KYIV, Ukraine — For days, Roman Naumenko and his neighbors at the Pokrovsky apartment complex outside Kyiv had been watching from a few short miles away as Russian forces tried to take over a nearby airport.

“I saw helicopters that were firing, coming one after the other,” he said. “It was a huge shock. I couldn’t believe it was real.”

Residents would stand outside their buildings filming the destruction with their cellphones.

Each day, Russian forces drew closer and closer to the apartment complex. On March 3, one of the buildings was directly hit by a missile. More than 150 families were still in the 14-building residential complex at the time, a building manager told The New York Times.

And then, later that same day, troops were literally at Mr. Naumenko’s doorstep.

“We saw the Russian infantry on the security camera of our building,” he said. “From that moment, the Russians stayed.”

They made around 200 residents stay too, holding many of them hostage in the basements of their own buildings, forcing them to hand over their phones and taking over their apartments. Others were able to avoid detection but still were essentially prisoners in their own homes as Russian forces moved into the buildings, which had housed 560 families, and took up sniping positions.

The Times interviewed seven residents of the Pokrovsky apartment complex in the town of Hostomel, about 10 miles northwest of Kyiv. All experienced the assault and the captivity firsthand before finding ways to flee. Using their accounts, along with footage from security cameras and cellphones, The Times was able to piece together what it looked and felt like as Russian forces closed in.

Read full story in the New York Times.