Residents and authorities say that departing Russian soldiers have laced large swaths of the country with buried land mines and jury-rigged bombs — some hidden as booby traps inside homes. The explosives now must be found and neutralized before residents can resume a semblance of normal life.

Some of the explosives have been attached to washing machines, doorways, car windows, and other places where they can kill or injure civilians returning to their homes, according to residents and Ukrainian officials. Some were even hidden under hospital stretchers and corpses.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine this week called his country “one of the most contaminated by mines in the world,” and said that authorities were working to clear thousands in the areas from which Russian armies had retreated in recent weeks. He accused Russian soldiers of leaving the explosives in their wake “to kill or maim as many of our people as possible.”

He said that the tactic was a war crime and that Russian soldiers must have been acting on instructions from top officials, adding: “Without the appropriate orders, they would not have done it.”

"I wish he had killed me instead of what he did"

The women of Ukraine are living under a constant threat, with growing evidence of sexual violence emerging as the war carries on. 

Vera, an 83-year-old retired school teacher, told CBS News that her village was occupied by Russian forces last month when she was raped.

But do you hope to see specific people brought to justice?

I hope that specific people are identified and charged. The question about whether they’re caught or not, this is not the goal in Ukraine ~snip~
our goal has become investigating and charging these people, and having a judicial process independent of the fact of whether this person is physically in Ukraine or not. So that will be our goal here: establishing facts. Plus I think Ukraine will form—or maybe it will form on its own—a group that will seek revenge all over the world, the same way Israel does.

I've been really hoping to see something like this emerge.

Babushkas from a liberated village near Kyiv tell about russian soldiers who've seen a modern toilet for the first time in their lives