, citizens and journalists who have posted more than 7,000 videos and photos on a government internet hub, warcrimes.gov.ua, the state prosecutor, Iryna Venediktova, said.

“What is very important here is that they are made in such a way that they are admissible evidence in court,” she said. “That is seven thousand with video evidence, with photo evidence.” Yet a long and laborious process of identification lies ahead.

Ms. Kirmichi still has no information about her husband, the construction worker, and when she called one government office, she was told to wait one month for news.

She sounded forlorn and tearful on the telephone. “There are only two of us, my son and me, and we are not giving up hope,” she said.

​​An earlier version of this article misstated the English translation of Yablunska Street. It means Apple Tree Street, not Flower Street.

Oleksandr Chubko contributed reporting from Bucha, Ukraine, and Andrew E. Kramer from Motyzhyn, Ukraine. Produced by Rumsey Taylor and Gray Beltran.

Tetiana Perebyinis and her two children were killed trying to dash to safety, a moment captured by our photographer. Her husband describes their lives, and their final hours.

By Andrew E. Kramer

KYIV, Ukraine — They met in high school but became a couple years later, after meeting again on a dance floor at a Ukrainian nightclub. Married in 2001, they lived in a bedroom community outside Kyiv, in an apartment with their two children and their dogs, Benz and Cake. She was an accountant and he was a computer programmer.

Serhiy and Tetiana Perebyinis owned a Chevrolet minivan. They shared a country home with friends, and Ms. Perebyinis was a dedicated gardener and an avid skier. She had just returned from a ski trip to Georgia.

And then, late last month, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the fighting quickly moved toward Kyiv. It wasn’t long before artillery shells were crashing into their neighborhood. One night, a shell hit their building, prompting Ms. Perebyinis and the children to move to the basement. Finally, with her husband away in eastern Ukraine tending to his ailing mother, Ms. Perebyinis decided it was time to take her children and run.

They didn’t make it. Ms. Perebyinis, 43, and her two children, Mykyta, 18, and Alisa, 9, along with a church volunteer who was helping them, Anatoly Berezhnyi, 26, were killed on Sunday as they dashed across the concrete remnants of a damaged bridge in their town of Irpin, trying to evacuate to Kyiv.

Their luggage — a blue roller suitcase, a gray suitcase and some backpacks — was scattered near their bodies, along with a green carrying case for a small dog that was barking.

They were four people among the many who tried to cross that bridge last weekend, but their deaths resonated far beyond their Ukrainian suburb. A photograph of the family and Mr. Berezhnyi lying bloodied and motionless, taken by a New York Times photographer, Lynsey Addario, encapsulates the indiscriminate slaughter by an invading Russian army that has increasingly targeted heavily populated civilian areas.

The family’s lives and their final hours were described in an interview by Mr. Perebyinis and a godmother, Polina Nedava. Mr. Perebyinis, also 43, said he learned of the death of his family on Twitter, from posts by Ukrainians.

Breaking down in tears for the only time in the interview, Mr. Perebyinis said he told his wife the night before she died that he was sorry he wasn’t with her.

“I told her, ‘Forgive me that I couldn’t defend you,’” he said. “I tried to care for one person, and it meant I cannot protect you.”

“She said, ‘Don’t worry, I will get out.’”

After she didn’t, he said he felt it was important that their deaths had been recorded in photographs and video. “The whole world should know what is happening here,” he said.

The Perebyinis family had already been displaced once by war, in 2014, when they were living in Donetsk in the east and Russia fomented a separatist uprising. They moved to Kyiv to escape the fighting and started rebuilding their lives. When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine last month, they could hardly believe it was happening again, Mr. Perebyinis said.

Ms. Perebyinis’ employer, SE Ranking, a software company with offices in California and London, had encouraged employees to leave Ukraine immediately once the fighting started. It had even rented rooms for them in Poland, Mr. Perebyinis said. But his wife delayed her departure because of uncertainty over how to evacuate her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease.

A colleague at work, Anastasia Avetysian, said that SE Ranking had provided emergency funds for employees to evacuate and that Ms. Perebyinis, as the chief accountant in Ukraine, had been busy in her final days disbursing them.

“We were all in touch with her,” Ms. Avetysian said in a telephone interview. “Even when she was hiding in the basement, she was optimistic and joking in our group chat that the company would now need to do a special operation to get them out, like ‘Saving Private Ryan.’”

But behind the jokes was a period of waiting and intense worrying, Mr. Perebyinis said. His son, Mykyta, started sleeping during the day and staying up all night, keeping a vigil over his mother and sister. When there were sounds of fighting, he woke them up and all three would move into a corridor, away from the windows. “My son was under a lot of stress,” Mr. Perebyinis said.

Last Saturday, after two days in the basement, they made a first attempt at evacuating. But as they were packing up their minivan, a tank rolled by on the street outside. They decided to wait.

The next day they were up and moving by about 7 a.m. Tetiana Perebyinis had discussed the plan in minute detail with her husband. She and her two children and her mother and father, who lived nearby, would join a church group and try to evacuate toward Kyiv, and then get somewhere safe from there.

They drove as far as they could in Irpin, but then Ms. Perebyinis was forced to abandon the minivan. They set out on foot toward a damaged bridge over the Irpin River.

To escape, they were forced to cross a hundred yards or so of exposed street on one side of the bridge. As Russian forces fired into the area, many tried to seek cover behind a brick wall.

Mr. Berezhnyis, the church volunteer, who had earlier evacuated his own family but had returned to help others, was with Ms. Perebyinis and her children when they began to dash toward the other side.

Through the night, Mr. Perebyinis had tried to monitor his wife’s location using a locator app on their phones. But it showed nothing: the family was in a basement, without cell reception.

Around dawn, he said, he saw one ping, showing them at their home address. But nothing showed them moving. Cellphone coverage had become too spotty in the town.

The next ping of a location on Mr. Perebyinis’ phone came around 10 Sunday morning. It was at Clinical Hospital No. 7 in Kyiv. Something had gone wrong.

He called his wife’s number. It was ringing, but nobody answered. He called his children’s phone numbers, with the same result.

A half-hour or so later, he saw a post on Twitter saying a family had been killed in a mortar strike on the evacuation route out of Irpin. A short time later, another Twitter post appeared, with a picture. “I recognized the luggage and that is how I knew,” he said.

When the mortar shell hit, the family and Mr. Berezhnyi were about 12 yards away from the crater left by the mortar. They had no chance. The explosion sent out a spray of hundreds of jagged, metallic shrapnel shards. Their bodies slumped onto the muddy street beside a monument to World War II dead from Irpin. A plaque on the monument read: “Eternal memory to those who fell for the fatherland in the Great Patriotic War.”

