At the entrance to City Hall there is a mini-city built with gingerbread cookies next to a Christmas tree. “This year the great Christmas event is that we celebrate it together with the rest of Europe, like last year, and not on the date that had been imposed on us in Soviet times [el 7 de enero, la fecha de la Navidad del cristianismo ortodoxo que impera en Rusia]”, the mayor, Anatoli Fedoruk, said with satisfaction, one day before Christmas Eve. About 30 kilometers from kyiv, the city attracts attention because everything looks new, solid, in a reeling country riddled with war. It looks like a municipality of middle class families on the outskirts of any European capital. But it is Bucha, Ukraine, one of the symbols of the horror of the Russian invasion.
The atrocities suffered by the inhabitants during the 33 days of Russian occupation between February 26 and April 1, 2022 shocked the world. Yablonska Street was named the Avenue of Corpses, after the 78 bodies that lay in plain sight when the city was liberated. Its display was a warning and a threat to anyone who dared to leave the basements where the 2,300 residents who remained of the city’s 50,000 inhabitants were hiding. They killed 509 and kidnapped 79.
Today, some sections of the long avenue have new pavement, fixed sidewalks, and brand new signage. “It is very important to write a new page in our history; After psychological support, restoring and recovering the city is crucial,” says Fedoruk in his office. That is their commitment, along with bringing the guilty before international justice so that they can be tried and punished for war crimes. “We don’t want revenge and hatred, we want justice,” he insists.
Bucha is marked by the stigma of having been the scene of horror. “We are working hard to explain that it is not the same place as in 2022. It is not a city that suffers,” says Mijailina Skorik-Shkarivska, former vice mayor and president of the Institute for Sustainable Development of Communities, an NGO working on recovery. physical and emotional of the municipality. The city and its region have recovered 95% of the total 73,000 inhabitants who lived before the invasion. “They are not necessarily the same,” explains Skorik-Shkarivska. There are at least 12,000 new residents internally displaced by the war.
Anastasia Polianska, director of the regional development agency, her husband and their son are three of those new neighbors. They had decided to move to Bucha from Sumi, on the Russian border, before the occupation. They were attracted by the forests, the nursery schools, and its proximity to kyiv. The city is a mix of residential blocks with single-family houses, surrounded by green areas. “After everything bad that happened, what else can happen? That can’t happen twice,” he reflects. The city hosts frequent visits by international delegations. She usually tells them: “If you want to see the war, go somewhere else.”
Despite the efforts of the mayor and his team to start a new chapter and the resilience of the neighbors, no one forgets what was experienced there. Fedoruk, who stayed during the occupation – “I was elected in six elections, I couldn’t leave” – recounts how he changed hiding places daily. “The Russians were on safari and, in that hunt, the mayor was the number one target,” he says. “Every cell in my body was focused on surviving, I couldn’t make any mistakes.”
The priest Andrii Halavin also stayed. He remembers the constant shelling, the shaking ground, the battlefield that Bucha became. He points out remains of shrapnel on the walls of the white church with golden domes and two broken windows as a memorial. But what Saint Andrew and his priest are known for is the mass grave that he dug on the church grounds during the occupation, after convincing the Russians, to give temporary burial to 116 dead. He transported them, with the help of neighbors, in supermarket carts.
Inside the frozen temple, the photographs that documented the barbarism are exhibited. Halavin is impenetrable: “I can’t share my emotions from then. If I let myself be carried away by them, I would not be able to live.” “I can share the facts,” and he shows a video of the church choir on his cell phone. He points his finger at one of the singers, a young man. Below is a photo of his charred, mutilated body. “It’s inhumane.” And another in the same conditions, smaller, his son. “It’s extremely hard, every day. But I can’t have feelings. It is a weakness and I cannot allow it.”
Bucha wants to move forward. “We are celebrating, enjoying life, like any other city,” says Skoryk-Shkarivska in a warm cafe decorated with Christmas decorations. But as she herself recognizes: “Behind normality, there is this trauma.” “Everyone knows someone who died or saw people die. “It is very painful for families to pass through Yablonska Street.”
Vadim Yevdorkimenko has no choice. This 22-year-old young man, who works as a volunteer hairdresser with the military, tells of his particular ordeal, sitting in a room of a cultural center in front of the block where he lives, on that street. His sick father went to take refuge in a garage with a basement with a neighbor when the Russian troops arrived. On March 3, 2022, he went to the forest for firewood. “From then on, we lost all contact,” he laments.
They called him in mid-April to tell him that they had found the remains of several bodies, also burned, among which his father could be found. Until August of this year they did not confirm that it was indeed true. There are still 63 unidentified victims, according to the mayor. “I had not lost hope that it was not him, that he was actually somewhere else, like the front,” the boy confesses. “I’m trying to get over it, not think about the horror. “I try to be useful,” says Yevdorkimenko hastily. “I have worked with psychologists and I have understood that I have to move on with my life.”
They are in Bucha, in moving forward, although it is difficult. “I am very proud of the city. We are doing very well,” says Yuliia Nichvoloda, owner of a café destroyed in the bombings and rebuilt. Mother of five children to whom she tries to offer as normal a Christmas as possible, she admits without hesitation: “Emotionally, it is getting harder and harder.”
“Everyone tries to continue living, but it’s very tiring,” Nichvoloda shares without losing her smile. The war continues and the Bucha that tries to overcome the trauma lives daily, like the rest of the country, under the constant threat of bombing. In the cemetery, the rows reserved for soldiers who fell at the front do not stop growing. The relatives of the mobilized soldiers share their fears with Halavin every day. “We continue living perhaps because of the adrenaline,” says the priest, and because his existence depends on it: “We have no choice. “Either we fight, or we disappear.”
“I am saving all my feelings and emotions until the day of victory,” the priest concedes. “There is no doubt that we will restore Ukraine and it will be better, but our souls are very wounded. “We have to find a way to live and heal, and it is going to take a long time.” Meanwhile, Bucha continues to move forward, rebuilding a version of normality, determined not to succumb. “There are always moments for joy and Christmas is that. The Russians will never be able to steal that from us,” says Halavin, smiling.
