I was introduced to a Bucha resident via a Ukrainian man in my Telegram group who is in Austria with his wife and child. He is receiving chemotherapy. His wife works as a hairdresser, and their son is attending local school. He suggested I contact his mother-in-law, a Bucha resident, who lived in Bucha for the first weeks of occupation and then fled, to the a village south of Kyiv, and since returned to her home.
When I arrive in Kyiv, I have two long phone calls with his mother-in-law in Bucha (I am not using her name because she was not keen on a formal interview), in which she told me all about how they left Bucha, how they returned, what happened in the meantime. She told me about her own family story, how she had once lived in the industrial east of Ukraine, trained as an engineer, she knew the mixed sentiment, that some locals did feel pro-Russian, that they were skeptical of the “regime” in Kyiv. This was years ago. Pre-2014. She talks about an old sentiment that western Ukraine was enjoying a lazy agricultural life breathing clean air while eastern Ukrainian was working for the whole country, breathing heavily polluted air.
She has a close relative who lived in Mariupol, spent a month and a half in a bomb shelter there while the Russian army pounded his city, then fled…to Russia, to Taganrog. He has since returned to Mariupol. It is difficult when close family don’t see eye to eye. You try and talk about things other than the elephant in the room. She tells me until recently Mariupol residents even had free utility bills, as part of a broader incentive program Russia is using to lure people back to the city. This relative now has a job in construction. So first Russia destroyed his city, and now it employs him to rebuild it. Those now living in Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia also receive higher pensions.
We turn to the present, and she suggests I come to Bucha on Tuesday morning and meet with her neighbour, the local librarian, Lidia Grigorievna. She slowly walks me through how to get there with public transport: first ride the metro to the end station (northwest Kyiv), then take a marshrutka, pay the driver, and tell him I want to get off a the house of culture, next to the former glass factory. I am taking notes on tiny hotel stationary and running out of pages. She tells me of the 160 Bucha residents who died during the first two weeks of the war; they are buried in the local cemetery. The local priest has been spearheading many recovery efforts. She tells me delegations from foreign countries, politicians and journalists have been visiting Bucha since April. She recalls Boris Johnson having to sit out an air raid siren. But Bucha is well protected, she says, with air defence systems, just like Kyiv.
We talk about territories near the front lines, where some residents who refused to evacuate harbour mixed sentiments. Those near Russia, like in Kupyansk, who watched years of Russian TV. We talk about those who refuse to leave and then find themselves in the line of fire, like a couple in their 70s recently, living only 20 kilometres from the front.
We speak a second time by phone, the night before I am due to go to Bucha. She will not be able to meet me, but Lidia Grigorievna will be there, 10am, at the library. She recalls how they evacuated to the south, via trains from Kyiv. Bucha was occupied for 1 month and 10 days. Slowly, after March 31, 2022, people started to return to see what happened to their homes. Homes had been selectively burned down by the occupiers, she recalls. They had lists. They knew who lived where and had which profession. When the Russians came, people lived in cellars. The bridge to Irpin was blown up. 400-500 people walked out of Bucha on foot, they handed over dogs, elderly who could not walk anymore. This was on March 10, 2002. The young Russian soldiers had asked to be fed, for coffee. At the Kyiv train station they had been shoved onto trains to Vinnytisa and then to Zhmerynka. Volunteers met them in this central Ukrainian town. They were fed and given mattresses to sleep on in school halls.
She cuts off her story of the past and switches to the present. I write down all the precise directions (turn left, turn right, walk 30m, through the tunnel). The next morning I crawl into a mini-bus older than me, pay about 40 UAH (€1), and take a seat by the window. It is mostly men on board, mostly looking like they are about to go work construction jobs. We drive out of Kyiv, past strip malls and hypermarkets, and head straight through Hostomel. You still see anti-tank crosses everywhere on the sides of the road. There are checkpoints, some manned, some not. The destruction in Hostomel is overwhelming. You see the power of the bombs Russian rained down on this airport town with the damage that remains.
After Hostomel, the road turns into a deep forest, and you see the outlines of the bedroom community Bucha was built to be: homes and apartments set in the woods with shops and restaurants to serve them, all a short drive from Kyiv. We pass a bridge reconstruction on the left. I think back to the images of the Irpin bridge. I wonder if it is the same one (I do not think so based on the map, but the imagery looks eerily familiar).