Ms. Perebyinis’s parents were behind the mother and children and were unharmed. They are now staying with Ms. Nedava, the godmother. The following day, a snowstorm blew over Kyiv. The suitcases, one of which had been knocked open by the explosion or later opened by passers-by, lay covered in snow on the street beside blood stains. It held only clothes: a pink child’s tank top, sweatpants, yellow and blue child-size socks, apparently for Alisa.

When asked to describe his wife, Mr. Perebyinis slumped in his chair. Ms. Nedava offered that she had a “light” spirit, was often joking and cheered up a room.

Over their long marriage, Mr. Perebyinis added, “We refurbished three apartments and never argued once.”

Mr. Berezhnyi had moved his wife to western Ukraine but had returned to Irpin to help with the evacuation organized by his church, the Irpin Bible Church, the pastor, Mykola Romaniuk, said in a telephone interview.

When the mortar strike began, with shells landing first a few hundred yards away, Mr. Romaniuk said other church volunteers saw Mr. Berezhnyi run to help Ms. Perebyinis. “He took her suitcase and they started running,” he said.

Mr. Berezhnyi, Pastor Romaniuk said, was quiet and generous. “He was the kind of friend who is ready to help with no words needed,” he said. “I do not know how God can forgive such crimes.”

In mid-February, before the war started, Mr. Perebyinis had traveled to his hometown, Donetsk, in rebel-held eastern Ukraine, to care for his mother, who was sick with Covid-19. After hostilities began, the crossing point closed and Mr. Perebyinis was trapped in the East.

To return to Kyiv from separatist-controlled eastern Ukraine after the death of his family, Mr. Perebyinis traveled into Russia and flew to the city of Kaliningrad, to cross a land border into Poland. At the Russia-Poland border, he said, Russian guards questioned him, took his fingerprints and seemed ready to arrest him for unclear reasons, though he was eventually allowed to travel on.

He said he told them: “My whole family died in what you call a special operation and we call a war. You can do what you want with me. I have nothing left to lose.’’

Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Lviv, Ukraine.

For 80 days, at a sprawling steelworks, a relentless Russian assault met unyielding Ukrainian resistance. This is how it was for those who fought, and for those trapped beneath the battlefield.

By Michael Schwirtz

The two Mi-8 helicopters tore across enemy territory early on the morning of March 21, startling the Russian soldiers below. Inside were Ukrainian Special Forces fighters carrying crates of Stinger and Javelin missiles, as well as a satellite internet system. They were flying barely 20 feet above ground into the hottest combat zone in the war.

Ukraine’s top generals had conceived the flights as a daring, possibly doomed, mission. A band of Ukrainian soldiers, running low on ammunition and largely without any communications, was holed up in a sprawling steel factory in the besieged city of Mariupol. The soldiers were surrounded by a massive Russian force and on the verge of annihilation.

The plan called for the Mi-8s to land at the factory, swap their cargo for wounded soldiers, and fly back to central Ukraine. Most everyone understood that the city and its defenders were lost. But the weapons would allow the soldiers to frustrate the Russian forces for a few weeks more, blunting the onslaught faced by Ukrainian troops elsewhere on the southern and eastern fronts and giving them time to prepare for a new Russian offensive there.

“It was so important to the guys, who were fully encircled, to know that we had not abandoned them, that we would fly to them, risking our lives to take their wounded and bring them ammunition and medicine,” said a military intelligence officer with the call sign Flint, who was on the first flight and described the operation to The New York Times, along with three others involved. “This was our main goal.”

As the two Mi-8s drew closer, they banked hard over the Sea of Azov, flying just above the water’s surface to avoid Russian radar. Then it appeared, the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works, the last bastion of the Ukrainian defenders. In a video from the flight, Azovstal looms like a besieged industrial fortress, bathed in early morning sunlight.

Beyond it was Mariupol, a city reduced in less than four weeks to a smoldering shell. Corpses littered the streets, while the living, those who remained, were mostly below ground, hungry and scared, emerging from basements only to scrounge for water and food.

“It was a sad sight,” said Flint, who was on the lead helicopter. “It was already mostly in ruins.”

The Prize

For the Kremlin, Mariupol was a prize.

Barely had President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia given the order to invade Ukraine, on Feb. 24, when Russian soldiers began pouring over the border in tanks and armored vehicles, rolling toward the city, a strategic port on the Sea of Azov. Missiles streaked through the pre-dawn darkness, slamming into apartment buildings and wounding the first civilians of the war.

That morning, the general director of Azovstal, an industrial behemoth with more than 11,000 workers, convened his board. The director, Enver Tskitishvili, went on a war footing, deciding to power down the blast furnaces and cease operations for the first time since World War II.

Then the board made a decision that would shape the battle for eastern Ukraine.

Deep beneath the steel plant were 36 bomb shelters, a legacy of the Cold War. The shelters, some more than 20 feet underground, had enough food to feed thousands of people for several weeks. Believing the fighting would not last long, Mr. Tskitishvili and the other executives saw the plant as a sanctuary and invited employees to come there with their families.

What Mr. Tskitishvili did not know was that Ukraine’s military was also arriving at Azovstal. To the Ukrainian soldiers, the plant was a stronghold, surrounded on three sides by water, ringed by high walls, as seemingly impregnable as a medieval keep. It was the perfect place to make a last stand.

“The military never told us, and we never supposed that they would deploy with us,” Mr. Tskitishvili said in an interview. “We planned only for the civilian population, and only as refuge from attack. We did not consider ourselves to be participants in the war.”

For the next 80 days, Azovstal would be a fulcrum of the war, as Russian brutality collided with Ukrainian resistance. What began as an accident — civilians and soldiers barricaded together inside an industrial complex nearly twice as large as Midtown Manhattan — became a bloody siege as roughly 3,000 Ukrainian fighters kept a vastly larger Russian force bogged down in a quagmire that brought misery and death on both sides.

Mariupol stood in the way of one of Mr. Putin’s key aims: the creation of a land bridge linking Russian territory to Crimea, the strategic peninsula in southern Ukraine that Russia annexed in 2014. But the fight also fit the Kremlin’s war narrative. Though several military groups were at Azovstal, many of its defenders were members of the Azov Regiment, a strongly nationalistic group of fighters whose fame in Ukraine and early connections to far-right political figures have been used by the Kremlin to falsely depict the entire country as fascist.

