You don’t forget that kind of thing
Seven months ago the Russian army retreated from the Kyiv area. Behind them the soldiers left looted buildings, villages and towns in ruins, and hundreds of dead civilians. Bucha became the primary symbol of this retreat. The images of bodies lying on the “road of death” made talks between Russia and Ukraine impossible for a long time. Seven months later, Kholod is using the testimony of civilians to reconstruct what happened in Bucha during the occupation.
On the ground floors of multi-use buildings, there were holes instead of businesses. The pet store and flower stall on Tarasivska street were destroyed: broken windows, charred walls, a thick layer of broken glass covering the doorsteps. The stray cats and dogs had vanished from town streets. That’s the Bucha that Tatyana Levdar, 48, saw when she went back home at the end of May.
Tatyana remembers initially being unable to shake the feeling that all this was just “the set of a movie about vampires and cannibals.” Levdar says she used to keep a lot of meat, as well as berries for making compote, in her freezer, but now the freezer compartment of her fridge is empty. She doesn’t keep extra on hand, since she doesn’t know what tomorrow will bring.
Tatyana is the head of the tenant collective in a large tenant-owned apartment building on Tarasivska street in southwest Bucha. She spends all her available time restoring the building premises and courtyards. Over the summer and early fall she removed several 30-ton dumpsters of trash and fixed the sprinkler systems in the courtyard and the playground. She got the building’s plumbing and heating repaired, revived the plantings, and retiled the sidewalk of the ping-pong area where tank treads had gouged out ruts. There is still a lot of work to do.
The efforts of local residents are gradually bringing Bucha back to life. The townfolk go out into the forest without being afraid of mines, and visit the grocery stores, which are open again. The town is repairing the bridges that were destroyed, and new asphalt has been laid on Vokzalna street, which had been covered with broken, burned-out military vehicles for months while the town was occupied.
Electricity is often turned off in Bucha since several heat and power stations in the outskirts of town were damaged by missile strikes. Curfew’s still observed in the city and emergency services only go out up to 11 at night. So at night, Tatyana Levdar has to do everything herself, from clamping off leaking pipes to extracting residents who get stuck in elevators.
Next to 28-year-old English teacher Anastasia Derkach’s building in Lisova Bucha, a neighborhood in the southeast part of the city, there are prefab homes the locals call “little train cars.” They’re one-story constructions with rooms for people who lost their homes. Volunteers and other people from the city help people get settled in. Anastasia contributed a microwave oven for one of the rooms.
“One out of every five people has lost someone,” explains Derkach. “Out on the street you just run into someone you know and begin listing the names of acquaintances you have in common, and it turns out that one person was shot, but another one was miraculously saved, while a third one never came back. But it’s usually the ones whose people are all still alive who’ll share their experiences. A whole lot of people are silent. And I’m afraid they’ll be that way forever.”
Anastasia’s husband lost his job when the shopping center where he worked was bombed. The government gives him financial assistance. For a while the family also received food baskets from the government. The Derkaches used the money from a one-off financial support payment from the UN to repair the windows in their apartment. Many Bucha residents got through the first few months this way.
“People were downcast,” Anastasia says, remembering what it was like after she returned. “Yes, we’re alive, yes, we have food to eat and somewhere to sleep, but you don’t forget that kind of thing. It’s fear, probably. And that fear breeds suspicion,” Derkach recalls. “At first, after I returned, I’d run home as soon as the sun set and slam down the blinds on the windows and sit there without leaving.”
Chapter 1. All we had to do was live our lovely life
At the end of April 2014, sixteen-year-old Anna Bocharova had to flee her native Lugansk under an assumed name. Separatists from the self-proclaimed LNR [the “Lugansk People’s Republic.” – Trans.] had promised a bounty for capturing her father, the Ukrainian soldier Roman Bocharov. Concerned about what was happening in Lugansk, Bocharov had joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Pictures of him appeared on the lists of “killers” on the Tribunal website, where separatists had started posting the personal information of Ukrainian soldiers.
On January 1st, 2016, while he was patrolling near the Russian border, Bocharov was severely injured and died at the hospital. After his death, a comrade gave his widow and children, whom the war had rendered homeless, an apartment in the suburbs of the capital. That’s how the Bocharovs ended up in Bucha.
Anna quickly befriended her new neighbors in the residential complex. Together the neighbors planted a grassy lawn in the courtyard and every New Year’s without fail they gathered outside and wished each other a Happy New year after the countdown. “The kids would run around and play, somebody would even make shashlik.”
Anna describes the Bucha that took them in as a city that was quiet, green, and beautiful, and also very modern: “We had everything: lots of shopping centers, movie theaters, restaurants, and high-quality supermarkets where you could buy fresh-baked breads and pastries. We even had our own McDonald’s, which is impressive for such a little town. Folks from Bucha had no need to ever go out to Kyiv.”
“There are a lot of great restaurants in Bucha,” says 28-year-old Lina Polishchuk, a beginning photographer. Regardless of the fact that it’s just 30 kilometers to the Kyiv city center, Lina and her fiancé Alexey (the name has been changed) decided in 2020 to have their wedding in Bucha, instead of going out somewhere. “We held our wedding photo shoot in a Bucha park.”
Lina and Alexey had been in the same school in Irpin since kindergarten. In high school they started dating, and after they got their master’s degrees, they moved to Bucha to build their own home.
Alexey worked at a glass factory in Hostomel; it’s around three kilometers from there to Bucha. Lina opened a dress rental service in her friend’s photo studio. The Polishchuks got a dog and bought a car, and a year ago they had a baby.
“We’d almost finished building our house,” Lina recalls. “All we had to do was just move in and live our own lovely life.”
In 2014 Alexander Titov brought his family (his wife, son, and daughter) from Donetsk to Hostomel, to get away from the war that was breaking out. Alexander had been teaching geography in Bucha’s Lyceum No. 4 since 2015, and also worked as a referee for the Ukrainian Soccer Association. As Alexander himself jokes, his job was to run around the field in a yellow shirt and get in people’s way while they tried to play soccer.
