Throughout the occupation, Ukrainian forces incessantly shelled the Russian troops there, and at least two of the same type of cluster munition were lodged in a field by Mr. Doroshenko’s home, just a few hundred yards away from the Russians’ headquarters.
The rockets fell around a small neighborhood of a dozen or so single-story homes interspersed with small gardens.
As the rockets neared the farm, their warheads — probably carrying 30 antipersonnel bomblets apiece — would have separated from the weapons’ solid rocket motors, breaking open and casting their deadly cargo across the neighborhood.
These small munitions each contain the equivalent of about 11 ounces of TNT, slightly less than twice as much as a standard hand grenade.
The attack on the Husarivka farm appears to be the first use of a cluster munition by Ukrainian troops since the Russian invasion began on Feb. 24. In 2015, Ukrainian forces used cluster munitions during the opening months of their war against Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east.
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A cellar in Husarivka, where at least three skulls were recovered this month. Residents said Russian troops had kept captives in homes along the street where the remains were found. Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
When confronted with the prospect that the Ukrainian military had shelled his village with cluster bombs, Mr. Doroshenko, 58, seemed indifferent.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The main thing is that after those rockets everybody comes out alive.”
The hazard posed by small undetonated munitions prevented Times reporters from closely examining all the weapons that landed. They visually verified from a distance two of the three rocket remnants as being Uragan cluster munitions, which leave behind the rocket’s nose cone followed by a long skeletal metal frame that held the bomblets together in flight.
On April 8, The Times verified that a similar kind of Uragan rocket, loaded with anti-vehicle land mines, was fired by Russian troops in a strike against the town of Bezruky, a suburb of Kharkiv, once Ukraine’s second-largest city.
Much has been said about the Russian shelling of Ukrainian towns — frequent artillery barrages that wound and kill residents and push the ones who remain in these contested areas into basements or shelters. The danger to civilians is no different under the barrels of Ukrainian artillery, as their forces desperately try to retake the parts of the country under Russian control.
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Lubov Dvoretska, 62, a biology teacher whose husband was killed in a bombing. Her neighbors buried his body in the garden behi