Destroying them was central to the Kremlin’s often-repeated goal of “denazifying” Ukraine.

In Ukraine, the battle for Azovstal has already become legend, though a comprehensive account of the siege and the struggle for survival by the troops and civilians inside has been slow to emerge. Dozens of interviews conducted by The Times with defenders and civilians who were at Azovstal, including soldiers who were captured and later released by Russia, along with top military officials and international arbiters involved in negotiating evacuations, paint a picture of an apocalyptic siege that became Ukraine’s version of the Alamo.

In a war largely fought by anonymous soldiers far from the cameras, commanders and regular fighters at Azovstal spoke to journalists and beamed video testimonials to the world on Telegram. Capt. Svyatoslav Palamar, the deputy commander of the Azov Regiment at the plant, spent his days and nights fighting above ground, then broadcast his impressions in video messages when he retreated to the bunkers beneath Azovstal.

“We have fought with a group that is many times stronger than we are and have tied them down and not let them move further into Ukrainian territory,” Captain Palamar said in a telephone interview from Azovstal in late April. “But at the same time, the situation is difficult, actually critical.”

Ultimately, Azovstal became a trap. The presence of civilians hampered the soldiers’ ability to defend themselves. The presence of soldiers meant the civilians had to endure a vicious siege as food and clean water ran out.

Natalya Babeush, who worked as a high-pressure boiler operator at the plant before seeking refuge in one of the shelters, described a hunger so pernicious that children began to draw pictures of pizza and cake. As a volunteer cook for her bunker, she went above ground each day to prepare meals of thin soup and fried dough on a makeshift stove constructed of brick and metal gratings, as jets flew overhead dropping bombs.

Twice her kitchen was blown up by Russian rockets.

“You’d hear a jet, grab your frying pan and run to hide, counting how many bombs the plane dropped,” she said. “When it’s flying there above your head and all around there are explosions, you understand that your life is simply, well, it’s not worth anything.”

‘I Thought I Was Safe’

To Ms. Babeush and many others, Azovstal meant family. Her brother worked there. So did her husband. Generations of Mariupol families had worked at the plant since it opened in 1933, when Ukraine was part of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Later, when World War II left the plant in ruins, citizens of Mariupol made donations to help rebuild it.

“For people, especially after the war, the factory was a lifeline in terms of work, in terms of stability,” Ms. Babeush said. “Even before this war, there really wasn’t any other kind of work except for work in the factories.”

Unlike other industrial relics of that era, Azovstal thrived long after the Soviet Union collapsed. Metal from its furnaces was used for the protective sarcophagus around the damaged Chernobyl nuclear plant, as well as for more recent projects including Hudson Yards in New York, the Shard in London and Apple’s headquarters in California.

But Azovstal sat along one of the world’s bloodiest geostrategic fault lines. In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, Russian troops together with local separatists seized surrounding territory in the eastern Donbas region. The separatists occupied Mariupol for weeks before pro-Ukrainian forces, including Azov fighters, pushed them out.

For several years, as the war in the Donbas simmered, Azovstal executives ordered employees to revamp the decaying bomb shelters and stock them with food and water. Mariupol was only a few miles from the “contact line” that demarcated the territory controlled by the separatists.

“For eight years, we had become accustomed in Mariupol to explosions from time to time,” said Mr. Tskitishvili, the plant’s general manager. “We often heard shells explode — we heard the fighting and so we grew used to it.”

But that changed on Feb. 24 when Russian forces invaded the entire country.

Senior Sgt. Sergei Medyanyk, a soldier with the Azov Regiment, was at his barracks outside of Mariupol. His wife, Yulia Polyakova, a soldier with Ukraine’s National Guard, was at their home in the city. Both were woken at 4 a.m. and ordered to prepare for war.

“We did not really understand what was happening,” Sergeant Medyanyk said. “We thought maybe it was a training exercise.”

Anna Zaitseva and her husband, Kirill, who worked at Azovstal, bundled their infant son and rushed to take shelter at the factory. She had been so stressed during the Russian military buildup before the war, she said, that she had stopped lactating.

“We came to the shelter,” she recalled, “and took with us only what was necessary, like very big blankets, some food, water, documents and some baby formula.”

Ms. Babeush initially refused to leave her home, even as the rockets began striking nearby apartment buildings and cars burned on the streets. By March 2, the city no longer had working electricity, water or cellphone service, and Ms. Babeush and her husband finally fled on foot to Azovstal, taking cover from shelling every few minutes.

Ms. Babeush took up residence in a bunker below the rail and beam shop where her husband worked, fashioning a bed out of planks, some rubber sheeting and rags.

“That first night was the first time in a while that I slept,” she said. “Honestly, I thought I was safe.”

A City Within a City

Russia’s military hit so hard and so fast that Ukrainian defenses along Mariupol’s perimeter melted within days.

Sergeant Medyanyk was manning a Soviet-era vehicle armed with a small-caliber machine gun when an enormous column of Russian tanks, escorted by fighter jets, bore down on his position.

“This was my war baptism,” he said. “We had nothing to use against aviation, and so to avoid losses, we did what we could and fell back.”

Almost no one thought Ukraine had a chance. But in many cities, the Ukrainian military fought the invaders to a standstill, spoiling the Kremlin’s plans to quickly seize the capital, Kyiv, and halting an advance along Ukraine’s southern Black Sea coast toward Odesa.

Mariupol was different. Russian troops lunged from two directions, closing the city in a vise, routing Ukrainian soldiers in the first few weeks, and pushing them back to the sea and toward Azovstal. Soldiers from different units arrived at the factory, and Captain Palamar and other Azov officers set up a command center.

“We moved and moved and moved toward the territory of the factory because it was the only place that remained,” Captain Palamar said in an interview.

The city itself was collateral damage. Snow disappeared from courtyards as people gathered it for drinking water. Residents cooked outdoors on wood-fired stoves, ducking into basements when Russian jets flew overhead.

“After a direct hit from those shells, nothing remains,” said Elina Tsybulchenko, who fled on foot to Azovstal with her family and two dogs. “Everything inside burns and explodes into small pieces, flying in all directions, and disintegrates as if there was nothing ever there, not people, furniture, not appliances or walls or plumbing. It all just disappears.”

Soon, Azovstal began filling up with civilians who did not know that elsewhere on the vast grounds, soldiers were arriving, too. “If I had known there would be soldiers,” Ms. Tsybulchenko said, “we would have perhaps looked for another place to hide.”

But by early March, several thousand Ukrainian troops had converged inside Azovstal, and soldiers and civilians realized they were sharing the same refuge. Communications to the outside world were cut as Russian forces steadily took all but a few pockets of the city.