The Titovs affectionately call their house “Lyudochka” in honor of the former owner: “when she was here there were always a lot of guests in the house, and there were tomatoes and strawberries in the garden beds.” The family acquired pets: the squirrel Grigory, the cat Shisha, and a big shaggy dog they called White. For the last six months, Alexander had been building his wife a jewelry studio on the plot next to their house. The studio was almost finished. All they still had to do was install the windowsills and do the final finishing.
For a few days after the 20th of February, 2022, Alexander and his colleagues carried medicine and water down to the basement of the school, preparing a refuge in case of war. Titov recalls that not a single one of his coworkers at the school took this preparation seriously; they didn’t believe anyone would bomb Bucha.
Chapter 2. Bucha under fire
The morning of February 24th, Alexander Titov was getting ready to drop the kids off at school and daycare, and then go to work, when his wife told him, “it looks like the war’s begun.” Alexander didn’t believe it at first. It was only when he went outside and saw a Ukrainian soldier having a smoke next to an APC that he caught himself thinking, “something’s definitely not right.” Titov never did make it to work that day: he got stuck in a huge traffic jam of vehicles trying to get out of the city.
At five in the morning, Lina Polishchuk was walking her dog by her building, four kilometers away from the Hostomel airport. She’d left her phone at home and didn’t find out the war had begun until she got back. A few hours later, Polishchuk was already in the basement. “At 12:07, I remember it like it just happened, I heard the sound of helicopters and fighter jets,” she recalls. “I grabbed my kid and ran barefoot, and they started demolishing the airport.”
Antonov, the Hostomel airport (all of three and a half kilometers from Bucha), was one of the first places to come under fire. Russian forces were planning to use it as a staging area for the invasion of Kyiv. After aerial bombardment, Russian assault forces landed on the airstrip. The battle for Antonov lasted several days. Russian soldiers turned up in Bucha for the first time on February 25th.
That morning, a column of armored prisoner transport vans with the letter V painted on the side went past the Titovs’ building toward the village of Stoianka. Two days later, Alexander decided to reconnoiter the route the Russian military vehicles had taken and found the vehicles’ remains by the Irpin river, at the bridge the Ukrainian Armed Forces had blown up. “Four vehicles had burned to the ground and were completely shredded, but the fifth had remained intact. I went inside and found the occupiers’ dry rations, and crates of grenades, and a set of extra uniforms with Special Rapid Deployment Force labels, and huge riot shields. It felt as though they were heading out there with their tear-gas grenades to put down civilian protests, not confront the resistance of an army,” says Titov.
Tatyana Levdar tried to live life as usual for the first few days after the war began. She kept going to work at the housing and utilities office, having first sent the other office workers home. She tried to walk her dog outside, though the dog didn’t want to go outside because it was afraid of the loud noise of the explosions. But when shells started hitting residential buildings, Tatyana took more precautions. She stopped leaving her building to go to work and she started taking the dog out only in the courtyard next to her building.
On the February 26th, Lina Polishchuk’s building was hit too. “The shell hit one of the buildings and the family that lived there died. A man from the next building came out to see what happened, but he was blown up by the next shell,” recalls Polishchuk. “That’s when it got truly terrifying: we realized they were shooting at private residences. After that I refused to step foot out of the basement at all. My father-in-law would go out, he’d make soup, but I wouldn’t even go out to use the bathroom. I used a bucket.”
The same morning a shock wave rocked Anna Bocharova’s five-story building. She and her fiancé had already been sleeping in the basement for two nights. “There was a really powerful shock. A woman standing by the entrance into the basement fell down, and when we ran over to help her get back up, another blast followed, several times more powerful than the first,” Bocharova relates. “The second blast blew out the door by the entrance into the basement and raised a thick cloud of dust, and it started to smell strongly of gas. Clearly a gas main had burst. We started getting out of the basement, because the gas was quickly filling the entire place, and running to the basement of a neighboring building. Outside the building we saw a wounded man whose stomach was torn wide open. He’d probably been walking past our building when all that came in.”
When Ruslan, Anastasia Derkach’s husband, found out the war had begun, he immediately went to a 24-hour store and bought a supply of chocolate candy and Mivina [a type of ramen noodles. – Kholod], then got some cash from an ATM and went to visit his mother, who lived in the city center. Anastasia stayed behind in Lisova Bucha to wait through the shelling, along with her grandmother, mother, and daughter.
Derkach recalls that before the war, she and her daughter would drink hot cocoa in their favorite café, and then in the winter they’d go visit the so-called winter village in the Bucha city center, where every year a big skating rink was set up, as well as a merry-go-round for the children and a New Year tree. Now the family was sitting with their building neighbors in a basement. To make sure they didn’t let in anyone they didn’t know, the building residents decided to use a code word, palianytsia [a type of Ukrainian wheat bread. The word is difficult for Russian-speakers to pronounce correctly, which is why Ukrainians often use it to determine whether someone is “one of ours.” – Kholod]
The evening of February 26th, one of Anastasia’s neighbors went out of the basement to have a smoke. But a few minutes later, the girl ran back in and bolted the door shut. She told her neighbors that she’d seen two unfamiliar men. Soon there was a knock at the basement door.
The newcomers didn’t know the code word. When asked who they were, they said “we’re with you.” “When the men asked them what the mayor’s name was, the strangers at the door mumbled something unintelligible,” recalls Anastasia. “Our guys figured it out pretty quick and told them there was no room in the basement, and they left. I wrote right away about what happened in the Viber chat for our neighborhood, and within an hour several messages came in from people I knew saying that people had also tried to get into their basements. I think it was Russian assault forces dressed in civilian clothes, they probably wanted to get in past the front that way, make it to Kyiv. The bridges were blown up, after all.”
In those first days, hundreds of people tried to get out of town, regardless of the fighting and shooting. Alexander and Katerina Titov remember working with EMTs to get people out of shot-up cars at an intersection between Irpin, Bucha, and Hostomel on February 28th. “In one car there were bodies of a young couple. The guy had a bullet wound in his neck, the girl was shot through the stomach and legs. They didn’t look to be any older than 25… they were buckled in and hadn’t been able to get out,” says Titov, adding that on that day he saw a great many cars riddled with bullet holes with the bodies of passengers inside.
