Bucha Gets a Remake, but Pain Lingers Behind the Facade

BUCHA, Ukraine — There is a line of tidy houses on Vokzalna Street, where crumbling homes once lined a roadway littered with burned-out Russian tanks. There are neat sidewalks and fresh pavement with blue and yellow bunting hanging overhead. And there are backhoes and bulldozers plowing across a construction site where a new home goods store will replace a previous one that was burned to the ground.

They are remaking Bucha, the suburb of Kyiv, the capital, that became synonymous with Russian atrocities in the earliest days of the invasion of Ukraine, where civilians were tortured, raped or executed, their bodies left to rot in the streets.

More than a year after Ukrainian forces wrested back Bucha from Russian troops, the town has drawn international investment that has physically transformed it, and it has become a stopping point for delegations of foreign leaders who come through almost weekly.

And yet behind the veneer of revitalization, the pain that suffused Bucha during its month of horror under Russian occupation still lingers.

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 corpse he believes was found burned in a garage. “This case is not closed; it’s complicated.”

The remains of at least 80 people killed in Bucha during the occupation in March 2022 have not been officially identified, local officials said. But a week ago, the town unveiled a memorial with the names of 501 people killed during that occupation, with an official acknowledgment that the list was incomplete.

That juxtaposition — jarring in its contrasts — now defines life in Bucha.

Walking through the streets of this leafy suburb, it is possible to look past the bullet holes piercing storefront windows and the shrapnel marks peppering building facades to see a more peaceful place emerging.

There is 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 an apartment building’s stoop.

Schools have been refurbished, and there are new shops on the main streets. Soaring cranes fill the skyline where workers repair high-rise residences damaged in the fighting.

“It’s very difficult to get that balance right — between memorializing, rebuilding and moving forward,” said Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivska, the deputy mayor of Bucha. “We don’t want to just be a place of tragedy.”

Specifically citing Chernobyl, the site of a nuclear disaster in Ukraine in 1986, she said Bucha did not want to become a place for foreign tourists looking to gawk at catastrophe.

Much of Ms. Skoryk-Shkarivska’s work is focused on creating a sustainable development plan. She said that she hoped for an environmentally friendly suburb, and had proposals for an innovative technology hub.

Economic development partnerships are what are needed now, she said, and rather than humanitarian aid, Bucha needs long-term recovery support to be self-sustaining again. The mayor was recently in London taking part in the Ukraine Recovery Conference, meeting with international supporters.

“We want to be the story of Ukrainian of success,” Ms. Skoryk-Shkarivska said. “Yes, a place of tragedy with proper remembrance programs, but to be a place of success, of recovery.”

Amid the rebuilding, the search for answers for people like Mr. Yevdokymenko is wrenching.

Personal documents belonging to his father, Oleksiy Yevdokymenko, were discovered on charred human remains found in a burned garage, along with those of at least five others. But because of the bodies’ degraded states, they have never been conclusively identified.

“It was all pointing to this fact,” Vadym Yevdokymenko said. “But no one could say anything specific.”

The remains are currently buried in a portion of a local cemetery reserved for bodies that are formally unidentified, with the number 320 — a serial number used for record-keeping purposes — written on a plastic sign and affixed to a wooden cross. Mr. Yevdokymenko hopes they can one day put his father’s name there.

Mr. Yevdokymenko recently provided a DNA sample to be tested against the remains. He did the same last spring, with no results, but he hopes this time is different.

“The situation with these bodies, it’s delayed now, and they are rebuilding houses,” he said with a sigh.

Still, there is no question that the physical rehabilitation of Bucha is something to celebrate, and the houses that have been rebuilt on Vokzalna Street are perhaps the most obvious evidence of transformation.

The street was the scene of some of Bucha’s heaviest fighting. Now, new ranch-style houses are being erected behind metal gates.

These homes were built in a public-private partnership, partly funded by the foundation run by Howard Buffett, Warren Buffett’s son, and carried out by Global Empowerment Mission, an American disaster relief charity.

“It provides hope and lets people see that things can change,” Mr. Buffett said in a phone interview. “They can get better. And you have to do that during a war.”

Iryna Abramova’s home on Vokzalna Street stands as a metaphor for the halting, imperfect nature of Bucha’s reconstruction. It was rebuilt after it was reduced to rubble by Russian forces. Her husband, Oleh Abramov, was dragged from their home and executed by Russian soldiers.

“I am not afraid of anything after what I have lived through,” said Ms. Abramova, 49.

The home gave her hope for a new start, and she was handed the keys this spring. The exterior is pretty, with white walls and a brown roof.

But behind the front door, it is empty, with exposed wires and unfinished drywall, and she still cannot live there. The city council is responsible for furnishing the home, and Ms. Abramova said they told her there was simply no money right now.

“On the outside, the picture is nice, but,” she said, gesturing around her. “They promised so many nice things.”

Local officials are doing their best to provide for the community, both in the rebuilding and in the identifying of the dead, but Ms. Skoryk-Shkarivska acknowledged that has been challenging. For all of the financial support the city has received, it is only a fraction of what is needed, she said, and the number of city council staff members to oversee rebuilding is small.

“Now is the hardest period,” she said. “Almost a year and a half after occupation, with war still raging — people are exhausted.”

While the houses on Vokzalna Street have become a destination for international delegations to see Bucha’s rebirth, the All Saints Church is the place they go to to try to understand some of its bleakest moments.

At least 119 bodies of civilians were buried in a mass grave on the church grounds while Russian forces occupied Bucha for weeks. A makeshift memorial now stands at the site.

“We don’t ask these people to come here,” said Andriy Halavin, a priest in Bucha since 1996. “But since they do come, we share with them our experience and pain.”

He knows, perhaps better than most, the depths of the horrors that the Russian occupation brought. He helped bury the dead when the bodies were collected from the streets in shopping carts and wheeled to the churchyard. He was there when the exhumations began so that DNA specialists could try to identify corpses.

Now, he has become a keeper of that memory. He walks people through photographs displayed in the church, depicting the first days after the city was retaken.

The photographs help newcomers understand, he said. “It is wrong if you come to Bucha and you don’t tell the full 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 christened a 3-month-old girl, Uliana, whose parents were from Bucha, holding the child over a fountain as he blessed her head with water.

Mr. Halavin said that he and other residents had been asked countless times why they continue living in the city.

Bucha, he said simply, is home.

“This is a place where their kids were born,” he said, “where they planted trees, and now these trees are tall. It’s their home, and they’ve lived many happy years here. That’s why they are not ready to simply cross out that part of their lives.”

Daria Mitiuk contributed reporting.