“The encirclement was so dense there was no possibility to reach them,” said Flint, the Ukrainian military intelligence officer, “either by land or by the Azov Sea, which was fully controlled by the Russian Navy.”

But Ukrainian fighters were still slipping into Mariupol. Bohdan Tsymbal, an Azov junior sergeant, staged lighting raids with his artillery unit to skirmish with Russian fighters and gather supplies for the civilians inside the plant. He and his older brother, Anton, had joined Azov right out of school. They were boys when their nearby village was occupied by separatists in 2014, and it was the Azov troops who liberated them.

“These guys gave up their lives and their health to free my village from these scoundrels,” said Sergeant Tsymbal, 20. “That’s why I chose this path.”

On one of the raids, Sergeant Tsymbal’s unit slipped out of Azovstal and came under heavy fire. He was struck several times. For nearly 90 minutes, he lay bleeding in the rubble, not far from the factory, before he was rescued and taken to the makeshift field hospital inside Azovstal. Medics operated on him in the dim light of a bunker.

Azovstal was becoming a horror show. Civilians and soldiers were short of food, weapons and medicine to treat dozens of wounded troops. Soldiers were dying from even minor wounds.

There was no way out.

The question was whether there was a way in.

Operation Air Corridor

The two Mi-8 helicopters navigated through the loading cranes of Mariupol’s port and descended into the Azovstal complex. Flint, the intelligence officer, jumped out with the Special Forces team and quickly began offloading green crates of weapons and ammunition.

Soldiers wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags, some missing arms and legs, were hoisted into the helicopters, whose rotors never stopped spinning. They lifted off with eight or nine wounded fighters that day, Flint said, some of whom were conscious enough to show off cellphone videos of the intense fighting they had endured.

The March 21 mission, captured on videos provided by Flint, lasted only 20 minutes on the ground. “There was just this feeling of happiness, emotional satisfaction that we were able to get these guys out,” Flint said.

In all, Operation Air Corridor, as the effort was known to participants, managed to land helicopters at Azovstal seven times during the next two weeks and rescue 85 gravely wounded soldiers, Flint said. A heavily sedated Sergeant Tsymbal was among those evacuated.

But the helicopters also brought in other soldiers, mostly volunteers, including Pvt. Nikita Zherdev of the Azov Regiment. His father had died in the shelling of Mariupol weeks earlier, and he wrote his sister before taking off telling her to learn to take care of herself. He did not tell her what he thought: that he did not expect to leave alive.

“As soon as we landed at Azovstal, I understood that, wow, things are really happening here,” he said. “Everything was covered in smoke. Everything was under fire. The people who greeted us, shouted, ‘Faster, faster, faster — there are airstrikes every five minutes, the jets are coming.’”

A native of Mariupol, Private Zherdev already knew the troops at Azovstal, but the men he found were withered specters of those soldiers, hungry and exhausted and covered in blood and gun oil after weeks of constant fighting. They were shocked to see him.

“You see what’s happening,” he recalled one soldier telling him. “Why do you want to die here with us?”

The city many of them saw now was an incomprehensible horror. Several fighters described streets littered with corpses that were being devoured by starving cats and dogs.

“I love cats,” said Ruslan, a fighter who arrived on a helicopter in April. “I didn’t know that a cat, when it’s hungry, could eat a person.”

Losses were heavy. Private Zherdev said his top commander and another officer were killed by Russian fire on the second day. Private Zherdev lasted seven. He was sprayed with shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade, and one large piece lodged in the nape of his neck, threatening to paralyze or kill him if he moved.

What saved him were the helicopters, which were still flying, barely. As his rescue helicopter lifted off, Private Zherdev recalled a loud pop and an explosion as a Russian rocket slammed into its fuselage. Somehow it remained aloft, but a second helicopter was knocked out of the sky, along with the wounded soldiers onboard, he said.

When he landed back in Ukrainian-held territory, Private Zherdev managed to record a video of his helicopter, its fuselage shredded and blackened by the explosion. It had made it back with one engine.

Another helicopter went out on April 7 and was hit by Russian ordnance only a few miles from Ukrainian territory, said Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the commander of Ukraine’s military intelligence service, who oversaw the helicopter operation. A rescue helicopter sent to look for survivors was also shot down, and the four Special Forces troops on board were killed along with its crew, he said.

After that, Operation Air Corridor ended, General Budanov said. But it helped the forces at Azovstal withstand the Russian onslaught for more than a month longer.

“Isolated and surrounded, they fought,” General Budanov said in an interview. “We brought them all we could, but, you understand, not as much as was necessary.”

What also changed the battle was the Starlink internet system that Flint’s team had delivered on that first mission. Before, the civilians and fighters inside Azovstal had been almost completely cut off from the outside world.

Now, a siege seemingly out of World War II would become an online event. Videos from inside the factory began appearing on Telegram channels. Soldiers were suddenly in contact with their wives, who pleaded with world leaders to end the fighting. Captain Palamar began communicating with reporters, sending out videos and describing bunkers filled with hundreds of soldiers too badly wounded to fight.

The world could now peer inside Azovstal. What it saw was apocalyptic.

The Verge of Madness

Inside the field hospital at Azovstal, the wounded soldiers looked pale and deathlike. Crammed into a dark and dust-filled bunker, most were lying on the concrete floor. Their injuries were leaking and bloody, and where gangrene had set in, the flesh looked green and rotted.

Captain Palamar sent a reporter video and photos from the field hospital in late April, hoping to stir the world’s sympathies with the suffering of his troops. A blackish mold now coated the food, the old and tattered bedding, even the weapons. Medicines were running so low that surgeons carried out amputations without sufficient anesthesia.

Night and day, Russian ships and artillery units pounded the factory, while Russian jets fired rockets and bunker-busting munitions that began to degrade the bomb shelters.

Days after Captain Palamar sent his video, the hospital was hit directly, causing the ceiling to collapse and burying an unknown number of wounded fighters and their caregivers. Even as troops tried to pull their comrades from the rubble, the fighting continued.

“This is on the verge of madness,” Dmytro Kozatsky, an Azov soldier, said in a video message used in a short Ukrainian documentary, recalling the constant attacks. “You realize that your friends are dead, they are lying here next to you. And on the other hand, you’re walking and you rejoice, you are happy because you survived.

“I will remember this smell for a long time,” he added. “It was the smell of blood.”

By then, the last Ukrainian units fighting outside the factory had retreated behind its walls.