As we drive through the beautiful forests of Bucha, it is hard to imagine such horrors took place here. I think back to the first resident I met from Bucha. It was March 8, 2022, and she was standing in front of me at Vienna’s central train station holding a six month old baby. Next to her was her elderly mother wearing a long brown fur coat. She told me she and all of her neighbours were hiding in their cellars. She decided she could not sit like that with her baby. She walked right up to the Russian soldiers and asked to be able to leave. They gave her one hour. She took what she could in plastic bags, and left. I asked her back then what she needed. Diapers, formula? Nothing, she said, just cigarettes. I went and bought her four packs. That baby must now be a toddler.
I ask the driver, per instructions, to tell me when we reach the old glass factory / house of culture. He does not respond. I ask again. He grunts something like sit down. I sit down. We drive out of the forest streets towards fields and agriculture, and I start to worry I might have missed my stop, but then the bus turns, we pass a pack of stray dogs, and we stop, in front of an old glass factory with a house of culture across the street. It is the old Bucha, the Bucha without new villas. Just across the field in the other direction is Irpin. The Russians had occupied Bucha and the Ukrainian army was fighting back from Irpin, which meant this spot, where I get off the bus, was in the crossfire. I am standing on a dusty country road which Russian tanks stood on. There are no visible potholes; that has all been repaired. But if you look up, and Lidia Grigorievna later shows me, you see the damage to the top floors of the apartment building. Residents still live in it, of course.
It is eerily quiet on the street at 10am on this hot August Tuesday. I walk inside the house of culture, and begin to poke around, when I am greeted by Lidia Grigorievna, 72, local librarian, who invites me into the library for a chat. It is neat and tidy and books for children have been arranged by theme: summer. But there are not many kids, she explains. Many went abroad. I notice one of the shelves is missing a label. She later explains it was the shelf for Russian literature. They are not really sure what to do. Do you stop reading Pushkin and Tolstoy? But the whole world reads them as classics? So for now, that shelf has no label, lodged between “Ukrainian classics” and “international classics”. I snap a quick photo.
A black cat with white paws greets us as we sit at the table. I pull out my little notebook, and begin writing as Lidia Grigorievna starts talking. She is cautious at first, but soon loses her inhibition, and eagerly tells me her story. She weaves from past to present and back again. When she refers to the Russians, she calls them Rashisti, a derogatory term many in Ukraine now use meaning “Russian fascists”.
“Soldiers lived even here in the library”, she recalls. “There were tanks all along the street outside. I live just one street over, towards Irpin. There was one tank for every three houses.”
She recalls the attack on the airport in Hostomel. She remembers the amazing Mriya and how it used to fly above Bucha, the unique sound it made. On February 24, in the morning, she awoke to the smell of gasoline, the sky was black, airplanes in the sky. Her adult son (52, she had him young, she explains) came in.
“It’s war, Mama.”
Lidia Grigorievna didn’t know what to do. Pack a bag with documents. But some of her documents were in her desk in the library. Without a second thought, she set out on foot that morning towards the library, walking right past the Russian soldiers. They yelled at her, woman, where are you going?! She even spoke with them, explained Ukrainians did not need saving, contrary to the Russian propaganda the soldiers had been fed. The smell of smoke was heavy in the air. In the stores, the shelves were nearly empty. In a panic, everyone was trying to buy something. Filling up bathtubs with water. She explains she is grateful to her late husband — he worked in construction, he built their house with a cellar. Not everyone had one.
By February 25 the Russians had come from Belarus and were shooting at the Ukrainian army in Irpin from Bucha. Some residents tried to flee then. Lidia Grigorievna did not leave until March 10. An artillery shell flew into the side of her house but did not explode. They sat in the cellar. There was fighting all around them. Tanks were burning. She thinks the Kadyrovtsi came around March 8. They did shoot to kill at random.
One evening four Russian soldiers came to her house, they smelled the scent of her son trying to cook something on an open fire. They grabbed her son, and pointed a gun to his head. She shouted to them, and instinctively told a tall tale which saved his life. “Don’t touch him, he served like you did, in Afghanistan”, she said to the officer. The officer seemed to have believed it. They put the gun down. Lidia Grigorievna’s son had served in the Soviet army in the late 1980s, but in Angola. But in the moment, the right words came out of her mouth (she herself seems still surprised how she managed this), and they appear to have saved her son’s life.
Everyone lived in fear. There was a sniper set up across the road. They had to walk to get water. By mid-March, residents were given 30 minutes to leave. This is how Lidia Grigorievna ended up, with her neighbour I spoke with by phone, evacuating to central Ukraine for some time. They saw people arriving even barefoot. After a month in the shelter, they decided to come home, to Bucha. Lidia Grigorievna’s daughter in law and grandson had left Bucha on March 12 for Germany. Her son remained, and is in the army reserves. He is a repair specialist.
