BUTŠA / IRPIN First Anatolyi Glavatskyi wants to tell the story of a hedgehog. It lived under a bush on a creek crash until a Russian bomb dropped into the yard and cut through a piece of land. By a miracle trade, the hedgehog survived.
Now the animal lives in Glavastky and his wife Lyudmila Glavatskaya with garage. The house is no more.
It was destroyed when Russia attacked suburbs of Kiev such as Irpin, home of Anatoly and Lyudmila, two months ago.
Butcha and Irpin are located on the side northwest of the Ukrainian capital. Irpin’s name isn’t as famous as Butšan, but the story is the same.
As Russian troops left, executed people were found on the streets. The journalists who were among the first to arrive in Bocha recorded the details as follows: Three of the bodies were tangled in bicycles. One hand is tied behind his back with a white cloth. Next to it was opened a Ukrainian passport. Everyone had been shot in the back of the head.
Mass graves have been found in Butch, of which one is located (you switch to another service) just over three kilometers from Anatolyi Glavatsky’s home. Dead people were also found on a nearby street.
The facade of Glavatsky’s house is still standing, but when you open the front door, you can see directly into the backyard. Glavatskyi stands in the place where before was his bedroom. What remains is a pile of bricks and a charred frame for the bed.
– This is my home, he says.
Anatolyi Glavatsky has seen the worst moments in Ukraine’s recent history. When the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant happened 36 years ago, he was cleaning up traces.
The two-story house in Irpin was his life’s work. Glavatsky built it for 35 years. Every flower and shrub in the garden was planted to his liking. In the pictures on the phone, the magnolia tree blooms at the top of the stairs.
Then they came Vladimir Putin troop.
– Why didn’t they do this to Putin? Why didn’t they do this to his home? Glavatskyi is in pain.
The first days of the attack, the couple hid in the stone leg of the garage, the same where they now live. War machines flew over the house towards a nearby sports stadium and dropped their bombs.
When Anatolyi and Lyudmila heard the planes turning again, they said goodbye to each other.
Bombs dropped around the home. It felt like the country had swallowed them.
Now the streets are quiet and most of the houses abandoned. Life can be seen in the cherry trees that have finally been planted with pink flowers. Spring is also late in Ukraine.
As you turn from Glavatsky’s house towards Irpin’s main street, you see a basement at the end of the house where residents are hiding Russian soldiers. There are countless of them in the suburbs around Kiev.
Ukrainian troops blocked the attackers from entering the capital and fighting was fought here.
Not all residents have dared to move out of the basements yet. While the Russians were in town, a man who went in search of water or food might be shot.
Butša, Irpin, Hostomel, Borodjanka, Makariv and a long list of other agglomerations. The world remembers Butshan, but for the locals it is just one of many. In these suburbs and villages, young women and girls are hiding from Russian soldiers. Ukrainian authorities have reported mass rapes, but much of the violence goes unreported.
Before the war, Butša and Irpin were places to move to after the squares. Prices were cheaper than in the capital, but Kiev could be reached in twenty minutes.
There are well-maintained detached houses along the street that would cost hundreds of thousands of euros on the side of Helsinki in Espoo or Vantaa. Now every second of them has been hit.
It tells how random the war is. Further afield there are intact apartment buildings, some of which are still being built. Adjacent tower blocks are missing a corner. The bomb has barked at the concrete and left black tooth marks.
In early March Russian soldiers shot people fleeing Irpin into the street. Ukrainian forces themselves had blown up the bridge along the road to the capital. The Russians wanted to be stopped.
Yaroslav Kovalchuk escaped from Irpin by a voluntary evacuation convoy on the same day that the fleeing woman and her two children died near the bridge on Russian bullets.
Now Kovalchuk is packing his last items in the yard of his home. A big piece of the roof has collapsed. From Irpin, he plans to leave first for Kiev and then for France.
There is nothing left here, he says.
Kovalchuk says the house got four hits right in early March.
– My father was here until the end, but when everything started to fall apart and the streets caught fire, he went to the evacuation with the help of volunteers.
Those who survived lived in their homes and bomb shelters without electricity and gas.
– There were people shot on the street next door to our house. Some burned inside their houses, Kovalchuk says.
The inhabitants of Bushan and Irpin have been animal-loving. It can be deduced from the number of cats and dogs roaming the streets.
Talking gets tears Oleksandr Kulinskyin eyes.
– Cats, dogs, people, soldiers. We have nothing to do with that one madman and his lust for power.
Oleksandr Kulinskyi and Natalia Wagner are from Kiev. They dared to return to their hometown a week and a half ago.
They were on the run in war in western Ukraine, where they helped stockpile supplies for the army and distribute food to those in need.
Now they are living at home again, at least for now. Many of the friends are still from all over Europe.
– This is a huge crime against humanity, he says.
The cat moving in front of the House of Culture settles on Kulinsky’s ankles. When the man leaves, the cat returns to roam the ruins. It is not a stray cat, as the coat is soft and there is flesh on the bones.
In Butcha, the trunks of houses stick upright on both sides of the main street. Among the junk, one distinguishes clues as to how one once lived here. The empty sparkling wine bottle has remained intact.
Now the armor destroyed in the fighting has been cleaned up and the holes in the asphalt patched up. However, horrors remain in people’s minds.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi and the President of the United States Joe Biden have called the events in Bushan a genocide. International investigators have come to find out whether Russia’s actions are war crimes.
Bushan’s name will go down in history as an example of what happened to the people in the villages and towns around Kiev during the Ukrainian war.
Many have heard of the fate of their own homes only with a delay. Glavatsky and his wife’s information reached the end of March, two weeks after the hit itself. They were then fleeing the city of Zhytomyr, just over a hundred kilometers away.
Now there is a pile of scrap left over from the home, but somewhere you should start again. Ukrainians can not receive more than 300 000 hryvnia in compensation for their losses. That is about 10,000 euros.
Anatoly Glavatsky says he has been investigating the compensation case for weeks.
– I’ve been thrown from one agency to another. They just shrug and say there are no instructions. Nothing has been decided.
The beds are made of stone in the garage. Laundry is hanging on the ceiling with a string. They are the clothes that were included in the getaway. The couple still can’t think of what will happen next. There would be even one room, Glavatskyi says.
Glavatskyi is 60 years old. He still has a wife, adult sons, and a dog that his family rescued from the street three years ago. The hedgehog lives in a laundry basket.
– That’s the way life is now.
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