Outside, Russian fighters ringed the factory’s periphery, as correspondents from Russian state television and Russian war bloggers covered the assault. Several times, Russian infantry tried to break through Azovstal’s perimeter but each time they were repelled.

In late April, Aleksandr Sladkov, a war correspondent for Russian state television, posted video of Russian troops wearing white armbands and carrying an assortment of small arms, preparing to storm Azovstal. The land around them was pounded into a twisted, wreckage-strewn wasteland and ahead of them was the towering factory.

“They’ve tried to take this building three times already,” Mr. Sladkov said, as artillery thundered in the distance. “Honestly, I didn’t think I would end up in this.”

But inside, it was worse. Ukrainian soldiers were scrounging for food and water, risking death from the constant shelling.

Earlier, the messages sent out by Captain Palamar and others at the plant were full of soldierly bravado. The troops were prepared to die with guns in their hands and become martyrs to Ukraine’s glory, they said. But as the siege wore on, and food and water grew scarce, many of them began to hope for a negotiated end to the battle.

“We are prepared to leave the city because there is nothing left to defend,” Captain Palamar said in late April. “We consider that we’ve fulfilled our mission. But we will continue to defend it until there is an order to retreat from our military leadership. And if we are going to leave, we are going to leave with our weapons.”

Desperation

The civilians were starving.

By late April, Ms. Babeush and other adults in her bunker were rationed to a single meal a day, mostly a gruel of canned meat mixed with water. The 14 children got two meals a day, if they were lucky, starting with a breakfast of oatmeal that she mixed with a little flour and water and fried like a pancake. She recalled waking up one morning to find that a child had placed a drawing of a pizza on her bed.

“Тhey were starving and not getting vitamins,” she said. “One woman was so weak that she was always stumbling, losing her balance, nearly fainting.”

Ms. Zaitseva, who had fled to Azovstal with her husband and infant son on the second day of the war, suffered a concussion. Her mother broke her arm when a bomb landed nearby as they were heating baby formula.

Ms. Zaitseva’s husband joined the Azov troops, moving into a different bunker. He visited his family to deliver food and candy with other soldiers, bringing a book of fairy tales for their son, Svyatoslav, along with a copy of “Robinson Crusoe” for his wife.

“I promised him that when he returned, we would have a little daughter, because it was always his dream to have a daughter,” she said in an interview.

That was the last time he visited.

Despair set in. People in the bunkers went weeks without seeing natural light or breathing clean air. People became irritable and cruel, occasionally fighting, said Anna Krylova, who sheltered with her daughter, who was then 14. Some became so desperate for an escape they began to drink from the bottles of alcohol-infused hand sanitizer installed during the Covid pandemic.

“It was unbearable,” Ms. Krylova said.

Evacuation

By late April, Russian forces still had not broken through the perimeter. As many as 12,000 Russian troops had been bogged down in the fight. Thousands of rounds of ammunition had been used.

From the bunkers, Azov soldiers began sharing videos of children in diapers fashioned from plastic bags, or wearing oversized Azovstal work uniforms. The children and their mothers pleaded to return home, to see the sun again.

“There is no escape from here,” a teary-eyed woman said in one of the videos. “The children have not seen the sun in a month and a half.”

Outside Mariupol, a group of women, mostly wives of the trapped soldiers, launched a campaign to save their husbands, appealing to world leaders and even earning an audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican.

“You are our last hope,” Kateryna Prokopenko, the wife of the Azov Regiment’s commander, told the pope. “I hope you can save their lives. Please don’t let them die.”

On April 26, the secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, flew to Moscow with a proposal to open a humanitarian corridor for the civilians inside Azovstal. Mr. Putin, according to a United Nations readout of the meeting, agreed to the proposal “in principle.”

Four days later, near sunset, Ms. Krylova and her daughter clawed their way out of the subterranean bunker and emerged in the dying light. They were put on a bus and driven out of the factory complex where they were met by representatives from the United Nations and the Red Cross.

“Above, the sky was so blue, so blue. Beautiful. There was quiet,” Ms. Krylova said. “And the ruined factory, like the apocalypse.”

Osnat Lubrani, the top United Nations representative in Ukraine, described the shock of arriving in Mariupol to help coordinate the evacuations and passing makeshift graves on the side of the road.

“The word ‘Dresden’ came to my mind,” she said in an interview, referring to the German city flattened by Allied firebombing in World War II.

The evacuations were harrowing. Bombing in the preceding days was so intense that civilians initially resisted coming out of Azovstal, she said. Just being at the plant, she said, was extremely dangerous, as shooting erupted. Yet over the next several days, every civilian was extracted from Azovstal.

Each was escorted by the United Nations and Red Cross to a checkpoint in a coastal Ukrainian town that was under Russian control. They were strip searched and interrogated about their knowledge of Ukrainian forces at the plant, as Russian authorities pulled off the buses a handful of people deemed suspicious.

Some people chose to return to bombed-out neighborhoods in Mariupol in search of relatives. But the majority are now in the relative safety of western Ukraine.

When she finally got a new cellphone, Ms. Babeush discovered that her parents, who remained in Mariupol, had survived. They had searched for her in late March and found the family cat, Liza, who was half-starved.

“They thought we had died,” Ms. Babeush said of her parents. “Thank God everyone survived. Even Liza.”

Surrender

For the soldiers at Azovstal, there was no reprieve. Even before the last civilians had left, the shelling resumed and continued intensely for about two weeks as Russian forces made their final push but the Ukrainians kept repelling them.

Sergeant Tsymbal said he texted with his brother, Anton, who was still inside the factory.

“They were waiting for help, that a miracle might occur,” he said.

The last exchange between the brothers was on May 14. Anton was killed in a mortar attack later that day.

Two days later, Ruslan, one of the Azov fighters, lost his leg.

“I can see flying toward me this sparking, whistling thing on a wire and suddenly it just cuts through my leg like a sausage,” he said. “I’m screaming, ‘I’m bleeding out, I’m bleeding out. Give me a tourniquet. Shoot me, shoot me.’

“And some guy runs up to me and says, ‘Not today.’”

Ruslan — who gave only his first name to reduce risk to his brother, a soldier fighting the Russians in the east — was rushed to the field hospital in the bunker, where doctors performed a quick surgery and pumped him full of morphine.

When he came to several hours later, he received a shock. He was on a stretcher surrounded by Russian soldiers, their faces covered by Balaklavas. He said a Russian commander told him to “hang in there.”

