Bucha's wounds still raw two years on
Two years on, Ludmila has finally installed a marble headstone on Valeriy’s grave with his photograph. After Bucha was liberated, she was able to have him reburied properly at the local cemetery. The couple’s home, destroyed in the fighting, is slowly being rebuilt and Ludmila has been planting bright coloured flowers in the yard. But when the house is finished, she will live there alone.
The building work is part of efforts to restore Bucha from the ruins left by retreating Russian soldiers. When Ukrainian forces retook the town, they discovered bodies strewn in Yablunska street where they had been shot. It was the first the outside world knew of the horrors Bucha had endured during 33 days of occupation.
“We have a moral obligation to support the families who live on that street, because more than 70 civilians were brutally killed and tortured there,” the local mayor, Anatoliy Fedoruk, explains.
Yablunska street and the area around has been cleaned up, spruced up and in some places rebuilt. But the Russians took over “almost every yard or house”, according to the mayor, who estimates the total cost of repair at €1.6bn (£1.4bn; $1.7bn). “Of course we don’t have this sum. But we are doing whatever we can to return people to their houses.”
Just a few steps from Yablunska street, Ludmila’s new home is still just a shell. The builders have promised to finish it by summer, but she hasn’t seen them for days. Homeless for two years, on top of her bereavement, Ludmila is anxious to move in.
“I’m trying to cope, but my blood pressure is high, which it never was before the war,” she says, showing me around the building site. “I’m getting heart scans, signs of problems. It’s all from the stress. From the memories.”
