destroyed. and in bucha, where the world first saw the horror russia is capable of, authorities are exhuming mass graves, 67 bodies from this site alone. the president of the eu commission on the scene, stunned at what she saw. here in bucha we saw our humanity being shattered. reporter: some residents returned to their broken city, imploring the world not to forget what happened there. the only thing they know is people dead, people with their hands tied, people tortured, murdered, and this just breaks my heart. but i m sure i m optimist, so i m sure we ll rebuild this city and make it even more beautiful than before. reporter: and it s not just the cities and the battlefields. in a small village in central ukraine, we met viktoria mel nik. her husband alexander died defending mariupol, leaving her to raise their 6-month-old boy, marak. [ speaking foreign language ]
images in her exclusive report are disturbing. reporter: the work is delicate. the kind of excavation usually reserved for historic artifacts. now put to grim use, to exhume the first bodies from tikrit s mass graves. a pause for a brief ceremony to honor the dead. reporter: the iraqi national anthem plays. the lyrics of unity float across the freshly open ground. no one yet knows who the victims are, but it doesn t matter. i have been working on exhuming mass graves for eight years, but something like this, it s different because of the way they were killed, this man says. as many as 1,700 shia army recruits were marched to their death by isis when it swept through here in june in what is now known as the speicher