Cleaning up the chaos Charred houses, ruined lawns, broken bridges and unexploded bombs

Galina Muzyra moved around her front garden as she cleaned up the mess left by occupying Russian soldiers.

- Luke Harding

The trail of destruction on the road from

“They parked two armoured vehicles on my lawn,” she said, pointing to a flattened blue fence next to her neat vegetable patch. Nearby was a large crater. Her yellow-painted dacha was perforated with holes.

Shrapnel had wrecked the wooden summer house, too. It was a birthday gift from her late husband, Nikolai, Muzyra explained. “We don't understand why the Russians did this. We are a small, quiet country. If it wasn't for our president, I don't know what we would do," she added, throwing splintered branches and other rubbish on to a spring bonfire.

Muzyra and her son, Denis, live in Zalissya, a village on the highway between the capital Kyiv and the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv. For 20 days, between 8 and 28 March, Russian troops took over her home, sleeping on top of her kitchen stove. The property survived better than many others. The house next door is a charred, roofless shell.

Across swathes of territory vacated by Russia's armed forces a great cleanup was underway. Homeowners were tidying up and counting the cost of a devastating month-long occupation. Ukrainian army sappers collected left-behind munitions and defused mines - a vast ongoing job.