Graves in Buča. A decade of war
I have been to Buche on several occasions, but I only met Mayor Anatoli Fedoruk now, when we came with a Lithuanian delegation to agree on the naming of one of the city's streets after Tadas Tumas „the Giant“, who was killed on the battlefield near Bakhmut. Bachmut will not be rebuilt for a long time, and there will not be enough streets to go round, given the number of people who died there.
220 soldiers from Buča died during the ten years of the war. The war came to this community in 2014, after the occupation of Crimea and the war against the „Ichthamnetian“ occupiers who seized Donetsk and Luhansk.
The mayor already knew what we were coming for, because the day before my friend, councillor Vasylius Oleksiuk, had passed the Lithuanian idea to the mayor. After a short and businesslike meeting, the mayor said: 'You don't need to convince me, we are building a new school financed by Lithuania, the street and the neighbourhood are new, and we were just looking for a name. Construction has already started, despite the Šarūnas Stepukonis scandal. It's a pity, because he turned out to be serious and responsible, and we didn't know about demons.
We take a photo and go our separate ways, as the Mayor's agenda is very busy. Buca is home to 50,000 people and counting, with new residents moving in from the east...
We still have time, and Councillor Vasylius, who accompanied us, takes us to the site of the Orthodox church where the murdered residents of Buche were buried. 501 victims, over two hundred unidentified corpses.
At the same time, the Slovenian ambassador and her delegation visit the memorial, and the church hosts an exhibition of photographs taken by Reuters reporters of the crimes of the occupiers. The walls of the church are riddled with splinters and bullets. „We will fix it, we can't“, says the priest.
The victims of the genocide were laid to rest next to soldiers who died in 2014.
A khaki-coloured minibus is parked in the square next to the graves of the soldiers, and several soldiers are walking around, visiting their friends. TRO commander Volodymyr Shcherbinin feeds his sandwiches to stray dogs. It is rare here that anyone searches for the owners of lost dogs on Facebook, but many of my friends have a few sheltered animals. His Excellency Valdemaras Serapinas, the Lithuanian Ambassador to Ukraine, brought a dog from Izum. There are hardly any stray animals here, so someone will take them in soon.
Commander Volodymyr Shcherbinin has been in the war since its beginning, and he and six of his men were the first to burn Russian columns. Several of them were killed, and they are now visiting the graves of the dead.
I walk through the rows of graves, at least six with freshly poured wreaths, decorated with flowers in national colours. On all the graves are the tridents that look so much like our Gediminas pillars. Tridantis is like a code word for Freedom - Volia.
I see a middle-aged woman kneeling by the headstone, and I walk over and ask apologetically whose grave it is. She answers - her son Volodymyr. He fought from the very first days as a territorial defence soldier, and later, after the liberation of the city, he volunteered for the front, even though he was twenty-two years old and could have stayed in Buche. He was killed in Avdiivka on 17 December 2022, in the same platoon with his best friend Sergij. They are buried nearby. The woman has another son, who is 16, and is already waiting to come of age to go to war. I won't let go, the woman says. I hug her and go on.
Vasylius lights a cigarette and places it on the grave of a soldier who died in 2016: my best friend Andriy is buried here. Vasylius was also in the east when the war broke out...
It leads to a tomb with a gravestone carved with the images of a young woman and two boys. She worked in administration and was known to everyone. The Russians fired on her family from a BTR when they tried to withdraw from Buche, and only her husband survived. I have seen his interview, he was left without a leg after the shelling, but he lives actively helping others.
A stylish, bearded man wearing a cap with Liverpool written on it is standing nearby. For a moment, I think he might be from there. But it turned out that Mr Liverpool, a fierce fan of Kyiv Dynamo, had defended Donetsk airport and had taken part in the hellish battles of Debaltseve. He spat at the mention of the name of the former President, who then boasted that it was to his credit that the Ukrainians had come out of the siege.
They say that you should hear us singing the Ukrainian national anthem at the Kyiv Dynamo match year. I start and he catches up and we sing the anthem together in the cemetery. We will meet again. At the Kyiv Dynamo stadium. We will scream and curse Putin and Russia. Glory to Ukraine!
In the cemetery, decades of war are visible in all their horror. The sun is shining and spring should be more cheerful. We understand that things are bad, but we must not let our hands down, not only for them, but also for us.
