A short drive from Kyiv in any direction turned up scenes of incinerated Russian vehicles, charred engine parts and chunks of armor. Attention is now shifting to the east, where Moscow says it is redirecting its forces.
The Russian forces, intent on overwhelming Kyiv with tanks and artillery when the war started, retreated under fire across a broad front by Saturday, leaving behind them dead soldiers and burned vehicles, according to witnesses, Ukrainian officials, satellite images and military analysts. The withdrawal suggested the possibility of a major turn in the six-week war — the failure, at least for now, of Russia’s initial attempt to seize Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, and the end of its hopes for the quick subjugation of the nation. “The initial Russian operation was a failure and one of its central goals — the capture of Kyiv — proved unobtainable for Russian forces,” Michael Kofman, the director of Russian studies at C.N.A., a research institute in Arlington, Va., said in a telephone interview Saturday. Elsewhere in Ukraine, attacks by Russian military forces continued unabated, and the Pentagon has cautioned that the formations near Kyiv could be repositioning for renewed assaults. In the south, an aid convoy organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross that had stalled on its way to bring some relief to the besieged city of Mariupol was on the move again. The hope, repeatedly frustrated by Russian shelling, was to bring emergency supplies to trapped residents and to evacuate hundreds of those who have endured weeks of bombardment that has left shortages of food and water, amid corpses left abandoned on the streets. As the Ukrainian army advances, it is moving through a tableau of destruction in the suburban towns to the north of Kyiv, with dozens of wrecked tanks on streets, extensive damage to buildings and bodies of civilians still lying uncollected. Ukraine’s military asserted on Saturday that it had captured Bucha, a key outlying town to the north of Kyiv on the west bank of the Dnipro River, after Russian forces pulled back. “They went from apartment to apartment collecting televisions and computers, loaded them on their tanks and left,” Svetlana Semenova, a retiree, said of the Russian departure, which she described as chaotic. “They left in a hurry.” A few dozen people who had been living mostly in basements for a month emerged to collect food — bags of potatoes and bread — brought by Ukrainian soldiers. Elena Shur,43, an accountant for Ukraine’s national airline, said the Ukrainian military had appeared in the town on Friday. The first sign of a Ukrainian presence was a civilian car carrying soldiers, which drove through town waving a Ukrainian flag. “We saw people on the street, and soldiers,” Ms. Shur said. “I cried.” Reporters counted six bodies of civilians on the streets and sidewalks of Bucha. It was unclear under what circumstances they had died, but the discarded packaging of a Russian military ration was lying beside one man who had been shot in the head. The town was the site of a major Ukrainian ambush of a Russian armored column in the first days of the war, and one street was blocked by dozens of incinerated tanks and trucks.
