and basements, and everyone I spoke
to noted how young the occupiers had
seemed. At a cultural center where vol-
unteers were distributing sugar, eggs,
diapers, and other basic provisions, res-
idents huddled around power cords
connected to diesel generators, charging
their phones and reading the news for
the first time in weeks. They described
the Russian soldiers mainly as volatile
looters. When the troops left the city,
their vehicles were filled with TVs, car-
pets, electronics, appliances, and other
stolen goods.
The mayor, Yuriy Bova, wanted to
show me the city hall. “What was the
point of this?” he asked, gesturing at
overturned filing cabinets and smashed
computers. Menstrual pads were glued
to a door below graffiti that read “Slava
Rossii!!!”
Across town, Bova took me to a con-
fectionery plant that had manufactured
products for Oreo, Milka, and Nabisco.
The Russians who had been stationed
there appeared to have subsisted largely
on the warehouse stock: discarded
chocolate-bar wrappers and cookie
boxes were as ubiquitous as expended
ammunition casings. Dozens of crates
of unused rockets were still stacked near
the factory’s assembly line. All the of-
fices had been ransacked. In a confer-
ence room whose windows were barri-
caded with jumbo tins of candy, Russian
soldiers had left several messages, in
marker, on a white projector screen.
“We are just following orders. Sorry.”
“We don’t need this war.”
“We were sent, please forgive us.”
“Brothers! We love you!”
A few days later, the Russian forces
north of Kyiv also retreated. I returned
to the capital to see whether they, too,
had left anything behind.
I
vana-Franka Street was a quaint dirt
lane on the eastern edge of Bucha,
across the Irpin River from the mater-
nity hospital where the Hospitallers
had been stationed. During the month-
long Russian occupation, the street,
which was close to various Ukrainian-
held neighborhoods, had become a front
line, and now burnt-out Russian tanks
and trucks listed among the remains of
splintered houses and overturned or
pancaked vehicles. The few people who
were around wandered amid the debris
with dazed expressions, resembling the
survivors of a natural catastrophe.
At the end of Ivana-Franka Street,
an elderly woman in a down coat and
a shawl beckoned to me. I followed
her up a steep berm to a set of railroad
tracks. They ran parallel to an open cul-
vert where, at the bottom, two male
bodies were tangled together, half bur-
ied under weeds and trash that had col-
lected during recent rains. The woman
said that the victims were brothers, add-
ing, “Everybody loved them. We don’t
know why they were killed.”
The brothers, Yuri and Victor, had
been in their sixties and had lived in
adjacent houses. Locals had referred to
them as Uncle Yuri and Uncle Victor.
While Bucha was occupied, Yuri had
worn a white cloth around his sleeve,
to signal neutrality, and baked bread
for hungry neighbors. Both men had
been shot in the head. Empty beer bot-
tles lay in the grass.
“Him I don’t know,” the woman said,
pointing at a form slumped on the road-
side. The man was overweight and
middle-aged, dressed in civilian clothes,
with receding gray hair and a neatly
trimmed white beard. So much blood
had seeped from the bullet hole in his
temple that a patch of crimson earth
extended past his feet.
A Ukrainian soldier approached me
to say that he’d found another victim.
I followed him into the basement of a
yellow house, where a rail-thin teen-
ager was crumpled on the floor. Blood
had leaked from his mouth and nose.
The soldier crouched and felt under his
skull. “He was shot in the back of the
head,” he said.
Outside a small two-story home,
Russian soldiers had constructed a
makeshift checkpoint from pallets, cin-
der blocks, and empty ammunition
boxes. In the back yard, three more men
had been executed. One, shot through
the ear, lay on his back against a fence.
Another, beside a woodpile, wore a
sheepskin-and-leather jacket that was
speckled with unmelted snow. He, too,
was on his back; a T-shirt covered his
face. The third man was prone. Half of
his head had been blown off, and his
brain had spilled into the dirt.
I hadn’t been there long when two
women in their mid-thirties appeared
in the yard. There was something im-
mediately incongruous about them. Un-
like everyone else in Bucha, they were
clean. Their clothes were unrumpled
“We’ve been fighting all day, but we were hungry, so we came.”