While Ruslan was unconscious, Ukraine’s commanders in Kyiv had made a difficult choice. To spare the lives of the remaining fighters, they ordered the defenders of Azovstal to surrender themselves as prisoners of war.

Ruslan was among the first to be evacuated, as was Sergeant Medyanyk, who was uninjured and ordered to help carry the wounded out of the factory.

“There was a little disappointment,” Sergeant Medyanyk said, “but deep in my soul, there was a joy that we would remain alive.”

Others were less enthusiastic. Ruslan said he would never have surrendered if given the choice.

“We would have fought to the end,” he said.

Some 2,500 fighters were taken to a prison camp on Russian-controlled territory in the Donetsk region. They were interrogated, locked into cramped cells and fed just enough to keep from dying of hunger.

They were awakened at 6 each morning to music blaring from a loudspeaker: the Russian national anthem.

The Trade

On June 29, at 1 a.m., a guard pulled Sergeant Medyanyk from his cell and told him he was being taken for further interrogation. He was put on a bus with other prisoners, many of them badly wounded. Ruslan, the stump of his leg now bandaged, was among them.

They drove for hours.

It was only when Sergeant Medyanyk saw Ukrainian soldiers that he realized that he was part of a trade. After intense negotiations, the Ukrainians and Russians had agreed on a prisoner swap that saw 144 Ukrainians exchanged that day, most of them fighters from Azovstal.

Sergeant Medyanyk stepped down from the bus blinking in the bright summer sun. He was shocked to see his wife, Yulia Polyakova, the soldier in the Ukrainian National Guard. They had not spoken since March 1, and he feared she had died.

“We locked eyes,” he said. “There was unbelievable happiness.”

Along with the other women in her unit, Ms. Polyakova had been told to stand down on the third day of the war, as the shelling in Mariupol intensified. She hid in the basement of the couple’s apartment building until it was hit by a shell and burned to the ground.

Then she had fled the city on foot.

She made it as far as the outskirts when she was arrested at a checkpoint manned by Russian forces. They had searched her phone, discovered that she was the wife of an Azov soldier and taken her into custody. They called her a fascist and made her sing the Russian national anthem. They told her that her husband was most likely dead.

“Azov fighters are not taken prisoner,” she said they told her. “They are shot on sight.”

She alone from her prison camp was selected as part of the same trade that freed her husband. Ukrainian officials had pressed for their release for the sake of their children, who had been left in the care of an ailing grandmother.

“When I saw him, I simply — I’m even crying now,” she said.

Today, the other surviving soldiers from Azovstal are being held at a prison camp in a Russia-controlled part of eastern Ukraine. The commanders, including Captain Palamar, were transferred to Russia and are being held in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, a place of torture during Stalin’s purges.

Ukraine’s leaders have vowed to bring them back alive, but Russian officials are threatening to charge some of them with war crimes. Of the dead, so far the bodies of more than 400 soldiers have been returned to Ukrainian-held territory for burial.

An unknown number remain entombed in the ruins of Azovstal.

Additional Reporting and Video Production: Brent McDonald

Graphics: Marco Hernandez

Additional Reporting: Valerie Hopkins, Maria Varenikova, Carlotta Gall, Andrew E. Kramer, Marc Santora, Christiaan Triebert, Ivan Nechepurenko and Alexandra Koroleva.

By Danielle Ivory, John Ismay, Denise Lu, Marco Hernandez, Cierra S. Queen, Jess Ruderman, Kristine White, Lauryn Higgins and Bonnie G. Wong

Reflecting a shockingly barbaric and old-fashioned wartime strategy, Russian forces have pummeled Ukrainian cities and towns with a barrage of rockets and other munitions, most of which can be considered relatively crude relics of the Cold War, and many of which have been banned widely under international treaties, according to a New York Times analysis.

The attacks have made repeated and widespread use of weapons that kill, maim and destroy indiscriminately — a potential violation of international humanitarian law. These strikes have left civilians — including children — dead and injured, and they have left critical infrastructure, like schools and homes, a shambles.

The Times examined more than 1,000 pictures taken by its own photojournalists and wire-service photographers working on the ground in Ukraine, as well as visual evidence presented by Ukrainian government and military agencies. Times journalists identified and categorized more than 450 instances in which weapons or groups of weapons were found in Ukraine. All told, there were more than 2,000 identifiable munitions, a vast majority of which were unguided.

The magnitude of the evidence collected and cataloged by The Times shows that the use of these kinds of weapons by Russia has not been limited or anomalous. In fact, it has formed the backbone of the country’s strategy for war since the beginning of the invasion.

Of the weapons identified by The Times, more than 210 were types that have been widely banned under international treaties. All but a handful were cluster munitions, including their submunitions, which can pose a grave risk to civilians for decades after war has ended. More than 330 other weapons appeared to have been used on or near civilian structures.

Because of the difficulties in getting comprehensive information in wartime, these tallies are undercounts. Some of the weapons identified may have been fired by Ukrainian forces in an effort to defend themselves against the invasion, but evidence points to far greater use by Russian forces.

Customary international humanitarian laws and treaties — including the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their protocols — demand that the driving principle in war be military necessity, which mandates all combatants direct their actions toward legitimate military targets. The law requires a balance between a military mission and humanity. Combatants must not carry out attacks that are disproportionate, where the expected civilian harm is clearly excessive, according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, to the direct and concrete military advantage that would be anticipated. Combatants must consider distinction, that attacks are directed only toward lawful targets and people and are not applied indiscriminately. And they must not use weapons calculated to inflict unnecessary suffering.

“The Russians have violated every single one of those principles almost daily,” said Mike Newton, a Vanderbilt University law professor who frequently supports efforts to prosecute war crimes all over the world.

“The law of war is far more demanding than the rule of simple expediency and convenience,” Professor Newton said. “Just because I have a weapon doesn’t mean I can use it.”

What follows is an analysis of the visual evidence The Times examined in its investigation.

Unguided Munitions

A vast majority of the weapons identified by The Times were unguided munitions, which lack accuracy and, as a result, may be used in greater numbers to destroy a single target. Both of these factors increase the likelihood of shells and rockets falling in areas populated by civilians.

Russia has relied heavily in Ukraine on long-range attacks with unguided weapons, like howitzers and artillery rockets. By comparison, Western military forces have almost entirely converted their arsenals to use guided rockets, missiles and bombs, and they have even developed kits that can turn regular artillery shells into precision weapons. Russia may be limited by sanctions and export controls affecting its ability to restock modern weapons, and much of its precision-guided arsenal may now have been exhausted.