At the end of February, the electricity started going out in several areas of Bucha. By the beginning of March, almost the whole city was without water, gas, and electricity. “Like the cartoon about the planet Shelezyaka, ‘Sorry, we don’t have anything,’” recalls Tatyana Levdar. [A reference to a planet in Kir Bulychev’s science fiction stories on which robots have exhausted the planet’s natural resources by building factories that produce robots, which build more factories, which produce more robots, and so on. The phrase Levdar is recalling is probably the description of the planet: ‘No natural resources. No water. No vegetation. Inhabited by robots.’ – Trans.] “As a modern person who is used to comfort, who earns money to support that comfort, it was wierd for me to make food outside on a campfire. I’d roam around the apartment, trying to figure out how to wrap myself in even more blankets. We lived in total darkness because some of my residents who lit candles at night had their windows shot out.”
Ksenia Zubchuk’s apartment in downtown Bucha was also left without electricity or heat. Ksenia, her husband, and their two children moved to an unfinished home in a private community on the outskirts of town. The home itself had just a roof and bare walls, but right next to it, in the guest house, there was a kitchenette with a small propane tank and a completely finished banya. That banya is what saved Ksenia’s family and their neighbors from freezing and starving when the community lost electricity and gas. The Zubchuks fired up the banya, not only keeping themselves warm but heating water from the well too.
Electricity and gas had already disappeared from Lina and Alexey Polishchuk’s building back on February 26th, so the couple had to come up with ways to warm and feed an infant. “We cobbled together a tent out of canvas for the baby, so he’d be warmer. The neighbors siphoned gas out of their lawn mowers for us, we had a generator, and we used it to run our ‘blower’ [heater. – Kholod] in those first days,” Lina recalls. “Later, when the gas ran out, my husband managed to dig up a burzhuika [a simple type of primus stove. – Trans.] and we coated it with clay so it wouldn’t smoke, and we kept warm that way. But it smoked anyway, we just about suffocated. So in the end we threw it out and sat in the cold. I had to wash and change the baby despite the freezing temperature. Everything was covered in dust in the basement. The bottle of formula was standing there right next to construction tools.”
The fighting in the city was constant, and people tried to only leave their basements during the lull from four to six in the morning. “We’d go up into the building in that interval and warm up the baby’s formula on an electric stove,” says Polishchuk. “If you had time, you could use the bathroom, but if not, you couldn’t—and then you raced back downstairs.”
Anna Zaritskaya, a 32-year old Bucha resident, admits that as a person with a disability, she’d never have made it through the occupation without the help from her neighbors. “They didn’t let any aid into the city. Medicine and groceries didn’t make it all the way to us. We were just cut off from everything and we had no news at all,” Zaritskaya recalls. “It was horrific. The neighbors cooked food on a campfire in the courtyard, the men chopped wood and the woman made soup. We ate once a day and sometimes we were able to get some hot water and have tea.”
Chapter 3. We ran, so they ran; we weren’t afraid, so they weren’t afraid either
A Ukrainian Armed Forces unit arrived in Hostomel, where there had been intensive fighting since the first day of the war, on the morning of March 3rd. Ukrainian soldiers prepared for battle, digging trenches in the Titovs’ neighbors’ property. Over the next several hours, Alexander hauled bags of broken bricks, helping them set up fortifications.
“Once the fighting started, we waited it out for whole days at a time in a canning closet in the basement of our house. In the first days of the war we got used to falling asleep to the noise of artillery and we didn’t go down to the basement, but now we had to: it was very noisy, they were using heavy weaponry,” recalls Titov. The next morning, once things had quieted down, he came up from the basement and looked out. Burned-out weaponry sat smoldering on the nearby garden beds, and Titov counted 30 bodies of dead Russian soldiers on the battlefield.
“I went out into the courtyard and saw that our fence was bowed in. I’d just picked a full magazine for an automatic rifle up off the ground when my neighbor comes running up to me saying, ‘Sasha, there’s a fighter there in my shed,’” recounts Alexander.
That’s when Titov went to some Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers who were taking the patches off the Russian corpses and taking pictures of the names. They all went over to the neighbor’s shed and found the Russian. “Our boys disarmed him and tied his hands, then blindfolded him and took him to the glass factory to interrogate him. I was there during the interrogation and found out he was a corporal named Ponomarev. I think he was a tank gunner. He hid because, as I understood it, he’d fallen from the tank and broken several ribs.”
Soon the Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers were informed of a new attack on the city. In the hour the Titovs spent trying to decide whether to leave their house or stay put, a shell hit a garage 20 meters from their house. “The garage flew to smithereens and the blast wave blew out our windows. A few minutes later came the next hit, and we knew we weren’t going anywhere, so we settled back down in the basement again,” says Alexander. “For a while we sat hugging the jars of food, just praying a shell wouldn’t hit our house, but when the heavy trap door in the floor over our heads flew up half a meter, we knew our property had taken its first hit.”
Alexander would lift the trap door a little from time to time, checking to see whether the house had caught fire. Titov couldn’t see anything through the narrow gap except clouds of dust and smoke. As soon as there was a lull of several minutes, the Titovs came out of the basement. Katerina and Alexander ordered the children to get dressed, while they themselves took the first three backpacks that came to hand and started shoving things in them.
“As they pulled on their clothes, the kids kept plugging their ears to keep from going deaf. I had to kick out the front door; it was bowed out like a tin can,” recounts Titov. “We ran out into the courtyard and saw out of the corner of our eyes that my wife’s studio was missing a wall, and all around us there was flying ash, and there was a strong burning smell, and it was dark and there wasn’t a soul in sight. I started shouting to our fighters, so they’d at least tell us which way to run.”