There are funerals every week. There are also many patriots. Humanitarian aid arrived after Bucha was liberated. She was even gifted a donated laptop for the library. She came back to the library for the first time on April 20. The Russians had slept there, but they did not take anything. In her home, they had taken all her son’s clothes and shoes. They had lived like pigs, even getting engine oil on the bedroom comforters. The violence of the Russians, as she recalls it, was selective and random. They burned down some houses. They shot some civilians. They left the bodies of their own men. “There were bodies everywhere,” Lidia Grigorievna recalls. They did not take their corpses with them.
Listening to her stories, about this woman or that neighbour, I begin to put together a picture of each family’s individual Bucha hell, because what happened to one family did not repeat itself immediately next door. She talks of the past, of holidays with her late husband in Crimea. She has a sister there now. They do not communicate. What can be said now?
Lidia Grigorievna tells me 500 people were killed in Bucha alone. Fewer civilians died in Irpin, she explains, because the Ukrainian army was there. She talks about a new sense of camaraderie amongst residents. There are Facebook groups. She puts out tomatoes in front of her house with a sign “free to take”. IDPs have arrived from other parts of Ukraine and are building and buying homes in Bucha. She has new neighbours, a family from Donetsk. Others came from Kramatorsk.
She mentions victims in passing. A female school teacher they killed for having read the history of Ukraine aloud to them. A young man who lost a leg and an arm. We talk about psychological resources. Very briefly the door to the library opens and a psychologist walks in. She says hello, but I can see very clearly she does not want to talk nor give an interview. She gives me a look that says a thousand words.
We turn to the past again. Lidia Grigorievna is slightly annoyed with her son. He took down the satellite dish which provided Russian TV channels. But she misses the soap operas! She recommends a Polish-Ukrainian soap opera to me “Coffee with Cardamom”. 10 episodes, she says. You will love it.
Back to the looting. They took microwaves, toilets, TVs, computers, even electric kettles. She recalls the Russians could not believe “they (Ukrainians) have asphalt and toilets in their villages”.
When the air raid sirens go on at night now, they still turn off their lights. I think back to Kyiv where no one does anything. The memories are different here. I ask about the war, the outlook. She tells me what nearly everyone else on my trip to Kyiv says, that it will not end soon; no one knows how much longer it will go on for. An Iranian drone landed somewhere in Irpin in early August. It made such an explosion.
Lidia Grigorievna tells me she sometimes goes to the cemetery, she sees the graves of local men who died on the front. She knew them. You know them all, she says, and it’s really painful. You cry and cry.
“You know, I was never in Russia? I dreamed of visiting Lake Baikal one day, but then they had the putch in 1991, and my husband said we should cancel. Then I wanted to go to Vladivostok, but my husband had to have an operation. We always went to Crimea with him. I also love the Baltics.”
When she returned home to Bucha, she cried for three days. Her home was standing, but they had to fix all the doors, windows (this is still a work in progress). She is making lists for her son what she wants to do to fix the house. Replace the mirrors they broke.
Chickens showed up, they just appeared one day. So now she has chickens, too.
She walks me to the bus stop. It is sweltering in the heat. Eventually, the minibus appears. But first, a modern long air conditioned bus. That was a gift from Europe, she explains. It is only for local rides around Bucha. I wait for the old mini-bus. We drive back towards Kyiv, feeling every pothole, smelling all the smells, and on that drive I notice even more ruined buildings, despite the normality which central Bucha now gives off. The scars of war are still very much visible for anyone with an open eye.
I ride the subway back to central Kyiv. That afternoon I am due to interview several more volunteers helping IDPs and working on front-line evacuations. It feels almost Arizona-hot in the sun. I was thinking about how hard it is to piece together hundreds, thousands of firsthand stories. Because everyone experienced a different Bucha. I think about the victims of Russian war crimes who I know personally, how a split second decision by an idiot drunken teenage soldier from Siberia impacts a Ukrainian family for a lifetime, for generations. The randomness of it all. That I cannot process. How a 72 year old librarian can be calmly sitting in front of me explaining which words came out of her mouth in a moment under extreme pressure for which she had no time to mentally prepare for, how that ended up saving the life of her 52 year old son.
These conversations are not a history of what happened Bucha, but rather a thread in the quilt of histories.