WAR IN UKRAINE
Revisiting Bucha, ground zero for Russian atrocity
A year on from the start of the conflict, Catherine Philp returns to the city outside Kyiv, where people are still struggling to come to terms with the horrors inflicted on them. Photographs by Jack Hill
Children play in Yablunska Street, Bucha, near one of the sites of Russian atrocities that shocked the world
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JACK HILL
The Times
Every day Tetiana wakes up in her apartment in Bucha, puts on her chef’s uniform and sets off for a live war crimes investigation scene. For two weeks at the beginning of the Russian invasion, her workplace was a shelter from the fighting. Under occupation it became a prison and eventually a chamber of horrors, where Russian soldiers marched civilians to torture and execution.
Bucha has become synonymous with the worst of Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine and 144 Yablunska Street, the office where Tetiana still works, is its ground zero, the nerve centre of a brutality that shocked the world. It may now become the place where Kyiv’s pursuit of justice for the town’s victims is decided.
It was there that eight defence volunteers
