Bucha gets a remake, but pain lingers behind the facade
BUCHA, Ukraine – There’s a row of tidy houses on Vokzalna Street, where crumbling houses once lined a road littered with burnt-out Russian tanks. There are neat sidewalks and fresh pavement with blue and yellow flags hanging above it. And excavators and bulldozers plow across a construction site where a new home goods store will replace a previous one that has burned to the ground.
They are making a new version of Bucha, the suburb of Kiev, the capital, which became synonymous with Russian atrocities in the earliest days of the invasion of Ukraine, true civilians were tortured, raped or executed, their bodies left to rot in the streets.
More than a year after Ukrainian forces reclaimed Bucha from Russian forces, the city has attracted international investment that has physically transformed it, and it has become a stopping point for delegations of foreign leaders who pass by almost weekly.
And yet, behind the veneer of revitalization lingers the pain that permeated Bucha during his month of horror under Russian occupation.
Even the bodies are still being identified.
“I wish it had ended,” said Vadym Yevdokymenko, 21, who has spent months trying to formally identify his father, whose body he says was found burned in a garage. “This case is not closed; it’s complicated.”
The remains of at least 80 people who died during the March 2022 occupation in Bucha have not been officially identified, local officials said. But a week ago, the city unveiled a memorial listing the names of 501 people who died during that occupation, with an official admission that the list was incomplete.
That juxtaposition – shocking in its contrasts – now defines life in Bucha.
As you walk the streets of this leafy suburb, it’s possible to look past the bullet holes that pierce the storefronts and the shrapnel that pierce the facades of buildings to see a more peaceful place emerging.
There’s a lemonade stand selling cool drinks on a summer afternoon, and swarms of children playing in a fountain. Teenagers pass the time scrolling on their phones on the sidewalk of an apartment building.
Schools have been refurbished and there are new shops in the main streets. Tall cranes fill the skyline where workers repair high-rise homes damaged in the fighting.
“It is very difficult to find that balance between rethinking, rebuilding and moving forward,” says Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivska, Bucha’s deputy mayor. “We don’t just want to be a place of tragedy.”
Referring specifically to Chernobyl, the site of a nuclear disaster in Ukraine in 1986, she said Bucha did not want to become a place for foreign tourists to stare at the disaster.
Much of Ms Skoryk-Shkarivska’s work focuses on drawing up a sustainable development plan. She said she hoped for an eco-friendly suburb and had proposals for an innovative technology hub.
Economic development partnerships are needed now, she said, and instead of humanitarian aid, Bucha needs long-term recovery support to regain self-sufficiency. The mayor was recently in London to participate in the Ukraine Recovery Conference, where he met international supporters.
“We want to be Ukraine’s success story,” said Ms. Skoryk-Shkarivska. “Yes, a place of tragedy with good memorial programs, but to be a place of success, of recovery.”
In the midst of reconstruction, the search for answers for people like Mr. Yevdokymenko is heartbreaking.
Personal documents from his father, Oleksiy Yevdokymenko, were discovered on charred human remains found in a burnt-out garage, along with those of at least five others. But due to the degraded condition of the bodies, they have never been conclusively identified.
“It all pointed to this fact,” said Vadym Yevdokymenko. “But nobody could say anything specific.”
The remains are currently buried in a section of a local cemetery set aside for bodies that have not been formally identified, with the number 320 – a serial number used for record keeping – written on a plastic board and affixed to a wooden crotch. Mr. Yevdokymenko hopes that one day they can put his father’s name there.
Mr Yevdokymenko recently provided a DNA sample to be tested against the remains. He did the same thing last spring, to no avail, but he hopes it will be different this time.
“The situation with these bodies has now slowed down and they are rebuilding houses,” he said with a sigh.
Still, there is no doubt that Bucha’s physical rehabilitation is something to celebrate, and the houses rebuilt on Vokzalna Street are perhaps the most obvious evidence of transformation.
The street was the scene of some of Bucha’s toughest battles. Now new ranch-style houses are being built behind metal fences.
These homes were built in a public-private partnership, funded in part by the foundation of Howard Buffett, the son of Warren Buffett, and operated by Global Empowerment Mission, a US disaster relief charity.
“It gives hope and shows people that things can change,” Buffett said in a telephone interview. “They can get better. And you have to do that during a war.”
Iryna Abramova’s house on Vokzalna Street stands as a metaphor for the hesitant, imperfect nature of Bucha’s reconstruction. It was rebuilt after being reduced to rubble by Russian troops. Her husband, Oleh Abramov, was dragged from their home and executed by Rus soldiers.
“I’m not afraid of anything after what I’ve been through,” said 49-year-old Ms Abramova.
The house gave her hope for a fresh start and this spring she got the keys. The outside is nice, with white walls and a brown roof.
But behind the front door it’s empty, with exposed wires and unfinished drywall, and she still can’t live there. The city government is responsible for furnishing the house, and Ms. Abramova said they told her that there was simply no money at the moment.
“From the outside, the picture is nice, but,” she said, gesturing around. “They promised so many nice things.”
Local officials are doing their best to care for the community, both in rebuilding and identifying the dead, but Ms Skoryk-Shkarivska acknowledged that this was a challenge. For all the financial aid the city has received, it’s only a fraction of what’s needed, she said, and the number of city councilors tasked with overseeing reconstruction is small.
“This is the most difficult period,” she said. “Almost a year and a half after the occupation, while the war is still raging, the people are exhausted.”
While the houses on Vokzalna Street have become a destination for international delegations to see Bucha’s rebirth, All Saints Church is where they go to understand some of the darkest moments.
At least 119 civilian bodies were buried in a mass grave on the church grounds as Russian troops occupied Bucha for weeks. A makeshift memorial now stands on the site.
“We don’t ask these people to come here,” says Andriy Halavin, a priest in Bucha since 1996. “But since they do come, we share our experience and pain with them.”
He knows, perhaps better than most, the depths of the horrors entailed by the Russian occupation. He helped bury the dead as the bodies were taken off the street in shopping carts and wheeled to the cemetery. He was there when the excavations began so DNA specialists could try to identify bodies.
Now he has become a keeper of that memory. He walks people through pictures hanging in the church, depicting the first days after the reconquest of the city.
The photos help newcomers understand, he said. “It’s wrong if you come to Bucha and don’t tell the whole story,” he said. “These were not accidental deaths.”
He is also still a priest and there are still weddings and funerals and Sunday services.
On a Saturday morning in late June, he baptized a three-month-old girl, Uliana, whose parents were from Bucha, holding the child over a fountain while blessing her head with water.
Mr Halavin said he and other residents had been asked numerous times why they continue to live in the town.
Bucha, he said simply, is home.
“This is a place where their children were born,” he said, “where they planted trees, and now these trees are tall. It is their home and they have spent many happy years here. That is why they are not ready to to simply skip that part of their lives.”
Daria Mitiuk contributed reporting.