The Titovs didn’t get any response. When they caught sight of a motionless body in a Ukrainian uniform in the nearest trench, they ran through the splinters and glass shards to the glass factory across the street, where there might be still be some Ukrainian soldiers. “When we got to the middle of the intersection, something whistled over our heads and a column of fire shot up. By that time we had no clue what was happening. We ran along some fences and got to the forest, then headed for Bucha, where our kids’ godparents live.”
The Titovs ran six more kilometers through the woods. “Our kids were real troopers,” says Alexander. “We ran, so they ran; we weren’t afraid, so they weren’t afraid either. By five that evening we’d already made it to Bucha, we managed to make it before dark. We knew people had already been sitting there without electricity or heat for several long days.”
The Titovs spent March 5th with relatives in Bucha, as the family decided what do to next. Alexander admits to thinking about going back home to Hostomel, especially since their pets had been left behind there, but that evening he decided once and for all that they had to save themselves.
“That night somebody started knocking at the door. We were really scared, because it was pitch black, you couldn’t even light a candle, and somebody’s here banging on the door with frightening insistence. A woman shouts, ‘Open up, please, open up, help us!’ We opened the door to find out what had happened, and that woman tells us that her husband Vladimir had been shot in the leg when he was going to check in on his relatives in the residential complex next to them,” recalls Alexander. “She and her husband’s sister had been carrying him towards their building for four hours. This woman begged us, sobbing, to help, and me and my kids’ godfather followed her outside, although our wives asked us to please not go: it was after curfew, and dark, and scary. We knew that we might actually not come back.”
When Alexander and his kids’ godfather found Vladimir, the 50-year-old man was lying on the ground, screaming from pain. He’d been shot through both hips. “We heaved him up on our arms and carried him to his building on Tarasivska street. We left him in his entryway; taking up to his apartment on the eighth floor was impossible, because it was too much to carry, and the elevator wasn’t working, and it wouldn’t have been humane—he was continually screaming in pain,’ recalls Titov. “We just laid him down on some styrofoam, covered him, and left. I didn’t have any painkiller, and the ambulance dispatcher said she couldn’t help since she’d lost contact with her ambulances. It made me totally furious, to be honest, and I tormented myself for days afterward that I hadn’t actually helped.”
Irina Yazova took care of Vladimir after he’d been left in the entryway of his section of the apartment building. Yazova, a doctor, lived in the second section of the building on Tarasivska street. For the four days it took for the ambulance to make it to them, Yazova anesthetized the patient, washed his wounds, and changed his dressings. On March 9th, Tatyana Levdar saw the neighbors carry Vladimir on a thick blanket out into the building courtyard and load him into the ambulance which had finally come for him.
During the occupation, Irina Yazova also delivered her neighbor’s baby in an apartment with no electricity on the first floor of the unheated building. Although Irina had never delivered a baby before, a little girl, Alisa, was born at seven o’clock in the morning. Both mother and child looked healthy to Tatyana Levdar when she stopped in later to visit the new mother.
Chapter 4. Another world
On March 6th, after their first night in Bucha, the Titovs and their children’s godparents decided to leave the city, which was without power, on foot through Irpin. In Romanivka, a residential complex two kilometers away from Irpin, residents of various occupied cities in Kyiv oblast were waiting for the evacuation buses that were ready to take them into the capital. To get to buses, they had to get across the Irpin river, but the bridge had been destroyed.
“At eight in the morning we were already on the road, walking from Bucha to Irpin, and then we trudged for a long time along the Irpin railroad tracks. And that whole time there was firing on Irpin from Bucha. Thins were continually blowing up around us. The awareness that we could be hit by an explosion or struck by a bullet at any moment was really scary. But we were lucky, and a guy in a minibus who drove by gave us a ride all the way to the end of Irpin, right up to the bridge.”
At the bridge, the Titovs saw a bunch of strollers and other things that were hard to get across the river, as well as dozens of shot-up, burned-out cars with bodies inside.
“On the bridge there was this huge line of people, like a big humming anthill. People were crossing the river on boards; Ukrainian soldiers were carrying children in their arms to the other shore and shouting at the grown-ups, telling them to keep in single file and go faster,” recalls Alexander. “Once we got to the other shore, we saw dead bodies by the Saint George Cathedral. They’d been covered up with sacks, but you could still see them.”
A woman, a man, and two children had died earlier that day by the Saint George Cathedral during an attack.
The Titovs only had the last hundred meters to run to get to the buses when a shell hit a roadside building. “We fell flat on the ground a couple of seconds before this insane explosion roared out over us. But we couldn’t stop, because a bus was waiting for our group of twenty people. I grabbed a grandma I didn’t know, who was gasping for air, by the arm and moved forward, climbing over fallen trees,” Alexander says. A photo of him helping an unknown woman run to the bus was published by the BBC Russian Service. “And then we’re finally jumping into the bus, and in literally five minutes it gets us to Kyiv. We get off the bus and me and Katya just stand holding each other and sobbing. The streetlights are working—holy moly, there’s electricity, people are walking down the street, stores are open… we landed in another world.”
Chapter 5. “Is that man going to shoot us?”
On March 9th the first “green corridor” opened in Bucha. Before that, the only way to get out of the occupied city had been to go over the ruins of the destroyed bridge in Irpin or to go along the railroad, which was also soon destroyed.
That morning a Russian tank drove right up to where 31-year-old Olga Lazorenko lived in Lisova Bucha. When Olga’s husband went out to check on the situation, two Russian soldiers ran up to him. They commanded Vitaly (his name has been changed) to tell them about Ukrainian military in the city, threatening to shoot him in the leg if he didn’t obey. Soon they let Lazorenko go; he didn’t have any information, the man had spent the entire beginning of March in a basement with his family. In parting, the Russian soldiers advised Vitaly to “get the fuck out of here.”
Fifteen minutes later the entire Lazorenko family came out. They went on foot on purpose, so the soldiers could see from far away that there were three children with them. Vitaly held his hands high above his head. Skirting the checkpoint, the Lazorenkos came out onto Yablunska street, which is now called the “road of death;” this is the street where the bodies of many murdered civilians were found.
