The mayor of Bucha, Ukraine admits he had little inkling a year ago that his quiet, comfortable tree-lined community just outside Kyiv was about to become the global symbol for Russian brutality in the 11-month war.

Even as the war threat intensified, “I told my friends Bucha is safer. It’s a small city and I think the Russians will not enter it,” Mayor Anatolii Fedoruk recalled on a visit to Washington this week. “It’s a nice place to stay. We didn’t want to believe that a full-scale invasion was going to happen.”

But after a lightning assault and brutal five-week occupation by Russian forces, Mr. Fedoruk said he is focused on helping his neighbors and constituents recover and rebuild their shattered lives. U.N. officials say the death toll from the siege included 73 civilians, but Ukrainians say the full death toll was six times higher.

“It is impossible to forget and forgive what they have done,” the mayor told a Hudson Institute audience Tuesday. “We have seen what the Russian beast is doing to the world. I had to do everything in order for my citizens to come back and to want to come back.”

The city’s deputy mayor, Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivska, said Bucha’s delegation was in Washington in part to assist in any potential war crimes investigations about the events in Bucha.

“These were not ‘accidental’ killings. They were civilians shot by Russian soldiers because they believed that nobody will punish them,” Ms. Skoryk-Shkarivska told The Washington Times. “They pretended to be ‘winners’ in this bloody war.”

Brutality as a tactic

Before the war, Bucha was known as a popular weekend destination for people looking for a brief respite from the hustle and bustle of the capital, about 15 miles away. But it had the misfortune of being located square in the middle of one of the primary invasion routes into Ukraine for Russian forces. Ukrainians say Russian troops used brutality as a tactic, leaving devastation and mass graves in their wake, only abandoning Bucha after the campaign to capture Kyiv stalled and was abandoned.

The invaders seemed to recognize no distinction between soldiers and noncombatants in Bucha. Civilians were as likely to be killed crossing the street to buy bread as they would be taking up arms in the city’s defense. Ukrainian officials said almost 500 bodies, including women and children whose hands were bound behind their backs, were recovered in what has come to be known as the Bucha Massacre.

One of the first objectives of the Russian troops was to track down Bucha’s mayor of 25 years — Mr. Fedoruk. If captured, he had two options, bend to Moscow’s will or be killed. Instead, he picked a third recourse: going underground and coordinating relief efforts for the city’s besieged residents.

“The regional authorities advised us to leave and all the colleagues of mine insisted,” Mr. Fedoruk said this week during a whirlwind trip to Washington to drum up economic support for Bucha. 

Mr. Fedoruk told the Hudson Institute audience that a number of residents told him they wouldn’t leave Bucha unless he did as well. Even his family told him he should get out.

“I told them, ‘You go first and I’ll follow you later,’” he said. “I had to apologize to them because I had made the decision to stay. Since 1998, the citizens of my city have trusted me. It was, of course, a difficult decision.”

With the Russian occupiers in pursuit, Mr. Fedoruk shuttled from house to house, occasionally popping up to make an appearance on an international news program to describe life in a city under Russian rule.

Bucha had a population of about 50,000 before the invasion. The devastation wrought by Russia left the city without heating, electricity, or an adequate supply of drinking water. 

Fight or flee

Unlike Russia’s invasion of Crimea in early 2014, officials in Ukraine in early 2022 had been warned that President Vladimir Putin had his troops arrayed along the country’s border and that an invasion was imminent. Several people reached out to Mr. Fedoruk days earlier to ask whether it would be safer to remain in their homes or seek refuge in Kyiv itself.

He recalls being startled awake by a missile attack on the morning of the Feb. 24  invasion. He was supposed to lead a routine city council meeting later in the day.

“We still had the session, however, the agenda was modified,” he noted.

Ms. Skoryk-Shkarivska said Mr. Fedoruk doesn’t like to talk about the time he spent evading the Russian dragnet that had been set up to detain him. The Russian troops destroyed any house where he was thought to have been hiding. Ms. Skoryk-Shkarivska said he was even once detained by Russian officials but managed to convince them they had the wrong man. 

“That saved his life,” she told The Washington Times.

Deliberate killing

The United Nations has substantiated many of the allegations about Russian atrocities in Bucha and elsewhere in Ukraine. Rights groups say it appears Russian troops have carried out war crimes, including the deliberate killing of civilians. 

“Russian soldiers brought civilians to makeshift places of detention and then executed them in captivity. Many of the victims’ bodies were found with their hands tied behind their backs and gunshot wounds to their heads,” Matilda Bogner, head of the UN’s human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine, said in a statement. “Civilians were targeted on the road while moving within or between settlements, including while attempting to flee the hostilities.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut Democrat, recalled searing scenes when he visited the mass graves in Bucha during his last visit to Ukraine, many months are the last occupying troops had withdrawn.

“My stomach still turns when I think about what we saw — those graves where the women and children had their hands tied behind their back,” Senator Blumenthal said last month. “They were shot in the head — hundreds of them — simply because they were Ukrainian. That’s genocide.”

U.N. officials said men and boys made up nearly 90% of all victims of summary executions carried out by the invading Russian troops, suggesting that males were disproportionately targeted.

Government officials in Moscow have publicly and repeatedly denied their soldiers were responsible for any war crimes and even accused Ukraine of staging the massacre to whip up support in the West.

Ms. Skoryk-Shkarivska said she was in Germany trying to generate support for Bucha when the Russians finally left about a month after the invasion.

“That was the biggest news for me. I was crying,” she told The Washington Times.

Today, Bucha is no longer occupied but it is still at war. The residents who remained and those who returned are forced to live under primitive conditions, with limited utilities like electricity and water. Officials charge that Russian soldiers destroyed more than 3,000 buildings in Bucha, mostly homes and apartments, and staged large-scale looting raids, taking anything valuable with them. 

City officials are trying to rebuild but the task is daunting with a municipal tax base that is now virtually nonexistent. They want to rebuild Bucha and make it attractive once against for young families. The damage from the war has even undercut one of the town’s top selling points — its ready access to the capital.

“We are close to the railway so there are lots of logistics hubs. But they have all been destroyed,” Ms. Skoryk-Shkarivska said. 

But she said there were also signs of rebirth, including at least one well-known local business destroyed in the occupation that is now back in operation. 

“McDonald’s is open in Bucha. We are happy that they rebuilt it,” she said.

• Mike Glenn can be reached at mglenn@washingtontimes.com.