BUCHA, Ukraine — The Russian troops, seeking to overwhelm Kiev with tanks and artillery as the war began, withdrew under fire across a wide front on Saturday, leaving behind dead soldiers and burned vehicles, according to witnesses, Ukrainian officials, satellite imagers and military analysts .
The withdrawal suggested the possibility of a major turn of events in the six-week war — the failure, at least for now, of Russia’s first attempt to take Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, and the end of its hopes for a quick subjugation of the nation. .
“The first Russian operation was a failure and one of its central goals – the capture of Kiev – proved unattainable for Russian forces,” said Michael Kofman, the director of Russian studies at CNA, a research institute in Arlington, Va. Phone call Saturday.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, attacks by Russian forces continued unabated, and the Pentagon has warned that formations near Kiev could reposition themselves for renewed attacks.
In the south, an aid convoy organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross was on the move again to help the besieged city of Mariupol. The hope, repeatedly frustrated by Russian shelling, was to bring emergency supplies to the trapped residents and to evacuate hundreds of people who endured weeks of bombing that left food and water shortages amid corpses lying on the streets. have been left behind.
As the Ukrainian army advances, it moves through a devastating scene in the suburbs north of Kiev, with dozens of wrecked tanks on streets, extensive damage to buildings and bodies of civilians still not recovered.
The Ukrainian army claimed on Saturday that it had taken Bucha, a key remote town north of Kiev on the western bank of the Dnipro River, after Russian forces withdrew.
“They went from apartment to apartment collecting televisions and computers, loaded them on their tanks and left,” Svetlana Semenova, a pensioner, said of the Russian departure, which she described as chaotic. “They left hastily.”
Several dozen people who had been living mostly in cellars for a month came forward to collect food – sacks of potatoes and bread – brought by Ukrainian soldiers.
Elena Shur, 43, an accountant for Ukraine’s flag carrier, said the Ukrainian army had appeared in the city on Friday. The first sign of a Ukrainian presence was a civilian car with soldiers passing through the city, waving a Ukrainian flag.
“We saw people on the street and soldiers,” said Ms. Shur. “I cried.”
Reporters counted six civilian bodies on Bucha’s streets and sidewalks. It was unclear under what circumstances they had died, but the discarded package of a Russian military ration was lying next to a man who had been shot in the head.
The city was the site of a major Ukrainian ambush by a Russian armored column in the early days of the war, and one street was blocked by dozens of burnt tanks and trucks.
Despite that setback, the Russians had taken the city and held it for about a month, and executed half a dozen members of the Territorial Defense Force, the volunteer army many Ukrainians joined when the war started, one resident said, leaving the bodies behind in a heavily buried part of the city.
The Ukrainians have moved at least 25 miles to the north of Bucha, where they now wave Ukrainian flags over former Russian checkpoints.
The circumstances had clearly been unraveled for the Russian soldiers. Locals said they had taken up residence in abandoned apartments and looted shops for food, while continuing to suffer losses.
“According to our information, they are running from all areas around Kiev,” said Sgt. Ihor Zaichuk, the commander of the 1st Company of the 2nd Azov Battalion in the Ukrainian Army, which fought in Bucha.
“They can say on their own television channels, if they want, that they are the second most powerful army in the world,” he said. “But they aren’t anymore.”
But in a word of warning, he said the Russians could be back. “Only their commanders know if they will be re-equipped and return.”
On the eastern bank of the Dnipro, Ukrainian troops pushed forward into villages tens of kilometers from the capital, according to an intelligence officer with Ukraine’s internal intelligence agency SBU, who declined to be identified on security grounds.
“The Russians are adjusting their goals to reality,” Lawrence Freedman, professor emeritus of war studies at King’s College London, said in an interview on Saturday. “I think they know they’re in trouble so I don’t think it’s a ruse to say they’re focusing on the Donbas because in reality that’s all they can do.”
As for the withdrawal from Kiev, Mr Freedman said, it shows that the Russians, who have botched the first part of the war, “just cannot keep all their current positions outside the Donbas region”, in the eastern Ukraine.
