Andrii Pobihai wore his army uniform to the funeral in Bucha, even though he’s retired. He was one of about 40 people to brave the freezing temperatures and air-raid sirens on Wednesday to say goodbye to his friend, who had died of a heart attack at the age of 48 after serving more than 10 years in the military.
Mr. Pobihai, who held a red carnation in his weathered hand, said he was disgusted by what President Trump had said only hours earlier: that this war with Russia was somehow Ukraine’s fault. He wondered what those comments portended, after a day of negotiations on ending the war that included high-level representatives from the United States and Russia, but none from the country the Russians invaded.
“I’m very, very angry,” said Mr. Pobihai, 66, who retired as a commander in the rifle company of the 11th Separate Motorized Infantry Battalion in 2019, three years before Russia launched its full-scale invasion. He had led 54 men near Mariupol, but since then, he said, the Russians have killed all those Ukrainian soldiers — the last just four days earlier.
“The best guys are dying,” Mr. Pobihai said. “How can you talk to these jackals?”
Bucha, a suburb of 37,000 about 20 miles northwest of the capital, Kyiv, has become a notorious symbol of Russian brutality. The Russians took it over within days of invading in February 2022, and in the month that followed, they killed more than 400 civilians, Ukrainian officials say, leading to global accusations of war crimes.
Images from that time ricocheted around the world: The priest left dead in a garage, his mouth open. The church choir singer and his family, their limbs cut off, their bodies burned. The woman shot dead pushing her bicycle home on Yablunska Street.
On Wednesday, many in Bucha seemed to be struggling to take in Mr. Trump’s comments. When the Biden administration was in power, the United States was Ukraine’s most powerful ally. Now they had many questions: Was Mr. Trump just speaking off the cuff? Was the United States really siding with Russia, a pariah on the world stage?
“Now he’s going to help the Russians?” asked Alla Kriuchkova, 40, waiting outside a military recruitment center in Bucha for her husband, who had just been called in. “They destroyed everything here, and now we’re supposed to give up? How does that work?”
Then she answered her own question: “If America leaves us, we are screwed.”
The ghosts of the massacre are still everywhere in Bucha. In the Bucha municipal cemetery on Memory Street, the body of Oleksiy Onyshchenko, Mr. Pobihai’s friend, rested maybe 50 yards from where scores of bodies in black plastic bags were once stacked.
On the corner of Yablunska and Vokzalna Streets — ground zero of the destruction in Bucha — Iryna Abramova lives in a boxy new house built to replace the home that was burned down almost three years ago. Whenever Ms. Abramova leaves for work, she has to walk past the spot where Russian soldiers shot her husband, Oleh, point-blank in front of her.
Then there’s the pink four-story building constructed during Soviet times, where Russian soldiers set up camp after invading. After Bucha was liberated in April 2022, trash as high as one’s knees was found in the building. A slick of blood had dried on the floor.
Now a man wearing thick-lensed glasses worked on a computer in the front window. Behind the building, eight young pine trees were tagged with the names of the men who were shot dead there in the early days of the war. “Anatolii,” read one. “Andriy,” read another. A few trees still had Christmas decorations, tinsel in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag, balls of red and green.
Ms. Abramova, 50, who now works at a dry cleaner, said she had unsuccessfully tried therapy and medication. She said investigators told her recently that they had identified the Russians who had killed her husband.
“Now I am afraid that the court will do nothing, because of what’s happening politically,” Ms. Abramova said. “They will say that the Russians are fine. The thing I’m most afraid of is that they will say we are guilty ourselves. That we are guilty of killing ourselves.”
The Rev. Andriy Halavin, an Orthodox priest at the Church of St. Andrew, Bucha’s largest church, carries his city’s memories with him, flipping through photos on his phone.
There is one of a smiling Myron Zvarychuk, the priest who founded their church community in the 1990s, and then one of him dead. Other photos show the burned bodies of the singer and several men, bent over, their hands tied, found shot dead in the cellar of a children’s camp. Still another portrays the bodies of the eight men memorialized by the trees near the onetime Russian encampment. (A ninth escaped alive, because the Russians didn’t notice he was still breathing.)
Father Halavin also showed a new satirical cartoon by a Ukrainian artist which depicts Mr. Trump pointing at the feet of Jesus on the cross. “I tried to find a very telling picture,” said Father Halavin, a wry smile on his face. “It’s Trump saying to Jesus, ‘This wouldn’t have happened if I were president.’”
A memorial outside the church identified those who were killed — from Timur Kozyrev, only 18 months old, to Iryna Rudenko, killed 18 days shy of her 99th birthday — mere feet away from where a mass grave once held 116 bodies.
Father Halavin pointed out a red home just beyond it where a mother and her two young sons once lived. They had fled Donbas, in the east, in 2014, shortly after the Russians seized Crimea and Russian-backed separatists occupied parts of eastern Ukraine.
“They moved here to escape, and then they were killed,” he said.
At the Bucha municipal cemetery, 52 graves were marked only with numbers, like 230 and 318. These bodies have not been identified.
In the military section of the cemetery, Ukrainian flags flew over every headstone. “Slaves are not allowed into heaven,” one grave marker proclaimed. Another bore a photo of a sergeant with the call sign Hedgehog; he was critically wounded in Bakhmut and died in a Kyiv hospital on June 12. “Infinite pain,” the epitaph said. “You’re not here, but you’re everywhere, forever with us.”
Other soldiers from Bucha had call signs like Viking, Lover and even Bucha, who died April 13 fighting in the east.
Mr. Onyshchenko, the soldier who was being buried on Wednesday, had collapsed Saturday at his post in Mykolaiv. A heart attack, his family and friends said. Mr. Pobihai said they had served together in the 11th Battalion in Mariupol and Popasna in 2014 and 2015. The Russians now control both areas.
“If not us, then who?” Mr. Onyshchenko had asked after enlisting, according to an obituary posted on Facebook by the mayor of Bucha.
After Mr. Onyshchenko’s coffin was placed into a freshly dug grave, Mr. Pobihai walked through the military cemetery, looking at the headstones. He figured there was a good chance that Mr. Trump would eventually change his mind.
“When Russia captures Ukraine and mobilizes the best Ukrainian fighters into the Russian Army, then goes against NATO and Europe, maybe then,” he said with a shrug.
Oleksandr Chubko contributed reporting.
