OZERA, Ukraine — Tetiana Boikiv peered from the doorway of the cellar at the Russian soldiers questioning her husband about his phone.

Her husband, Kolia, was trying to explain that the surveillance video they’d found was from his job as an electrician, all taken before the Feb. 24 invasion.

But the two soldiers and their commander weren’t listening. They put a bag over his head. Despairing, Boikiv demanded to know what they would do with the man she called her big, big love.

“Shoot him,” one of the soldiers replied. They took him away.

She would never see Kolia again.

While atrocities in the nearby town of Bucha have captured the world’s attention and become case number one for Ukraine’s prosecutors, the slaughter there was not an aberration. Rather, it was part of a trail of violence that spread far and wide, often under the radar of prosecutors, to ordinary villages.

Much of the violence was systemic, not random, conceived and implemented within the command structures of the Russian military.

Troops were instructed to block and destroy vestiges of “nationalist resistance.” They did so with consistent brutality, hunting potential enemies and torturing and killing volunteer fighters, veterans and civilians suspected of assisting Ukrainian troops.

Boikiv was left to her own devices to find her missing husband and struggle to make sense of his death.

Boikiv and Kolia had met at the botanical garden in Kyiv on a church outing for singles. Their house was painted in cheerful blues and green. Kolia got up before dawn to bring Boikiv fresh flowers from the fields. When they were apart, he sent her photos of flowers on her phone.

“He was like a child deep inside,” said Boikiv. He liked to collect small, beautiful things — stones, stamps, postcards, pieces of glass. In the evenings they’d take turns cooking. He baked better apple pie than she did.

“Once Kolia said to me, what’s the point in living for oneself? It’s when you have somebody next to you, you can feel happy,” she recalled.

After the Russians left, word went round that a village priest from Zdvyzhivka had been taking photos of people who’d been killed. When a body was found, Father Vasyl Bentsa’s phone would ring. He had taken it upon himself to document the deaths in all their horrific detail.

Boikiv went to talk with him. Father Bentsa scrolled through the images of the dead on his phone. At the third man, Boikiv froze. There was Kolia, dressed in his own clothes, with his own face, bloodied and beaten but intact. His hands were curled into fists and his body was fixed in a fetal position. The joints of his legs were bent at strange angles. One eye was swollen shut, and his skull had been crushed.

“My Kolia! Kolia!” she cried.

Father Bentsa told her police had exhumed Kolia and four others from their common grave six days earlier.

Boikiv drove home in silence. Where was Kolia now?

Russian soldiers were sloppy about deciding who would live and who would die. Perhaps fear or rage clouded their judgment. Perhaps they didn’t really care.

The day before Kolia was abducted, drone footage shows a fiery cloud bloom from the woods just as a Ukrainian rocket hit Russian artillery munitions. The strike was so accurate that it was “perfectly logical” for Russians to suspect a spotter had given information.

But Kolia was most likely not involved. Cell phone tower records for his mobile phone numbers obtained by The AP show that his phone was last active on Feb. 25 — making it extremely unlikely that he sent in coordinates from the occupied town in the 18 days before his abduction.

Boikiv’s first stop in her effort to find Kolia was the Bucha morgue.

By the time she arrived, spring was settling in over Bucha. As the sun warmed the earth back to life, the bodies of Bucha began to stink.

The thick, sticky stench of the dead lingered around the morgue for weeks. But Kolia’s name wasn’t on the lists of bodies at the morgue. There were three large refrigerated trucks parked outside; her Kolia was probably inside one of them.

Boikiv’s friend from church opened each body bag and peered in at each dead face. He called her over once in a while to examine possible matches. She said they went through dozens of bodies.

They did not find Kolia.

A few days later, she got word that two unidentified bodies from Zdvyzhivka had come in. But the Bucha morgue was farming out overflow corpses to other morgues. By the time Boikiv got back to Bucha, the two bodies were at the bottom of a stack of body bags in a refrigerated truck about to leave.

If she couldn’t hitch a ride on the truck, Boikiv threatened, she would climb in the back with all the dead people. She couldn’t let Kolia slip away again. The driver made space for her in the cab.

When the truck was unloaded in Bila Tserkva, Boikiv peered in at the corpses. They were in such poor shape that it was hard to be sure. A nurse told her to look not just at the clothes, but also at the teeth.

“I opened the mouth and looked at the teeth,” Boikiv said, flinching at the memory. “It wasn’t him.”

She kept looking, then spotted Kolia’s shoe peeking out from a partially open bag.

By the time Boikiv set eyes on her husband again, Kolia had been dead for a month. His eyeballs had liquified into a kind of white jelly. “I asked the nurse what’s with the eyes,” she said. “She told me the eyes rot first.”

Boikiv recognized her husband by the shape of his skull and his beard. She peered into Kolia’s mouth and looked at his fillings. “Even without the eyes, I could tell it was my husband.”

The day of the funeral, friends from church trickled into the yard and stood around Kolia’s coffin. “We will meet again, Kolia,” Boikiv said, running her work gloves along the top of the casket.

As Boikiv went back home, neighbors embraced and sat together in front of their fences. They had survived, so far. They would bury their dead and life, somehow, would begin again.

“Everything is beautiful here. But Kolia is gone,” Boikiv said, looking at a row of tall red tulips her neighbor had planted.

“They took my big love,” she said.