The Brief is reported by Eloise Barry, Madeleine Carlisle, Chad de Guzman, Leslie Dickstein, Mariah Espada, Tara Law, Sanya Mansoor, Ciara Nugent, Billy Perrigo,
S
omething terrible happened in the base-
ment of the children’s summer camp in Bucha.
The steps leading down to its unlocked door were
lousy with trash from Russian army rations: dried
macaroni, empty juice boxes, tins of meat. Standing at
the bottom of the stairwell, Volodymyr Roslik, the camp
groundskeeper, looked up and raised an eyebrow at me, as
if to offer one more chance to reconsider going in.
The airless tunnel behind that door resembled a se-
ries of torture chambers divided by concrete walls. There
was a room that appeared to be used for executions at
the front, its walls pocked with bullet holes. In the next
room stood two chairs, an empty jug, and a wooden plank.
In another, the Russians had brought in two metal bed-
springs and leaned them against the wall. To Ukrainian
investigators, the tableaux suggested that prisoners were
tortured here: tied to the bedsprings and interrogated;
strapped to the plank and waterboarded.
“The signs of torture were also on the bodies,” says
Taras Shapravskyi, the deputy mayor of Bucha. Five dead
men in civilian clothes were found in that chamber, he told
me. “They had burns, bruises, lacerations.” It was dark
when the groundskeeper took me there the following week
and shone a fashlight in the room where they had lain.
Two pools of dried blood ran down a wall into the dirt, next
to a feece hat that appeared to have a bullet hole.
The Russian forces withdrew in the first days of April
from this commuter town 15 miles outside the Ukrainian
capital. Before the invasion, Bucha was well known in
Kyiv as a place to get away, to drop kids off at the sum-
mer camp for a couple of weeks or take them to a ropes
course called the Crazy Squirrel. Now Bucha is a byword
for war crimes, like Srebrenica or My Lai. Scores of bod-
ies littered the streets when the Russians left. A mass
grave still occupies the churchyard. Shops and homes
lie vacant, pillaged, and burned. More than 400 civil-
ians were found dead here, according to local authori-
ties, nearly all with fatal gunshot wounds. “These were
not the victims of shelling or aerial bombardment,” says
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky. “These were intentional killings,
close-up and systematic.”
Inside the summer camp for children ages 7 to 16, the
Russians set up a garrison from which to terrorize the
town, shooting at civilian passersby and bringing pris-
oners down into the basement. Local officials and wit-
nesses to the violence told me the occupying force dis-
played a total lack of military discipline. Empty liquor
bottles lay among snipers’ nests dug beside a playground.
Dirty mattresses and cigarette butts littered an adminis-
trative building, which was strewn with an odd trove of
loot apparently taken from local homes: an old boom box,
costume jewelry, a leather briefcase, none of it valuable
enough for the occupiers to carry as they fed. In one
room, the Russians left a pile of hair shorn off with clip-
pers. On the foor of another sat two lumps of human
excrement. “This was no army,” says Roslik, the camp
groundskeeper. “This was a horde.”
The scenes of depraviTy they left
behind have changed the course of the
war in Ukraine. The Russian army’s
crimes, described in both Kyiv and
Washington as a campaign resembling
genocide, have hardened the will of
Western governments to arm Ukraine
and narrowed the space for a negoti-
ated peace. Leaders from across Eu-
rope have come through Bucha to see
the devastation for themselves. TheyTHE BRIEF OPENER
△
A crane lifts a
corpse from a
mass grave in
Bucha; authorities
say more than
400 civilians
were murdered