BUCHA, Ukraine — On one of the last nights of the Russian occupation of Bucha, a lone Russian soldier, drunk or high, went out looking for wine. He forced a 75-year-old resident at gunpoint along the street and made him bang on the doors of private homes.
What unfolded thereafter was a night of horror for two families that stands as a coda to a month of senseless killings by Russian troops in Bucha, a suburb of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. The Russian soldier left a trail of blood and devastated lives in a last paroxysm of violence only hours before Russian troops began withdrawing. His own unit fetched him in the morning, disposed of the bodies, and within hours, it was gone.
Nine months after those events, the dead have mostly been recovered and laid to rest, and people have picked up their lives and returned to work. But the grief of family members remains raw, and the pain inflicted on this small section of one neighborhood by this Russian soldier and his comrades still ripples through the Bucha community.
The soldier’s rampage was not an isolated event. Nine soldiers from a unit based in the same wooded neighborhood have been charged in one of the first war crimes cases to reach court in Ukraine. The case centers on their cruel treatment of a civilian, an electrical engineer who was repeatedly detained and beaten in the last days of March.
The engineer, Serhiy Kybka, is losing his sight from injuries suffered in another severe beating he received later, by a Russian soldier who encountered him on the street after his release.
More than 450 people died in Bucha in one month, which was roughly 10% of the remaining population, a level that war crimes investigators say could amount to the crime of genocide.
Fifteen of those people died in an area of only a few blocks around Antoniya Mykhailovskoho Street, where the intoxicated soldier went on his rampage. They included six members of a seniors’ home who died from cold and lack of medicines, and an 81-year-old woman found hanging in her garden.
Like their neighbors, two men — who, according to the mayor of Bucha, neighbors and family members, died at the hands of the lone soldier — were victims of an undisciplined and brutal occupying army.
It was evening, not long before the 8 p.m. curfew on March 27, when the Russian soldier encountered Oleksandr Kryvenko and ordered him at gunpoint along the street to a large house set behind high walls. Bucha was in the dark, without electricity or internet.
Kryvenko was a teacher, who was living alone after helping his wife and her disabled daughter evacuate from Bucha. Trained as a pilot, he had spent his life working as an adjuster at Bucha’s glass processing factory, acclaimed for his multiple mechanical inventions. Since then, he had run an educational center, sharing with generations of children his love of building model ships and aircraft.