These Cold War-era, unguided Russian weapons have the capacity to shoot well beyond the range of the human eye — many miles past the point where a soldier could see the eventual target. To use these weapons lawfully at long range, Russia would have to use drones or soldiers known as “forward observers” to watch where the weapons hit, and then radio back corrections. There was little evidence that they were doing so until recently.

“I think what we’re seeing here with the Russians is kind of like what you’d see back in World War II, where they just bomb the hell out of people,” a senior American defense official said in an interview.

“The most surprising thing is, I guess, their philosophy on trying to break the will or the spirit of the Ukrainian people by just leveling large sections or entire towns,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about assessments of Russian behavior in Ukraine. He added: “This is what war used to look like, and they just brought it back center stage. And people, I think, are horrified.”

Artillery rockets like the 122-millimeter Grad were fielded long before precision-guided weapons were invented. They were designed for something called “saturation fire” — in which a handful of mobile rocket launchers, each of which can fire as many as 40 rockets in about 20 seconds, can offer the same firepower as many dozens of larger towed howitzers. They can essentially flood an area with warheads exploding in rapid succession.

When fired in a barrage, the rockets make up for their comparative inaccuracy with sheer volume — blanketing their targets with explosions.

The warheads on these weapons can be devastating. When they explode, they produce a blast wave that can grow in intensity as it bounces off buildings, shattering concrete on neighboring structures and damaging internal organs of anyone nearby. The munition’s casing breaks into razor-sharp fragments that can penetrate bodies. Both the blast wave and the fragments can be lethal at various ranges. Here are three common types of weapons Russia has been using in Ukraine whose fragments can be dangerous to unprotected people at great distances.

Widespread Use

Munitions and remnants of weapons have been found throughout Ukraine, and about one-fifth of those identified were located outside of the areas of Russian troop presence, according to a Times analysis. Though some of the munitions were almost certainly used in airstrikes, many were most likely launched at maximum range, meaning that estimates of troop presence during the span of the war may have underrepresented the extent of the threat to civilians and civilian structures.

In the early weeks of the invasion, Russia shifted many of its attacks to highly populated areas with civilian infrastructure, hitting churches, kindergartens, hospitals and sports facilities, often with imprecise long-range unguided munitions that could be heaved blindly from afar, causing wreckage well beyond the boundaries of occupied territory.

The top prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague has opened a formal inquiry into accusations of atrocities in Ukraine. Under international humanitarian law, combatants and commanders are supposed to take all feasible precautionary measures to minimize harm to civilians and “civilian objects,” like apartments, houses and other buildings and structures that are not being used for military purposes.

Targeting civilian structures or indiscriminately bombing densely populated areas, depending on the circumstances of an attack, could violate the laws of war, or even possibly be a war crime. And the burden of proof to show that an area was a justified military target and that the attack was proportionate, experts have said, generally falls on the aggressor.

A photo of a warhead spiking the center of a playground, though it may be upsetting, does not necessarily prove that a war crime has been committed. Details of each instance, including the intent behind an attack and the surrounding circumstances, must be thoroughly investigated. (For example, if a school was being used as a military command center, it could potentially be considered a justified target under international law, though that would need to be weighed against other factors, like determining whether an attack would be proportionate.)

Still, experts said documenting evidence of potential violations could be an important first step in that investigative process and could help tell the story of civilians struggling on the ground. And a pattern of widespread attacks involving civilians and protected structures, they said, particularly with imprecise weapons, should not be ignored.

“This is a window into the mindset of how Russia views Ukraine,” said Pierre-Richard Prosper, who served as U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues under President George W. Bush and who has also been a war crimes prosecutor. “And it’s a window into how Russia views the likelihood that it will be held accountable for its actions.”

“It’s emblematic,” he said, “of how the Russian government has been operating with impunity on so many fronts.”

Over and over, The Times found visual evidence that Russian forces fired on areas that were near easily recognizable civilian buildings. Hundreds of munitions were identified in or near houses and apartment buildings, and dozens were identified in or near schools. Weapons were also identified close to churches, cemeteries, farms, medical facilities and several playgrounds.

Cluster Munitions

The Times found the distinctive remains of cluster munition warheads scattered across Ukraine — they were photographed sometimes where they landed, and sometimes where they were gathered in piles. The munitions are a class of weapon comprising rockets, bombs, missiles, mortar and artillery shells that split open midair and dispense smaller submunitions over a wide area.

Although some of the Russian submunitions used in Ukraine have been mines designed to kill people or destroy tanks, they usually take the form of small anti-personnel weapons called “bomblets” that are cheaply made, mass-produced and contain less than a pound of high explosives each.

About 20 percent of these submunitions fail to detonate on impact and can explode if later handled. Many of the solid-fuel motors tallied by The Times that were left over from rocket attacks might have carried cluster munition warheads, but it was unclear — meaning that the cluster weapon tally is likely an undercount.

A number of nongovernmental organizations have reported injuries and deaths in Ukraine resulting from cluster munitions. In February, Human Rights Watch said a Russian ballistic missile carrying submunitions struck near a hospital in Vuhledar, killing four civilians and injuring 10, including health care workers, as well as damaging the hospital, an ambulance and other vehicles.

The same month, according to the human rights organization, Russian forces fired cluster munitions into residential areas in Kharkiv, killing at least three civilians. Amnesty International reported that a cargo rocket dropped bomblets on a nursery and kindergarten in Okhtyrka, in an attack that was said to have killed three people, including a child, and to have wounded another child.

In April, Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General, which has been investigating potential war crimes, said a man in the village of Mala Kostromka picked up an unexploded submunition, which then detonated, killing him. In May, the office said Russian forces had used cluster munitions in a village in the Dnipropetrovsk region, possibly killing one person. Neither Ukraine nor Russia (nor the United States) have joined the international treaty banning the use of cluster munitions.

The military forces of both Russia and Ukraine are known to have used cluster munitions in Donbas during fighting in 2014 and to have used weapons in civilian spaces. But since the Feb. 24 invasion, with the exception of a single known use attributed to Ukrainian troops, evidence has pointed to nearly exclusive use by Russian forces.

The Times identified these weapons through photos of the skeletal remnants of empty rocket warheads as well as images of unexploded bomblets they left behind — some of which were designed to demolish armored vehicles and others to kill people.

Cluster Munitions in Civilian Areas

The Times defined civilian areas narrowly, as locations in or near identifiable nonmilitary or government buildings or places, like houses, apartment buildings, shops, warehouses, parks, playgrounds, schools, churches, cemeteries and memorials, hospitals, health facilities, agricultural structures and farms. Because some of the visual evidence — in both city centers and small villages — did not include clear examples of civilian buildings or landmarks, this tally is an undercount as well. The Times did not include infrastructure like roads or bridges.

