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When Russian troops retreated from Bucha, Ukraine on March 31, 2022, they left behind mass graves, torture chambers, bomb-damaged apartment buildings, columns of burnt out military equipment, expired ration packs, and empty vodka bottles. One year after liberation, streets which were once littered with charred debris and bounded corpses betray almost no sign of the horrors that took place there. Kiosk coffee shops bearing a spray of shrapnel scars have been open for months. Bodies from the mass grave behind the Orthodox church were exhumed last April and reburied in a cemetery on the edge of town.
But surviving residents are still unable to forget what they lived through under Russian occupation.
"Life on the street seems normal," a local teenager named Bohdan told Newsweek. "But I still look around and see everything as it was. It's like a bad dream."
Whether they bear physical scars or not, it is difficult to find a Bucha resident who was not affected by the month-long Russian occupation. The wife of a local pro-Russian politician still lives in the gated mansion where drunken Russian soldiers, in the early days of March 2022, shot her husband after he refused to let them search his home for vodka. The congregants of a local protestant church are still adjusting to life without their long-time pastor who was executed, with his body left on the street. Even among those who did not lose close friends or relatives, at some point, nearly all were threatened, beaten or robbed by Russian troops.
Newsweek reached out to the Russian Foreign Ministry via email for comment.
Bohdan does bear a physical scar, the result of the Russian bullet that pierced his shoulder on the eighth day of Russia's full-scale invasion last March. He still carries the bullet with him in his pocket and pulls it out occasionally, rolling it between his fingers as a kind of stress reliever.
On the evening of the first day of the full-scale war, February 24, 2022, Bohdan stopped by the local office of the "Buchanska Varta," a longstanding local neighborhood watch group, and was told to come back the next morning. When he did, he was put to work as an intelligence scout, riding his bicycle to various strategic sites around the area.
When the Russian column rolled in, their guys were drunk. They were singing songs as if they really expected we'd greet them with bread and salt, and we hit them with machine guns and Molotov cocktails instead.
On February 25, in neighboring Hostomel, where Russian paratroopers had already seized control of Antonov International Airport, a Ukrainian column sent in to attempt a counterattack was destroyed by Russian aircraft. Bohdan rode to the still-burning site of the strike, then returned to Bucha to report on what he had seen.
Bohdan's officers from the Varta put the intelligence to good use.
"That's where we got our weapons from," Buchanska Varta head Volodymyr Scherbinin told Newsweek on the steps leading up to the organization's bombed-out former office. "We drove to the site of the column and found machine guns, an RPG, ammunition, fuel."
"We also picked up a whole trailer full of our guys and took them to the morgue," Scherbinin added.
February 26 in Bucha, the third day of the war, was relatively quiet. Russian paratrooper units had already taken Antonov Airport under their full control, but the columns of armored vehicles traveling towards Kyiv from the Belarusian border had not yet arrived in Bucha. When the first one did, Ukrainian regular troops destroyed it Vokzalnaya Street, while irregular forces including members of the Buchanska Varta set up an ambush in the center of town.
"On the 27th, when the Russian column rolled in, their guys were drunk," Petro Mazin, a retired colonel and a member of the Buchanska Varta, told Newsweek. "They were singing songs as if they really expected we'd greet them with bread and salt, and we hit them with machine guns and Molotov cocktails instead."
"The next column to arrive didn't ride in so brazenly," Mazin added, "but they continued drinking all the time. Even while there was a battle happening on the streets, their guys would walk into the supermarket and come out with a crate of vodka. They'd throw it right into their armored personnel carrier."
However, despite the efforts of the Ukrainian military and armed, determined locals, the arrival of ever more Russian hardware soon allowed the occupiers to take control of Bucha. By March 4, they were fully in command of the city, and the reprisals against Ukrainian civilians would continue right up until Kyiv's forces liberated the town on March 31, 2022.
"They drove around stealing whatever they could find: chainsaws, electric teapots, whatever was still left behind by the other Russians who got there before them," Bohdan said.
The occupiers also came with lists of local figures to capture and kill. Most city officials succeeded in escaping from the town before the Russian troops tasked with tracking them down managed to find them, but when these officials returned to Bucha following liberation, they often found that their homes had been used as a kind of informal barracks.
City council member Vasyl Oleksyuk told of returning home to find that Russian soldiers had used one of his second floor rooms as their bathroom after the upstairs toilet had stopped functioning. Graffiti asking "Who allowed you to live well?" was written on one of the walls.
For the city as a whole, the year following liberation has been unimaginably painful, yet surprisingly productive.
"April and May of last year were very difficult," Taras Shapravskyi, Speaker of the Bucha City Council, told Newsweek. "Our task was to gather all the bodies of those who had been killed, in some cases exhume them, then to go through the process of identification, reburial, and memorialization."
"We have official data confirming the deaths of 422 civilians at the hands of the Russian occupiers," he continued. "But unfortunately, there are also many cases in which we are still finding remains of people who are recorded as having disappeared without a trace. Besides those 422 civilian deaths, we have 80 bodies which remain unidentified. We have taken DNA samples from all of them, but for now, in the cemetery, their graves are marked only with a number, not a name."
In addition to the work of identifying Bucha residents killed by Russian occupiers and providing them with an honorable burial, an overwhelming amount of damaged infrastructure needed to be repaired in order to bring some semblance of normal life back to the city.
"A simultaneous task was to restore basic infrastructure—water, heating, electricity, gas—and we accomplished this within a month," Shaparavskyi said.
"We also had to figure out how much of our city needed to be rebuilt," he added. "There were 3000 residential buildings and other objects of civilian infrastructure which had been either damaged or completely destroyed, and practically every home and apartment had had their windows broken and their doors removed. Almost all of them had been robbed."
While the work of physically rebuilding continues, the aura of normalcy on the streets of Bucha testifies to how successfully it has been carried out so far.
"Nearly 40 percent of these objects have been restored, and almost all roofs, windows, and facades have been replaced," Shaparavskyi said. "Thanks to donations from the Global Empowerment Mission fund, we've already completed this work on Vokzalnaya Street, along with projects to restore kindergartens, schools, outpatient clinics, bomb shelters, and apartment buildings."
Even though the occupation of Bucha has been a historical fact for more than a year, and even though the city has started to take on the appearance of normal life again, the fight that began on February 24, 2022 remains far from finished. In Bucha, as in every other Ukrainian city and town, the cemetery also contains a section reserved for local soldiers killed in the war.
It expands by the week.
"There are a lot of guys from Bucha fighting," Bohdan, the teenage intelligence scout who was shot through the shoulder, said. "A lot of them are in Bakhmut right now, and I just want them to come back in anything other than a coffin. They deserve the chance to rebuild their families, to rebuild the city, to rebuild their lives."
And he added a wish.
"After all of this ends," Bohdan said, "I hope to never have to hear the word 'Russia' again."
