On the menu today: The grim chapters of this trip continue with visits to the Kyiv suburbs of Irpin and Bucha, sites of key early battles in the war, and the exhumed mass grave in the churchyard of Saint George and all the Saints. You’ll get a whole lot of pictures today, because while I can describe what is before me, it’s best for you to see it for yourself.
The Grim Realities of War
Kyiv, Ukraine — The war is still going on, but it is important to know that the Ukrainians are rebuilding what they can, where they can, sometimes strikingly rapidly. Just outside the city limits, near the E-40 highway, which runs west from the city center of Kyiv, there is a high-rise apartment building that has the unfortunate address of 9-A Chornobylska Street. (Maybe it’s time to stop naming things “Chernobyl.”) In March 2022, “fragments of a Russian missile damaged a gas pipe on the building’s facade. Fire quickly spread to most of the apartments: half of the 126 flats burned down completely, the rest were partially damaged. Four of the building’s residents were killed.” Getting out of the blazing high-rise must have felt like the Towering Inferno:
Our translator and guide, Igor Asaulenko, took the photo on the left shortly after the fire; the photo on the right is mine from Friday, August 25. The building was repaired, rebuilt, and reoccupied in a matter of months; people started moving back in November. A mural on the side of the building depicts a phoenix, rising from the ashes, in the colors of the Ukrainian flag:
The main highway connecting the suburb of Irpin and the city of Kyiv includes a bridge over the Irpin River. On February 25, 2022, the Ukrainian army concluded it had to destroy the bridge to prevent Russian heavy tanks from advancing into the city. Traffic is currently diverted to a small two-lane bridge nearby, but if you’re a pedestrian, you can walk right up to where the road ends into a pile of rubble. Someone has left a stroller, memorializing a mother and child killed by Russian shells not far from this spot:
But the Ukrainians have made considerable progress on the replacement bridge:
Everyone in Kyiv has their own “what I did during the early days of the war” story, probably not all that different from every American’s “where I was on 9/11” story. Igor said a bullet came through the wall of his mother’s house; thankfully she was unharmed.
Andrei, our driver, used to live in Donetsk, an industrial city in eastern Ukraine that, because of its proximity to the Russian border, became a major contested territory and was regularly harassed by Russian military forces. In 2014, like many others from his old city, he settled down in the Kyiv suburb of Irpin. “Irpin is the Little Donetsk,” he told us. In February 2022, as the Russians were advancing, he and his family were told to evacuate. They had two cars and had loaded up one and were preparing to load up another when something — he said a mine, but I think he meant a bomb or missile — damaged the second car beyond repair. They fled in the surviving car, and thankfully, Andrei and his family survived, and the rest of his family is now living in Ireland.
Once in Irpin, we visited the “Cemetery of the European Cars,” which is not far from the suburb’s cemetery for human beings. After the battles in Irpin, the streets were filled with wrecked cars, destroyed by Russian tanks, artillery shells, gunfire, and everything else you can imagine. The result is about 200 cars piled high in a parking lot separated by the cemetery — almost all rusted to a burnt orange, but a few have been turned into a form of art with paintings:
The red spray-painted stencil says, “death to the looters.” Reports were commonplace both here and elsewhere in Ukraine that Russian soldiers were stealing anything valuable not nailed down — not just food, booze, and valuables, but women’s clothing, cosmetics, furniture, paintings, kitchen appliances, and, in one odd story from Chernihiv, a toilet. Roughly 30 percent of Irpin was occupied.
Outside the Irpin city hall, we saw a car with a side shot through with holes, like Swiss cheese. A man was inside with his two young daughters, and said his name was Ruslan. He said he was not in the car when it was hit, that it was parked, but that something — again, Igor told us he said “mine,” but I don’t think a stationary car would hit a mine — pelted it with shrapnel:
Inside city hall, we met with Irpin’s deputy mayor, Andrii Kravchuk, who said that roughly 90 percent of Irpin residents had evacuated before the Russians arrived; those who stayed had no electricity or gas, and, of course, had to hide from and evade the Russian forces.
Kravchuk described the enormous task before the leaders and residents of his city once the Russian retreated. The first, and most grim, order of business was removing the bodies of those killed — both those who were killed and left dead in the streets, and bodies that had been buried in yards and parks because the constant shelling and fighting made it impossible to conduct proper funerals. The second was clearing the streets; as Kravchuk described, no vehicle could go more than 100 meters before running into a path obstructed by burned-out tanks, destroyed civilian cars, mines or other unexploded ordinance, and other wreckage.
Kravchuk told us that more than 400 buildings have been repaired in Irpin, although some had very modest damage, like broken windows. There are 100 damaged buildings left to repair, and generally those are the ones in the worst condition.
Like in Kovel in northwestern Ukraine, city leaders faced the thorny challenge of figuring out how to reopen the schools during a war, knowing that an air-raid alert could occur at any time. Much like the rest of the world during Covid, they used online and distance learning for a time, although Russian attacks on power stations periodically knocked out the electricity and internet. The schools now have bomb shelters, although some are not large enough for all of the children, so they will be attending school in rotating shifts — some in the morning, some later in the day. He credited Unicef for donating €5 million to repair schools and build bomb shelters.
