Julius Strauss

High on a hillside not far from the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica the remains of dozens of young Muslim men had been left to rot. By the time I found them most of the flesh had been eaten away by forest scavengers – bears, wolves, foxes and even stray dogs – but the skeletons and skulls remained, some with rags of clothing and scraps of hair still attached. Personal possessions lay among the remains: tobacco tins – one inscribed with the name Suljo, a pair of broken glasses, family photographs. Most of these photos were taken with Polaroid cameras – a status symbol in the old Yugoslavia. The black backings had peeled away but the faces were still visible, if faded.

It was 2 a.m. when Russian gunmen broke in and took away 21-year-old Milana Ozdoyeva. When Sara, her three-year-old daughter, tried to grab her mother's hand they shoved her aside. Milana's son, who was 11 months old, just stared uncomprehendingly. ‘They were wearing masks and camouflage,’ Milana's mother told me. ‘They forced us all to the floor at gunpoint. Milana was too terrified to speak. She just looked at me and mouthed the words “mama”. It was the last time any of us saw her.’ The kidnapping and subsequent killing of Milana took place in Chechnya on 19 January 2004. Her sin was to have been married to a man who was suspected of taking up arms against the Russian military.

Russia has signalled that, a month into a war that it expected to take a few days, it would begin scaling back its military activities around the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. Moscow's deputy defence minister, Alexander Fomin, said that the move was designed to increase mutual trust between Russia and Ukraine. The real reason, if indeed the claim proves to have any veracity, is more likely that Vladimir Putin's military has taken a pounding around Kyiv, leaving village high streets strewn with burned-out Russian tanks and dead soldiers. Fomin said that Russia 'would dramatically reduce military activities in the directions of Kyiv and Chernihiv.' Chernihiv is one of several major cities under siege by their forces.

Several thousand Muslim Chechen fighters are reportedly massing on the edge of Kiev. Syrian volunteers, filmed this week holding assault rifles and chanting pro-Moscow slogans, are en route to the Ukrainian frontlines. Is Vladimir Putin running out of Christians for his war machine? The number of Russian battlefield casualties has certainly been high. Up to 7,000 Russian infantry have been killed since the invasion began, according to US estimates. That would put Russian casualties at more than the entire American losses in 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. As many as 14,000 Russians may have been injured.

Residents fleeing the Kiev suburb of Bucha reported Chechens machine-gunning cars, even those with the word ‘children’ written in their windscreens. The arrival of Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, who claims to lead a force of 10,000 of his countrymen, will have unnerved Ukrainian volunteers defending their city. When the Chechens intervened in eastern Ukraine in 2014, they gained a reputation for undue cruelty. ‘There were stories of Kadyrov's guys castrating prisoners of war,’ one woman with family still living in the Donbas told me.  Ukrainian fighters won’t be the only ones feeling nervous. Russia’s military has had an acrimonious relationship with the Chechen leader stretching back nearly two decades.

Budapest Russian troops, many apparently without insignia, began advancing into the disputed Donbas region yesterday. The question now is how much further they will go. The Donbas rebels claim an area three times the size of the territory they currently hold, which is roughly equivalent to the area of Devon. If Moscow were to try to take control of the larger territory, it would mean overrunning the Ukrainian frontlines. It is unlikely that Kiev’s military can mount a serious defence if the Kremlin orders a full-scale attack. The call to advance came in the form of a belligerent speech by Putin to the Russian people. In it, he strongly suggested that his aim was to reintegrate the country of 45 million into the motherland.