Vitaliy Huk’s war with Russia could have been over before the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine even began.
During eight years of fighting against powerful Russian-led militia in some of the most dangerous places in eastern Ukraine, including Bakhmut, Popasna and Lysychansk, he says his “guardian angel” somehow kept him alive “as a lot of things exploded close by”.
The toll on Huk’s health led to a medical release from the military, but when the Kremlin tried to take over the rest of Ukraine in February, he was among tens of thousands of people who volunteered to defend their homeland.
Huk was living in Bucha, a quiet commuter suburb 25km northwest of Kyiv which became – like Irpin, Vorzel, Hostomel, Borodyanka and other neighbouring towns – an obstacle to the Russian army as it poured south from Belarus towards the Ukrainian capital.
During breaks in the fighting we’d make short videos and post them online if we could, because we knew each one could be our last testament
— Vitaliy Huk
First in Irpin and then in nearby Moshchun, Huk (31) and other volunteers scrambled to hold off the advancing Russian forces, surviving firefights and heavy shelling in the first, desperate weeks of an all-out war that few people then believed Ukraine could win.
“Russian drones were flying overhead and sometimes we had to escape into the trees,” he recalls outside the house where he was stationed, its windows still missing, its redbrick walls charred by explosions and the forest behind it now thick with snow.
“During breaks in the fighting we’d make short videos and post them online if we could, because we knew each one could be our last testament,” says Huk, whose parents were still in his hometown in the eastern Kharkiv region, which was also under Russian attack.
“My parents and I told each other where our important documents and valuables were hidden, because we knew we could be killed. I made them believe in our armed forces, even though I wasn’t sure that we could hold out and defend Kyiv – and I thought that if we lost Kyiv we could lose the whole country. But together we saved Kyiv.”
Ukrainian soldiers engaged in intense battles with Russian troops north of Kyiv, blowing up bridges and even a dam on the Irpin river to hinder their advance, but Moscow’s forces managed to occupy Bucha about a week after the February 24th invasion.
“It was painful to know the Russians were in Bucha,” Huk says of invaders who turned the building next to his home into a barracks. “But we didn’t know at that point what heinous crimes they were committing there.”
As Ukraine fought Russia to a standstill outside Kyiv, Bucha was experiencing horrors – not only heavy shelling and tank fire but the abduction, torture and execution of civilians and the murder of residents as they tried to flee to safety; when Russia retreated, reporters found 20 bodies lying in one street, including one dead man with his hands tied behind his back.
Officials in Bucha say more than 450 bodies were found in the town after Russia’s 33-day occupation, include those of at least 12 children. More than 100 were exhumed from one mass grave behind the Church of Andrew the Apostle, where now a snow-covered cross stands in their memory following reburials in a nearby cemetery.
“These are war crimes and will be recognised by the world as genocide,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said when he visited Bucha on April 4th. The Kremlin responded by claiming the atrocities were a “fake” concocted to discredit Russia.
People told us to speak only Russian in the street if we wanted to stay alive
— Raisa Selyunina
Raisa Selyunina, who works in an appliance repair store in Bucha, said that for about the first 10 days of the invasion “we just stayed in our basement and didn’t know what was going on outside.”
“When we came out, people told us to speak only Russian in the street if we wanted to stay alive, and to only go out if it was absolutely essential. Thankfully we had a stove and firewood so we could keep warm. But we could hear fighting all the time.”
She managed to evacuate from Bucha in the middle of March and moved to western Ukraine. When she returned home in April, she found the shop had been looted, and it would be another month before gas and electricity supplies to the town were restored.
“We decided to get to work and not wait for anyone to help us. So we cleaned up the shop and reopened in May,” Selyunina says.
Now the shop, like her home, is running on a generator after Russian missile and drone strikes destroyed more than a third of Ukraine’s national grid, plunging it into an energy crisis just as snow and freezing temperatures set in.
“Sometimes the lights stay on all day, sometimes they go off every four hours. We have repaired some broken windows and covered others. But we are happy just to have a proper place to live – the roof of our neighbours’ house was destroyed and now they are living in their garage.”
In a Bucha cafe, Diana welcomes payment in cash for coffee because it can be hard to come by when power cuts disable the bank machines.
“I was living in Hostomel in February and evacuated on the first day of the invasion,” she says, referring to a town three kilometres north of Bucha that witnessed a fierce and crucial battle at the start of war, when Ukrainian forces prevented elite Russian paratroopers from seizing the strategic Antonov airfield.
“We came back to a terrible scene – we had no water, electricity or gas, no shops were open and a shell had hit our apartment and badly damaged one room,” she recalls.
Now she is living in Vorzel, just west of Bucha, where amid nationwide rolling blackouts she has “only a couple of hours of electricity a day”.
By 5pm, inky darkness shrouds streets where bullet- and shrapnel- scarred fences often fail to hide shattered buildings or gaping, snow-filled scrubland where someone’s shell-blasted home or business had to be demolished. But Bucha saw far worse earlier this year.
Like many Ukrainians, Huk says the hardship of war and a winter of privation is only deepening their defiance.
“Ukrainians already think differently, we see things differently and have a different identity,” Huk says of how his nation contrasts with neighbours who are now invaders.
“Ukraine has been fighting for its independence for more than 300 years ... And now Russia has become the author of its own downfall.”