The Lazorenkos didn’t dare go to the Bucha city council, where the buses were supposed to be coming; instead they went in the opposite direction, toward Irpin, where there were also evacuations. “It was scary,” Olga recalls. “I insisted that my daughter not look around, there were people’s bodies everywhere, Yablunska was already overflowing with them even then. At certain points when I grabbed her arm, she squeezed her eyes shut tight, otherwise she looked at the ground the whole way.”
The Derkach family also decided to leave by the “green corridors.” Anastasia and her grandmother, mother, and daughter went to the city council building on Energetikov street. “We were walking in a group of several people, with some pieces of white fabric we’d prepared in advance to show the soldiers we don’t have weapons and we’re going to the evacuation point. We were walking through the train station, or rather, we were running, we were so scared. We ran into the first checkpoint completely out of the blue on Vokzalna street. Russian soldiers pointed their weapons at us, but let us go when we started waving our white rags,” says Anastasia Derkach. “But at the second checkpoint, they ordered us to put our hands up. That image still stands before my eyes even now: I’m walking in my own country with my hands up, while my daughter asks, ‘Is that man going to shoot us?’”
The sounds of shooting trailed after the group hurrying to the evacuation point. When the group avoided checkpoints and started climbing up Vokzalna street, there were spent casings underfoot, and on Energetikov street there were several corpses of civilians, reports Derkach: “I was afraid to look closely, I just ran, covering my daughter’s eyes with my hands.”
An hour later Derkach and her family reached the street in front of the city council, where there were already crowds of exhausted people with children and pets in cobbled-together pet carriers. Hungry and loaded down with their things, Bucha residents stood in the cold for several hours, afraid to leave in case they missed the buses. A line of cars formed nearby. White pieces of paper with the words “People” and “Children” were glued to the cars’ windshields, and somebody had tied white towels to the rearview mirrors. Anna Zaritskaya, a Bucha resident with a disability who was waiting to be evacuated, recalled that up until that moment she’d never imagined that the color white could be associated with something so horrific and terrifying.
Anna Bocharova, the daughter of the killed Ukrainian soldier, sat in a car as she waited for her turn to be evacuated: she wasn’t sure her boyfriend, a man of enlistment age, would be allowed onto a bus. Anna’s mother and younger sister had gotten to the city council another way and were going get out of town on public transportation. As she got out of the car to find her relatives in the crowd of people at the city council, Bocharova saw that a tank with Russian soldiers sitting on top of it was driving straight toward her. Bocharova hid behind the nearest car. A soldier who came down from the tank asked the girl sitting in the driver’s seat of the car, “How do we get to the hospital?”
Anastasia Derkach also saw the Russian tank driving to the hospital. She also saw a large military vehicle in which she saw several pairs of feet sticking out at an unnaturally high level, clad in rough boots. Anastasia thinks the vehicle might have been loaded with the bodies of dead soldiers.
Several Bucha residents entered into conversation with the soldiers. Bocharova heard an elderly Ukrainian woman talking with some soldiers. When the woman asked, “What are you doing here,” the young soldiers answered, “See, nobody’s ever attacked Russia, and so we want you to never be attacked either." Despite Anna Derkach’s repeated requests not to endanger the children standing in front of them, a man behind her began shouting insults at the soldiers. The soldiers ignored him, but took another man, who had videoed the scene on his phone, by the arms and carried him away.
At 4 p.m. someone came out of the city council building, which had housed the city administration during peacetime, and announced to the gathered crowd that the buses hadn’t been allowed in and the evacuation was canceled. Anastasia realized they wouldn’t be able to get back home by the time it got dark and arranged with someone she knew who lived nearby to stay the night with him. At the same time a column of cars displaying white sheets moved ahead, at their own risk, without waiting for the buses.
“It was a restless night; they kept shooting, something was burning, there was constant shelling,” recalls Derkach. “By 10:30 the next morning we were already standing in front of the city council, waiting again for news about the buses. A lot of people were trying to find women with small children, so they could put them in their cars. They were especially looking for infants; for some reason they thought the soldiers would see them and not shoot. I overheard somebody refuse [to offer space in his car to] a woman with a twelve-year-old boy; the guy said the boy was too big and only a woman with a small child would fit.”
Toward evening the Derkaches decided that the buses probably weren’t coming again. “There were a whole lot of cars, each one of them getting searched, and just one road. We would’ve needed to leave by at least one p.m. to have time to make it through the Russian checkpoints by dark. And then my mom starts panicking, she starts running around looking for spots for us,” says Anastasia. “By some miracle she found our neighbor and convinced him to take us with him. Grandma had to go in a different car, since there’s no way we fit all together.”
The Bucha residents who were still there on the tenth of March say that the buses came after lunch that day. At the checkpoints, Russian soldiers were searching cars thoroughly and taking some men out of the vehicles. Olga Lazorenko, who evacuated via Irpin, witnessed her husband and other men being pulled out of a bus and forced to strip to the waist. The Russians were looking for nationalist tattoos. Lina Polishchuk recalls that at each checkpoint, while they were being searched, the soldiers held her and her husband at gunpoint.
The path of the evacuation from Bucha was roundabout because the bridges connecting the city to Kyiv had been blown up. Cars and buses took Warsaw Highway by Vorzel, Mikhaylovka-Rubezhovka, and Zabuchya, skirting around Irpin from the west. The cars and buses avoided Dmitrovka and Kapitanovka, getting off onto Zhitomirsky highway and going through Belgorodka to get to Kyiv. It took three hours to go what took 25 minutes in peacetime.
At the split between Vorzel and Bucha, Ksenia Zubchuk, who had evacuated by car on the ninth of March, saw two burned-out cars. In the front seat of one of them she saw human body parts. At the checkpoint at the turn-off to the village of Mikhaylovka-Rubezhovka, Ksenia counted around ten scorched cars.
“On the way I saw shot-up cars and military vehicles with the letter Z and blown-up houses. […] There were a whole lot of cars that were upside-down, regular civilian cars,” recalls Anna Bocharova.
