There was a terrible incident in the basement of the camp. The steps leading down to its unlocked door were a mess from the Russian army. At the bottom of the stairwell, the groundskeeper looked up and raised an eyebrow at me, as if to give me one more chance to reconsider.
The airless tunnel behind the door looked like a torture chamber. There was a room that looked like it was used for executions and had bullet holes in it. There were two chairs, an empty jug and a wooden plank in the next room. The Russians brought in two metal bedsprings and leaned them against the wall. The tableaus suggested that prisoners were tied to the bedsprings and strapped to the plank and waterboarded.
Taras Shapravskyi, the deputy mayor of Bucha, says that there were signs of torture on the bodies. The groundskeeper shined a flashlight in the room where the five dead men were found. Two trails of dried blood ran down a wall into the dirt next to a fleece hat that appeared to have a bullet hole.
The Russian forces left the town in the first days of April. Before the invasion, Bucha was well known in Kyiv as a place to get away, to drop kids off at the summer camp for a couple of weeks or take them to a ropes course called the Crazy Squirrel. It is a byword for war crimes. When the Russians left, the streets were covered in bodies. There is a mass grave in the churchyard. Shops and homes are empty. According to local authorities, more than 400 people were found dead here with gunshot wounds.
The Russians set up a garrison inside the summer camp for children to shoot at civilians and bring prisoners down into the basement. The occupying force displayed a lack of military discipline according to local officials and witnesses. There were empty liquor bottles next to the playground. An administrative building with dirty mattresses and cigarette butt was strewn with an old boom box, costume jewelry, a leather briefcase, and other items that were taken from local homes. The Russians left a pile of hair shorn off in one room. The camp groundskeeper says that there was no army on the floor.
The war in Ukraine has changed because of the depravity they left behind. 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 negotiated peace. The leaders from across Europe have come to see the destruction. They promised more than a billion dollars in military aid from the European Union.
Zelensky told reporters on a visit to Bucha April 4, days after the Russians withdrew, that thousands of people have been killed and tortured.
David Arakhamia told me that it was difficult to face the Russian envoys.
At the same time, investigators have fanned out across the country to look for evidence of Russian war crimes. The evidence is mounting, and the U.S. President Joe Biden called it genocide.
Moscow knows how bad this is. The Foreign Ministry in Moscow said that the massacre made the Russian forces look bad. His propaganda channels offered theories to undermine the grim reality with doubt. They said crisis actors had posed as dead in videos. They claimed that foreign mercenaries came to town and killed people after the Russians left.
The barbarity was too blatant and witnessed by many people. 3,700 people remained in the town during the occupation, according to the local government. The evidence emerging from the ground is consistent with their stories.
The Church of St. Andrew was the center of life before the invasion. On the second day of the invasion, a battle raged for control of the airport just north of town, and the parish priest was in attendance. His sermon at the graveside was drowned out by the loud explosions and helicopter crashes that ripped through the air.
The battle went on for a while. The Russians needed that airport to land an invading force outside the capital, and the Ukrainians put up a ferocious fight, shelling the runways and blowing up a bridge to block the advance of Russian tanks into Kyiv.
The Russians took control of the town in the first week of March. The battle cost them a lot and left them angry. There were more than a dozen burned-out Russian tanks and personnel carriers in the streets. As the Russians dug in, they set up positions in a local school and moved into the dormitories of the summer camp.
The church was considered a sanctuary for locals. After the Russian troops kicked in doors and dragged families into the streets, he changed his mind. At one point the church came under fire, leaving deep gashes in the walls. The men, women, children, and Halavin told me to cross the street.
The priest hid his robes so he wouldn't be seen. He snuck back into the church a few times to pray and get some candles for his home. The smell of death was hard to ignore by the second week. The cemetery was too dangerous to take bodies to. Many victims were left in the road with just enough soil to keep the dogs away.
A local coroner asked Halavin to help organize a burial. The priest agreed. They dug a trench and waited for a truck to bring the bodies to the cemetery.
The church's shadow was still where the trench was when the congregation gathered for Sunday mass on April 10. Most of the bodies were exhumed and sent to the mortuary for identification and a proper burial. A long plastic sheet was draped over the people who remained in the pit.
Olha Ivanitska saw two of her friends as she entered the church. She touched their cheeks with her hands.
They knew they were lucky. As they emerged from their homes, the people of Bucha often found their friends missing or dead, their streets full of wrecked military vehicles, and their neighbors' homes destroyed.
Some people are going to assess the damage. The janitor came back to work on April 10 to find that all the computers had been stolen. The problems were the least of them. The school had not been checked for booby traps and mines. There are more than a hundred empty boxes of Russian shells in the schoolyard. The windows had been damaged.
There are many temporary graves around the school. One of them is near the camp. The man who lives across the street told me that he dug that grave in March. Kasenok said that the man inside had made a mistake by approaching the Russians on foot. The soldiers left him there after shooting him.
When Kasenok went to fetch some firewood for the stove in his basement, he found a cluttered warren with more than 30 of his neighbors and many of their pets. Kasenok gave the dead man the dignity of a burial, and then 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020
Kasenok's wife came out, followed by a pair of cats. We began to talk about their children. The Russians took part in Luhansk in early March. Kasenok and his wife haven't heard from each other since.
The summer camp across the street was the only thing that came to mind when I thought of reassuring the couple. The kids could come visit and play over there after the rebuild.
We can be reached at letters@time.com.
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