Other Weapons of Concern

In the photos below, The Times identified other weapons that are widely scorned by the international humanitarian community: a hand grenade used as a booby trap, an antipersonnel land mine, remnants of incendiary weapons and a group of flechettes.

The hand grenade in the first photo, disguised in a crumpled coffee cup, was found by Ukrainians near their home in Zalissya Village, near Brovary. The weapon potentially violates the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which restricts the use of booby traps in the form of seemingly harmless portable objects that can explode if disturbed or approached.

The POM-3 land mine in the second photo is also banned under international humanitarian laws; it can kill and maim civilians long after wars have ended. Ukrainian military officials reported that they found such land mines in the Kharkiv and Sumy regions. They are a new type of weapon, equipped with sensors that can detect when people walk nearby — unlike older types of land mines, which typically explode when people step on them or disturb attached trip wires. Ukraine is one of 164 nations that have signed a 1997 treaty banning the use of antipersonnel land mines and have pledged to purge their stockpiles, while Russia has refused to join it (as has the United States).

The POM-3 generally is launched by a rocket and then parachutes back to the ground. There, it waits until it senses a person nearby and then launches a small explosive warhead that can detonate midair. The fragments can be lethal to someone as far as 50 feet away. In April, the HALO Trust, a British American nonprofit that removes explosive remnants of weapons after armed conflicts, told The Times that “these create a threat that we don’t have a response for.”

The third photo shows small, hexagonal cylinders of thermite — an incendiary compound used in some Russian rockets and bombs that have been seen bursting open mid-air, streaming burning sticks of thermite onto the ground below. International law specifically prohibits their use near civilian areas.

The fourth photo shows a handful of flechettes, essentially tiny steel arrows released from certain types of shells. Using them does not necessarily violate international humanitarian law, but the weapons could potentially run afoul of the laws of war if deemed to cause unnecessary suffering or if used in civilian areas because of their indiscriminate, lethal nature.

Even guided munitions, which are not generally banned on their face, can potentially run afoul of international humanitarian laws if they are used to harm civilians or structures without a justified military target. The Times found evidence of more than a dozen guided weapons in civilian locations.

Unexploded Weapons

Russia’s weapons strategy will reverberate far into Ukraine’s future. The Times found visual evidence of more than 120 rockets, bombs, shells and other munitions in Ukraine that failed to detonate or were abandoned. That count is surely just the tip of the iceberg, according to experts, who have said that proper cleanup of these weapons will take years.

Leftover munitions not only pose a danger to civilians if they unexpectedly explode, but also can wreak havoc on the environment, contaminating drinking water, soil and air, sometimes sickening or killing people. They can hinder rebuilding after fighting has ended, experts said, because people sometimes cannot return to their homes or cannot reach essential services.

In April, HALO, which stands for Hazardous Area Life-Support Organization, told The Times that future efforts to remove explosives in Ukraine would require roughly the same number of workers as its current operation in Afghanistan, which has suffered decades of conflict.

Unexploded ordnance poses a serious and ongoing threat, even decades after wars are fought. In Syria, land mines, explosive remnants and unexploded weapons were a leading cause of child casualties last year, making up about a third of recorded injuries and deaths and leaving many children permanently disabled.

In Laos, where the United States used cluster munitions extensively during the Vietnam War, nine million to 27 million unexploded submunitions remained after the conflict, causing more than 10,000 civilian casualties, according to the Congressional Research Service. More than a full century after World War I, unexploded shells still litter parts of Europe where battles were fought. Some zones are still uninhabited because they are considered unsafe.

In addition to launching weapons that have failed to explode in Ukraine, Russia has also attacked local arms depots, causing fires and explosions that typically can fling hundreds of damaged and unstable munitions into surrounding areas.

Leila Sadat, a professor of international law at Washington University in St. Louis and a special adviser to the International Criminal Court prosecutor since 2012, said there was a “huge degree of weapon contamination that then Ukrainians have to address, assuming they can come back to these areas.”

“Ukraine,” Prof. Sadat said, “could become a wasteland.”

Methodology

A team of six Times journalists, who specialize in manually gathering and organizing complicated data and building large databases, collected and classified hundreds of photos and videos showing weapons, munitions and remnants of munitions. These came from announcements in social media posts and press releases by Ukrainian military and government agencies, as well as from photojournalists for The Times and wire-service agencies.

A Times reporter, who previously served as a Navy explosive ordnance disposal officer, used his training to identify munitions in photos and videos gathered by The Times and verified them against public and private databases available to bomb technicians.

A Times visual journalist used the weapons data to build maps and photo displays, showing evidence of rockets, bombs, shells, cluster weapons and other munitions.

Another visual journalist used information and references from Characterisation of Explosive Weapons Project (CEW), weaponsystems.net, Armament Research Services (ARES) and armyrecognition.com along with the photographs identified by The Times, as well as 3-D modeling expertise, to create illustrations of munitions found in Ukraine and the danger they can create.

The data is as recent as June 10.

Photography for The New York Times: Lynsey Addario, Tyler Hicks, Finbarr O’Reilly, Ivor Prickett; for Agence France-Presse: Sergey Bobok, Yasuyoshi Chiba, Bulent Kilic, Aris Messinis, Sergei Supinsky and unnamed photographers; for Associated Press: Bernat Armangue, George Ivanchenko, Efrem Lukatsky, Evgeniy Maloletka, Natacha Pisarenko; for European Pressphoto Agency: Sergey Dolzhenko, Nataliia Dubrovska, Andrzej Lange, Oleg Petrasyuk, Roman Pilipey, Atef Safadi, Maria Senovilla, Vasiliy Zhlobsky; for Getty Images: John Moore, Anastasia Vlasova and unnamed photographers; for Reuters: Ivan Alvarado, Carlos Barria, Marko Djurica, Alexander Ermochenko, Gleb Garanich, Oleksandr Lapshyn, Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy, Ueslei Marcelino, Vladyslav Musiienko, Serhii Nuzhnenko, Viacheslav Ratynskyi, Edgar Su and Reuters TV; General staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, Mykolayiv Regional State Administration, National Guard of Ukraine, National Police of Ukraine, press service of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, press service of the Ukrainian Ground Forces, State Emergency Service in Kyiv Oblast, State Emergency Service of Ukraine, Ukrainian Ground Forces, Ukrainian Office of the Attorney General, Ukrainian State Emergency Service