Lina Polishchuk, who left Bucha by car, also talks about the “endless number” of shot-up cars on the shoulder of Zhitomir highway. “Cleary they’d been shot by tanks, because there were still charred bodies of people inside, frozen in the position they’d been in when they were still alive. Some corpses had fallen out of their cars onto the road. Many of the bodies were children. We couldn’t screw our eyes shut, turn away, not look—we had to drive forward carefully, since god forbid we run over them,” says Polishchuk, and admits that earlier she would’ve definitely vomited at a sight like that. Then she bursts into sobs.
Chapter 6. “Unarmed people can’t be where there’s shooting.”
Of the 213 apartments in the building on Tarasivska street, only five were still occupied on March 12th. Tatyana Levdar was one of the last to leave the residential complex. “It was a difficult decision for me,” admits Levdar. “I didn’t want to abandon the remaining residents. There was still a man of extremely advanced age, with his wheelchair-bound wife and five cats. There was still a wonderful family of doctors. But the one who cemented my resolve was my husband: for some reason he was convinced that soon there’d be violence in the city. He said something that burned into my memory: “Unarmed people can’t be where there’s shooting.”
Afterwards, Tatyana found out that on the seventeenth of March, Ruslan Nechiporenko, a resident of the fourth section of her building, was shot in front of his 14-year-old son as they headed out by bicycle to get humanitarian aid. “His wife, Alla, told me later that they had needed medicine, and her husband had taken it upon himself to go get them from the volunteers, and his son Yura went with him. As a result, they killed Ruslan, and they also shot Yura, but they just wounded his arm.”
The residents who remained saw Alla Nechiporenko and her mother approach the Russian soldiers to come to an agreement about her retrieving her husband’s body. “She got the body and buried Ruslan in the courtyard,” says Levdar. “That’s how we buried people: in courtyards, in mass graves—there was no taking them to the cemetery, no arranging funeral services, nothing! And even that was only if you were lucky enough to get the body out from under the shooting.”
At the very end of February, the village of Blistavitsa, a little west of Hostomel, ended up under Russian control. On March 12th, after two weeks of living under the occupation, the family of 20-year-old Maxim Kostenko (whose first and last names have been changed at his request) drove out of Blistavnitsa, headed for Bucha.
The Kostenkos lived at the edge of the village, right by the forest where the battle was continuing. Maxim describes the way the windows rattled constantly from explosions, and how Russian soldiers showed up twice to search his home. They weren’t interested in things; they just wanted to find “little Nazis.”
The family decided to leave, but they were stopped at one of the checkpoints. “They started searching us,” recalls Maxim. “They broke two laptops and all our phones, except mine: my sister hid it in her hood. My mother and my sister and her little boy were let through, but my dad and my sister’s husband and me were detained along with the rest of the men.”
The detainees were quartered in an apartment next to the checkpoint. For eight people they were given one ration of canned food. “Nobody beat us, thank god, although their commander treated us rough,” Kostenko says. “In the middle of the night they brought in a man who’d served with the Ukrainian Armed Forces during the ATO [anti-terrorist operation. – Trans.] and beat him up in front of us, then left and took him with them, promising to let us go when they came back. I don’t know what ever happened to that man. They really bashed his legs and feet, and called him scum. They shouted about the children of Donbass he’d killed.”
By morning the soldiers hadn’t come back, so Maxim and his father and his sister’s husband ran toward the Bucha city center. Three days later, volunteers managed to get them to Kyiv on a bus that was bringing humanitarian aid into the city.
Chapter 7. It wasn’t this man who’d take my life
Until the war, 41-year-old Yury (he asked us not to give his last name) worked as a rehabilitation therapist for people with addictions. His work was supported by a Protestant church in Borodianka, a village 25 kilometers northwest of Bucha. After February 24th, Yury was one of the ones who didn’t leave, instead staying in the city to help his neighbors survive the occupation.
“This is my sixth year in the Lord; before this I was an alcoholic for twenty years,” says Yury. He survived an extreme drinking binge that lasted eleven days during his divorce, and having been “on the other side of life,” he came to the Protestant church, conquered his addiction, and decided to help those with similar problems.
The last few days of February, Yury and his mentees set up a field kitchen in the courtyard of a building by the Bucha high school. His helpers got wheelbarrows and combed the neighborhood for groceries, pooling everything they found. Yury delivered groceries, water, and medicine to residents who were afraid to leave their apartments and basements.
“Eighty-year-old grandmas and grandpas were afraid, some of them couldn’t even move around without using a stool [as a walker]. The only thing that made them come out to see us was hunger. We gave them hot water, tea, coffee, soup—when there was something to make it out of,” recalls Yury. “Lots of the grandmas were completely immobile, we brought food and, when we could, adult diapers to them in their homes.”
Yury describes how, during the occupation, people ate canned cat food and grain soaked in cold water, sometimes even food from the trash: “We had to survive, so we were forced to shift our principles some.”
Yury studied the area during his food-finding forays and saw people wrapped in white cloth going out in the middle of bombardments to cart dead bodies away in wheelbarrows. “The bodies were covered with what used to be pillowcases; feet in regular sneakers and jeans were sticking out from under the rags. They weren’t soldiers in special boots, but civilians, regular people, whose bodies the city residents, also regular people, came across in the road; and out of compassion for their fellow man, out of respect for the dead, they tried to take them away and bury them somehow,” he explains. “As I understood it, the guys were just afraid that wild animals would start stripping the bodies for spare parts, they were trying to provide civilized burials.”
Tatyana Levdar personally knows people who collected bodies from city streets: “In peacetime they had leadership positions in our city, and during the war they changed into white lab coats, made big labels saying ‘Cargo 200’ and stuck them on cars, and went out under fire and picked up bodies, putting them in black bags. I couldn’t understand how they could sleep after that; even though I’ve seen people’s dead bodies on our streets, I didn’t turn them over, after all, I didn’t look into their dead eyes, I haven’t touched a dead body.”
At the end of February, one of Yury’s mentees joined a territorial defense unit. On March 12th, Yury helped get a bedridden comrade into a medical evacuation convoy. Yury and his last remaining mentee took the joint decision not to leave the city: “I had an inner conviction that I shouldn’t go; I saw that the most vulnerable people were staying, and I felt driven to help them.”
