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American Volunteer at Bucha Morgue

Patrick Loveless came to Bucha immediately after its release: he helped to sort the corpses in the Bucha morgue and saw and felt the consequences of what the Russians did. What he saw shocked him so much that he could not forget about it.

‘I prayed to God for my trees to resist’

Liudmyla Lomeiko, a resident of Moshun (village in Kyiv Region), used to transmit the coordinates of the enemy to her son, who is serving now in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, during the first days of the full-scale war. She prayed for the trees she had planted with her own hands to resist.

‘Every minute we wondered whether we would survive or not’

“Day and night merged into one. We were terrified of them, and I still fear them now,” says Vira Kaidan, a Zalissia resident who hid from the Russians in an unfamiliar basement for nine days. Seeing a man on the street, the Russians fired into the air, and when the family tried to evacuate, they assured them that the Ukrainians were shelling the village.

‘When a rocket hit our shelter, a hot water pipe there was damaged. My friend was doused with boiling water, all his clothes just stuck to him’

Denys Nozhaiskyi has relatives in Mariupol. He was in Kyiv when the war began, but fate brought him later to Bucha during the days of the heaviest shelling. The man says that now he has only one wish: to go to the war and take revenge on the enemy.

‘For two weeks I slept on damp earth’, — a resident of the village of Zalissia

Iryna Kovalenko celebrated her golden wedding and was involved in peaceful activities usually done by villagers. She never thought that the so-called “brothers” would come to kill and destroy houses. She had to leave the occupation in a car shot through by the Russians, and when the woman returned, she saw ashes and devastation.

One-way road, road back — execution

Anton Kovalenko was dragged out of the cellar and forced to carry bricks from his yard to block the windows in the houses where the Russians had set up headquarters. He had to bury a civilian shot in a car. When he evacuated his grandmother, the Russians rode tanks around a column of civilian vehicles and frightened people with stun grenades.

‘We looked like vagabonds — dirty and scared’

Telling her story, Iryna Kovalchuk cannot contain her emotions. The experienced fear still grips the woman. Her sons-in-law were taken prisoner and beaten, and her niece and the child were terrified when the Russians with machine guns broke into their house in search of weapons.

Constant plane attacks and barrages overhead

On 24 February 2022, Valerii Kovinko and his family left the capital for their house in the village of Stoianka, Buchansky district, hoping it would be safer there. The village turned out to be in a gray zone: between the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Russians. The most terrible thing, the man says, was the bombing of Russian aircraft.

When the sky is blacker than the Earth — the battle for Dmytrivka

The village of Dmytrivka in the Buchansky district of the Kyiv Region was partially occupied at the beginning of the Russian invasion. On 30 March 2022, There was a decisive tank battle called an example of the courage and unity of Ukrainians. The village was liberated. Olha Tokiy admits that if the Russians entered her part of the village, she would ask to be shot immediately.

He dreamed of building a superhouse

Robotics engineer Mykola Kononenko has been saving money for ten years to build an original house in the village of Velyka Dymerka. Unfortunately, his house burned to the ground and cannot be restored. Mykola says he had worked with the Russians before and never had any illusions about them.

‘When Freedom Square was hit by a rocket, our house shook’

Nataliia Frolova has two native cities: Berdiansk, where she was born and raised her daughter, and Kharkiv, where she had moved a few years before the full-scale war. Both cities suffered at the hands of the enemy.

‘Ukrainians have a collective trauma’, — psychologist Alena Hrybanova

Where does the sadism of the Russian military come from? Why is it sometimes beneficial for Ukrainians to be victims? What's wrong with the word “victim”? We are talking to a crisis psychologist who has worked in Belarus for a long time and now helps psychologists in Ukraine.

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