Editor’s Note: This story contains graphic imagery.
A gray car speeds on a highway near Kyiv, heading towards the Ukrainian capital. As it approaches a Russian position, it does a sharp U-turn, stopping shortly after.
A man then opens the door. A second later, he is on the ground.
“He raised his hands above his head – and in this moment, he was shot,” Oleksandr Radzikhovskiy of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense forces told CNN.
Radzikhovskiy is a member of the Bugatti company, a special intelligence gathering unit operating on the outskirts of Kyiv.
The unit filmed the March 7 incident on the E-40 – a key highway connecting the western city of Lviv to Kyiv – with a drone, as Russian forces held the area.
In the footage, Russian tanks are seen facing east towards Kyiv – the direction Russian forces were pushing towards in early March – as civilians tried to flee a nearby town.
“A group of cars was fleeing from a small town, just outside Irpin, where they’d been sitting for about 10 days, without food, water or warm clothes,” Radzikhovskiy said. “They didn’t know what’s happening, they didn’t know that Russian forces had advanced and taken this position.”
“There was an ambush by a Russian tank and Russian personnel,” Radzikhovskiy said. “They opened fire.”
In the video, after the man falls to the ground, Russian troops approach the vehicle.
Two people – who CNN later confirmed with their families were six-year-old Gordey Iovenko and a female family friend – emerge from the car.
The woman wraps her arm around Iovenko, trying to shield him from the death that surrounds them.
Iovenko had just lost his parents, 32-year-old Maksim, who was motionless on the ground, and his mother, Ksenia, 37, who was killed by Russian gunfire inside the car.
Iovenko and the woman are then led into a forested area by Russian forces. Meanwhile, other troops search the car and inspect Maksim Iovenko’s body before dragging him to the side of the road.
The BBC first reported the Iovenko’s deaths.
Radzikhovskiy’s drone unit, who were just 500 meters (0.3 miles) away, filmed the entire scene.
“…We captured everything, every single moment and detail of that killing,” he said. “Since then we have had to live with that picture in our heads,” he added.
Nearly a month after the incident, CNN visited the scene on the E-40 highway near Myla, where the destruction Russian forces left behind in their retreat was on full display.
Decomposing corpses were scattered along the road, charred bodies were still leaning against the vehicles they had been driving and the same car seen in the drone footage –which was burned out entirely – was in the same spot where it stopped on March 7.
“You can see this is like a shooting zone…The cars are in line,” said Radzikhovskiy, who showed CNN around the site of the incident.
“There are no cars (beyond a certain point) because they didn’t let them come. They just shot as soon as they approached,” he added.