It was time to leave Irpin and head north to adjacent Bucha, site of the infamous massacre. I dreaded visiting Bucha on this trip, but I knew that if I really wanted to understand the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I had to see it.
We were taking pictures of damaged houses on the outskirts of Bucha when Volodimir Makosii popped his head above a fence and asked if we wanted to see what used to be his house, and where he’s living now.
Makosii is a retired salesman of power tools. In February 2022, as Russian forces closed in on Bucha, a Ukrainian armored vehicle appeared in front of his house and told Makosii he had to evacuate, telling him that he had to pack suitcases and get out within two hours. As he packed, the Russians started to shell areas not far away and he could hear the explosions. He fled to stay with family in western Ukraine, and when he returned two weeks later, he found his house had burned to the ground. Makosii said the fire department is not far away, but the army wouldn’t allow the fire trucks to approach the scene because the Russians were shelling the area. The only things still recognizable in Makosii’s old house were the bathroom tiles:
Makosii said the first thing he did was fix a fence to keep the suburb’s now-abandoned dogs out of his yard. He started living in a nearby undamaged two-story storage shed with no heat and got through the rest of the winter.
When Makosii was showing us his destroyed home, he said to me through the translator, “Your colleagues built me a new one,” and I had no idea what he was talking about. It turns out the charitable organization To Ukraine with Love came along and built Makosii a new modular home. Makosii’s house was sponsored by the Chaves family in Utah and completed and donated to him on December 28, 2022:
May God bless To Ukraine with Love and the Chaves family for their generosity, and may God bless you, Volodimir Makosii. You’ve endured some exceptionally rough times and came out smiling on the other end:
The rest of Bucha didn’t offer much more to smile about. The good news is that many of the homes have been rebuilt, and one of the main avenues, which looked something like the “Highway of Death” from the Persian Gulf War, with a seemingly endless line of burned out tanks and corpses in the street, is now completely “normal,” with new homes lining both sides of the street:
In some of the footage of the aftermath of the battle of Bucha, you could see burned-out tanks and twisted wreckage in front of a sign for a supermarket with the logo ATB. That supermarket is now open again and full of shoppers going about their business. Bucha was apparently just another Ukrainian suburb, until the day it suddenly wasn’t, and now it is partially back to looking like just another suburb. Americans have imagined what it would be like to fight off invading Russians and their tanks in the streets of their suburban hometowns in movies such as Red Dawn. The residents of Bucha lived it.
But I must emphasize that only certain corners of Bucha are partially back to normal. There are still plenty of partially destroyed buildings standing around, sometimes decorated with graffiti or murals:
Finally, it was time to go to the Bucha’s Church of Saint Andrew and All Saints, located in the center of town. Russians occupied the suburb from March 3 to 31, 2022, and the grounds behind the church became a temporary mass grave for Bucha residents killed — like in Irpin, proper burials were impossible. After the Russians retreated, 116 bodies were exhumed, including 30 women and two children. A small plaque at the church entrance chillingly notes, “Most of the victims were killed by shots to the head at close range.” Several of the recovered bodies were found tied up:
Bucha residents completed a memorial wall this summer:
The patch of dirt behind the memorial in the church yard looks like just another patch of dirt anywhere else in the world — an utterly mundane site for an utterly unspeakable atrocity. The civilian residents of Bucha were no threat to anyone, and certainly no menace to Russia. Even if they knew things the invading Russians wanted to know, summary execution of unarmed civilians is a war crime.
The Russian soldiers committed these atrocities because they could, because they had the power, because they’re bullies, and because they’re not the least bit ashamed of beating up and murdering women, children, and senior citizens. The Russians in Bucha may well not have wanted to be there, so they took out their frustrations and anger on ordinary people who had done nothing wrong, and had simply been unlucky enough to live in the suburb that was in the Russians’ path. The battle to retake the suburbs of Bucha was difficult and bloody, but the Russians proved much less tough once they were up against Ukrainians who could shoot back.
A lot of arguments about the war feel very abstract, far away, and inconsequential when you’re staring at a churchyard that became, out of the blue one late winter, a mass grave for civilian men, women, and children. For example, you hear a lot about the level of corruption in the Ukrainian government. (As I laid out back in April, in terms of political corruption, Ukraine is either par for the course in eastern Europe, or slightly worse than the already low par for the course in the region.)
How corrupt were all those women the Russian forces executed by shooting them in the back of the head? The existence of past corruption in the Ukrainian government does not abrogate the innocence of Ukrainian civilians in the here and now.
The United Nations regularly provides updates of civilian casualties, counts that some Ukrainians contend wildly understate the true numbers, because so many people went missing during the battles and their bodies were never recovered. For what it’s worth, the U.N. count, as of August 13, is 9,444 Ukrainian civilians killed and 16,940 Ukrainian civilians injured. Of those, 545 of the dead and 1,156 of the injured were children.
What should be done about all those murdered children?
ADDENDUM: Friday night brought five or six air-raid alerts — some when I was walking out on the street, some when I was in my hotel. I didn’t hear any explosions or any other indications of trouble. But I’m starting to understand why so many Ukrainians don’t react much when they hear them — if they’re going off every hour or so, and nothing seems to happen, day after day for a year and a half, you aren’t necessarily going to run and sit in the nearest bomb shelter every time you hear the alert or siren.