In the suburb of Irpin, which the Ukrainians had recaptured before Bucha, mine clearance operations were in full swing on Saturday. Some civilian bodies had been booby-trapped to kill aid workers, Ukrainian officials said.
A group of military engineers, dressed in heavy blue Kevlar armor, had a rope tied to a body. They pulled it to test if the move would trigger booby traps. By the end of the day, however, the body remained there, and the engineers apparently couldn’t determine if it was safe to collect it.
In the village of Dmytrivka, west of the capital, there were signs of a grim and chaotic Russian retreat. On a forest road leading out of the village, nine tanks and armored vehicles had been destroyed and burned out at the site of a tank battle three days earlier. The turrets and heavy guns of two tanks lay to one side. The burnt human remains of men were visible in their armored personnel carrier.
“They didn’t go away, they were destroyed,” said Valentina Yatsevich, 58, a villager who walked past the wrecks to her home.
In Russia itself, the retreat caused consternation among wartime cheerleaders, with state television previously raising expectations that the Russian military would capture Kiev.
Semyon Pegov, a popular pro-Kremlin war blogger embedded in Russian forces, posted a video to social messaging app Telegram on Saturday explaining that the move was “a pullout, not a flight.”
Russia’s vast supply lines and the threat of further losses as its forces struggled to survive in field conditions against a much better-supplied and reinforced enemy necessitated the retreat, he said.
It was an attempt, echoed by other pro-Kremlin channels, to explain why Russia appeared to have sharply scaled back its war targets in recent days, after suffering painful losses in the battle for the suburbs of Kiev.
The Russian army said for the first time on Wednesday that it was “regrouping” troops in the Kiev area, claiming it had never intended to take the city and that it had only been the job of those soldiers to send Ukrainian troops there. to pin down.
In fact, Russian officials said, the main goal was to capture more territory in the Donbas region.
But Russian hardliners continue to call for an attack on Kiev and see the withdrawal as a disappointment. “I don’t know why this decision was made,” Aleksandr Kots, a war correspondent for the Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, wrote on Telegram about the Kiev withdrawal. “The war has only just begun. We’ll find out later who was right and who was wrong.”
The Kremlin continued to resist when state television aired an interview with Mr. Putin’s spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov, in which he characterized the United States as the root of Europe’s ills. He expressed confidence that European countries would renew relations with Russia once they “get a little sober from American bourbon”.
Mr Kofman, the expert on the Russian military, said the Russian withdrawal from Kiev had started quietly about a week ago and is now gaining momentum.
After the attack on the capital came to a halt about two weeks ago, he said, there were only two options: withdraw troops or leave troops in the area to pin down Ukrainian units, to prevent them from landing troops in the east or south. strengthen the country. It now appears that the Russians are withdrawing, he said.
Across Ukraine, he said, the Russian military has lost about 2,000 pieces of equipment that were either destroyed, captured or left behind, including about 350 tanks.
In other developments on Saturday, Pope Francis, who visited the island of Malta in the Mediterranean, came closer to blaming President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for the war in Ukraine than he had before. Addressing Maltese dignitaries and officials, the pope accused a “potentate, sadly entangled in anachronistic claims of nationalist interests” for casting “dark shadows of war” from eastern Europe.
Francis has refused to explicitly blame Putin or Russia for the aggressor for a variety of reasons, including the Vatican’s hopes of playing a role in a possible peace deal, and as a precaution not to harm Roman Catholics around the world. endanger. But on Saturday, he seemed to speak clearly about Mr Putin, who he said “provoked and fueled conflict”.
Andrew E. Kramer reported from Bucha, Ukraine, and Neil MacFarquhar From New York. Reporting contributed by Anton Trojanovskic in Istanbul; Carlotta Gallo in Dmytrivka, Ukraine; Megan Special in Warsaw; Steven Erlanger In Brussels; and Jason Horowitz in Rome.