The first few days, when the kitchen in the high school had just started operating, lots of people came to the courtyard. But soon Russian soldiers dug in nearby. The shelling intensified and the streets were deserted. “The majority left, evacuated; the ones who stayed stopped coming out of their basements. People were utterly despondent,” recalls Yury. “I knew the war wasn’t ending anytime soon, and it was important to me not to let these people—elderly, sick people—withdraw into themselves, not to let them give in to the stupor and shock. They turned into vegetables. We needed to occupy them, distract them, show them they weren’t going to die from hunger, keep their spirit up, inspire them to have resilience of spirit.”
Yury and his comrade continued scavenging groceries and water and delivering them to apartments and basements. Once time as they were walking up to the Grand Bourget residential complex on the west side of Bucha, where they usually got water, Yury was struck by the condition of the buildings: “Every single window broken, the buildings black and charred.” The young guys living there told Yury that the Russian military had pounded the residential complex the night before because a call to the Ukrainian Armed Services had been made from it. A friend of the people Yury was talking to had been killed by shrapnel. The Russian soldiers hadn’t let them dig the body out of the debris.
After March 12th there was practically nobody left in Yury’s multi-story apartment building. Everyone had evacuated. In mid-March, Yury and his mentee were in Yury’s apartment and heard a loud noise, but they thought it was probably just a passer-by dragging away some furniture for firewood—a common occurrence in Bucha at the end of March, according to Yury, since people cooked on campfires and used their own and other people’s furniture as fuel. But soon Yury heard a bang in his building entrance. They heard the sound repeatedly, and it was getting louder. Yury guessed what it was: Russian soldiers using some kind of explosive device to break into apartments.
“Right then I felt like a rodent that somebody had come to drown,” says Yury. “I realized that the building was being cleared from the bottom up, meaning that sooner or later they’d find us. We figured they’d shoot us on sight, out of surprise, they’d think we’d been waiting to ambush them. And to keep that from happening, we went down ourselves, with our hands in the air.”
The Russians conducted an interrogation, making them take off their clothes and checking whether they had prison or army tattoos. The Russians hadn’t been expecting to find two strong, athletic men in the city after it was evacuated. They refused to believe that Yury and his partner were with a church. “They must have thought we were soldiers, so they pointed their rifles at us and took us down to the ground floor. We were interrogated again there, as they pushed us up against the wall, and then they got even more guards and brought us out of the building and took us to a daycare.”
The soldiers made Yury and his partner kneel by the wall of the daycare building and put their hands behind their heads, then lie face-down on the pavement. Yury felt a rifle being held up to his head. The soldiers started interrogating them again, asking how he and his partner had ended up here. Yura remembers there being several voices: “Many of them spoke with a Caucasian accent, and there was another accent, sort of soft; Buryat, maybe?”
The detainees weren’t beaten. Yury lifted his head briefly and saw that five more people had been brought over to the wall. There were black bags over their heads and their hands were taped together behind their backs. The Russian soldiers’ faces were covered by masks. The soldiers would rotate out every so often, but they kept their rifles pointed at the prisoners. Yury didn’t look around for long, since they soon made him press his head back to the ground.
Soon the group of detainees was separated, the people with bags over their heads led to one courtyard, Yury and his comrade led at gunpoint to another. Yury and his mentee were placed next to a barbeque grill left by a resident and held there from noon until late at night.
After a couple of hours as a captive, Yury asked one of the soldiers about what awaited him and his mentee. As Yury remembers, the guy just smirked and said, “You’ll be here.” “I wasn’t afraid,” Yury explains. “In my life I’ve seen so many instances of God’s hand, they were so clear, that I’ve realized that if something’s preordained, then it will inevitably happen. But if it isn’t, then it won’t. So I had complete inner peace. I didn’t want to be the kind of person who can’t even die with dignity. I didn’t want to be a terrified dog with its tail between its legs, I wanted to die like a man in his own land. Not come off like a cowardly jackal before the people who think we’re fascists and Banderites.”
Then Yury and the soldier who had his rifle trained on him got into a conversation.
“Calmly, without getting all lofty about it, I asked him: ‘You do know, right, that you’re the aggressor country, that you’re the ones who invaded us?’ ‘But what makes you say that, why are you calling us enemies?’ the soldier asks. ‘I didn’t say the word ‘enemy,’ I pointed out. ‘But you are the aggressor, because I’m standing here in my home under the barrel of your gun. Not the other way around. You are the one who’s where you shouldn’t be, you are the one who came here and is telling me what to do. I’m not the one telling you what to do. The bottom line is that you’re the one who put me face down on the pavement. Because you are the aggressor country.’ It was said without aggression, without anger, I was just stating a fact. I wanted to get it across to him that he was making a mistake. ‘But you’re the ones with missiles…’ he began, but I interrupted him sharply. ‘Let’s not delude ourselves: neither you nor I are here because of missiles. I’m in my home, but you yourself don’t even know your purpose for being here. What exactly have I done to you, a resident of Russia, to make you come over here to my home and stick a rifle in my face?’ He couldn’t think of a response.”
Yury recalls that he wasn’t disturbed by the thought that these could’ve been his last words. He just felt the urge to have his say. “To let the word out. I knew that if something lofty was speaking through me, then that word would find his heart and not put me in danger. I knew that the time and place were right, that if this person’s asking questions and sharing his thoughts, it means something’s moving him, urging him to find out more. If he’d been cold and detached, he’d have stood there silently, keeping us at gunpoint. But since we started talking, it meant his heart had been moved. It means there’s something alive in him. And I knew that it wasn’t this man who’d take my life.”
Late that night the commander went up to the soldiers standing guard over the captives. Soon the soldiers informed Yury and his partner that they were being allowed to leave.
Chapter 8. One long day
On March 31st, Yury and his mentee were going through the area around the obliterated Epicenter shopping center, looking for food. They heard the roar of engines and ducked into an underground parking lot, where they remained until the rumble of passing military vehicles faded away. That night, it was quiet in the city for the first time since February 24th. “The silence was oppressive, bleak,” recalls Yury. “When you live for more than a month with constant noise, with the sound of battles and shelling, you can’t help being astonished by silence.”
The next morning, when Yura and his partner went outside, a car with a Ukrainian flag drove past them. “The driver shouted, ‘Glory to Ukraine, guys!’ at us, and we didn’t believe it. It was the first day of April, after all, we figured it was a mean joke,” says Yury. “Then the cars really started coming, and they didn’t go just anywhere, they came right into our building courtyard. They brought generators, and people started arriving, soldiers and police and civilians. We were informed that this was the spot where medical aid would be available and humanitarian aid would be distributed.”
* * *
Criminal investigators spent four months in liberated Bucha. They spent almost the whole summer investigating war crimes committed against the civilian population by Russian soldiers. On August 8th, city authorities announced that the number of those who’d died had been counted—to the extent that counting was possible.
There were over 450 bodies found in Bucha, of which 419 bore signs of violent death. According to Bucha’s deputy mayor, Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivska, over 50 victims could not be identified. On September 2nd, those bodies were buried in a Bucha cemetery along with bodies that had not been collected by relatives.
Anna Bocharova recalls that at first she’d been afraid to go back to Bucha: she didn’t know what she’d feel once she was inside her ruined home. “It was horrific for me to see corpses on the streets I know so well, even just in pictures, and I didn’t know how I’d react seeing that in person,” she explains. She was able to overcome her fear, and on April 20th she and her fiancé came back home for the first time. Anna admits to choking back the pain on the way in. She couldn’t keep from crying as she looked at the shattered buildings, the burned-out gas stations, the obliterated roads and bridges.
“When we drove up to our apartment complex, it was like I lived through the shell hitting our home all over again,” says Bocharova. Anna and her fiancé went up to their fifth-floor apartment, checked the apartment door to make sure it hadn’t been booby-trapped, and went inside. “It was cold and unwelcoming inside, but I was really happy to see my things, happy they’d waited for me,” Anna recalls. “I was smiling at every little nook and cranny, and—as stupid as it sounds—smiling because my stuffed animals were okay.”
Tatyana Levdar admits that if she hadn’t had to repair the residential complex entrusted to her all by herself, she’d probably have fallen into a deep depression. “Everybody says I’m strong, but they just don’t know how many hours I spent sobbing, looking at those first pictures of my home in April,” she says. “It took me 12 years to get the house all fixed up like that: we put in the fence, planted the grass, and installed the sprinklers ourselves. Two years ago I remodeled, I spent more than a few hundred thousand hryvnias to get all five building entrances updated. There were automated package lockers in each building entrance, so my residents didn’t have to go to the post office. Residents could go down in their robes and house slippers and use the app to open the little cubby and get their package. I was really proud of getting that system set up, I always tried to make my building residents’ lives better and more comfortable. But those Russian soldiers came and tore the package lockers off the walls, turned my building entrances into pig wallows, pulled the doors off their hinges, shot out the video cameras, and flattened the automatic gates with their tanks! I spend 12 years on it and then they come in and multiply it all by zero!”
The residents of Tatyana Levdar’s building on Tarasivska street have a group chat that’s overflowing with evidence of looting. The Bucha residents who returned home found that TVs, light bulbs, vacuum cleaners, bedroom doors, and even toilets had all gone missing. People carefully documented the losses and shared pictures and videos of their looted apartments with each other. Some residents were met with mattresses reeking of smoke, piles of dirty dishes, and human excrement.
After Yury’s apartment was searched by Russian soldiers, his phone and laptop weren’t the only things missing; his electric razor, socks, deodorant, and a brand-new, unopened package of shoe inserts were all gone too. When Anastasia Derkach got back, she noted the absence of her clothes, jewelry, and her daughter’s toddler bed. But what made her the most upset was her daughter’s broken, empty piggybank. She never could figure out who had such an urgent need for the 200 hryvnias it held.
The Derkach family returned to Bucha in June. “When I first drove into the city, I was so shocked!” Anastasia remembers. “You’re driving through, remembering that right here there’d been a building where this pile of charred who-knows-what is now, and there’d been apartments inside it, and people had lived in them. And the same thing here, and there, and over there. […] When I saw that, I felt the same thing I felt on February 24th all over again. I basically catch myself thinking that I’m living through one day, one long day, and it keeps not ending.”
During the occupation, a 15-year-old student of Alexander Titov’s named Katya Shishkina died. The car she was in was shot up at the exit to Borodianka. Her parents survived, but Katya was fatally wounded. Alexander was the advisor for her year in school, and he knew that her family were refugees from Donetsk, just like him. “She was really positive and genuinely honest. And she also helped her friend rehearse for the Miss School contest, choreographing a dance and insisting on crisp, defined moves. We jokingly called her the producer,” recalls Alexander Titov.
The Titovs came back home at the end of May and immediately began repairing “Lyudochka,” patching the roof and putting the windows and doors back in, and by fall they had returned Katerina’s studio—which was missing its roof and one wall when they got back—to its former glory. The Titovs also found their dog, White, who was healthy, although now he was even more afraid of thunder. They did not find their cat, Shisha, but they got a new one, a stray who went right over to their daughter to be picked up.
Alexander’s children attend school remotely, since their school in Hostomel hasn’t been rebuilt yet. Classes are also held remotely in Bucha’s Lyceum No. 4, where Alexander teaches. Alexander explains that in Kyiv oblast, the only educational facilities that are allowed to have students physically attend class are ones that are close to bomb shelters. But many schools in Bucha are already having in-person classes.
After the war began, Yury called his ex-wife, whom he hadn’t spoken to in many years, and asked her to marry him. She accepted. She also found her faith because of the war, and the former couple forgave each other their past offenses.
The family of the little baby girl that was born during the occupation, in the apartment with no power in the building on Tarasivska street, also came back to Bucha. Tatyana Levdar often sees the little girl in the courtyard. Eight-month-old Alisa sits in her stroller and beams at everyone who walks by.
