Horror and Hope: What We Can Learn From Vokzalna Street
Resilience and hope two years after the Russian retreat from Bucha and Irpin
(Left) Vokzalna St. in 2022. (Right) Vokzalna St. at the end of 2023. Image (1) The Guardian/AP (2) Honor Phillips
This past weekend was the two-year anniversary of the Russian withdrawal from the towns of Bucha and Irpin in Ukraine. Bucha was under Russian occupation for several months, and what took place there was potentially the best documented case of systematic war crimes in recent years.
This is not a commentary on those terrible weeks, and I could not do it justice in only a few words. Suffice it to say there was mass civilian execution, torture, and rape. When Ukrainian troops retook the town, they found horror everywhere. But as tempting as it is to make the story of Bucha about horror, seeing it today suggests a different message: resilience, unflinching defiance, the ability to pick yourself up and rebuild. That’s what I saw.
Through the strange providence of God, I’ve had the opportunity to become friends with many people who were either from these two cities before the war or who have a connection with them. It personalizes things when someone says, “that was my house,” and not just, “that house.” It goes even deeper when you know that the same things that were perpetrated in Bucha are happening right now in Russian occupied Ukraine.
Image EPA/UPG
This place is called Vokzalna Street. Even though you wouldn’t know it today, it’s probably one of the most recognized places in all of Ukraine. The images of burnt out and destroyed tanks, IFVs, cars, and civilian bodies were on every news and social media platform after the Russians were pushed out. They left behind destruction, mass civilian graves, and a legacy of brutality that the Ukrainians will never forget.
Today Vokzalna Street looks more like it did before the Russians invaded. The tanks have been dragged away, the bodies buried, and the roads repaved. Even some trees replanted. That is in part due to aid and help from Ukraine’s friends, but it is also representative of an attitude I’ve noticed throughout Ukraine: the unwillingness to let the Russians have the last word in their destruction. You don’t have to drive far before you see fences riddled with bullet holes or a house still black from an explosion, but on Vokzalna, where there had been so much destruction, they have rebuilt and restored. Now it looks like any other peaceful European neighborhood.
Vokzalna Street after extensive reconstruction
There is a toughness in the Ukrainian psyche that you have to see to really grasp. While there, our film team spoke with Aksana, a woman in her 60s. She had lived through the months of Russian occupation, but would not leave her home. She knew people, her neighbors, who had been shot dead in the street for no apparent reason. She told us about a “green corridor” that the Russians said would be open for people in the town to escape, but when some of them attempted to use it, they were mowed down in their cars by the Russian occupying troops. As she spoke with us, she would point first one way, then another, describing where people had been shot or taken into custody, or how the Russians searched and plundered homes looking for the alleged “Nazis.” Then she pointed to the ground where we were standing and told us someone’s arm which had blown off had lain there in front of her house for days.
However, after all this, she would not be persuaded to leave. This was her home. She survived the occupation, and she would rebuild her life there. And that is just what she did.
I have seen this attitude throughout Ukraine. The Russians bombard Kharkiv, destroying and killing, and the next morning the Ukrainians open their coffee shops and go to work amidst the rubble. Grain is still shipped from Odesa despite the Russian drone and missile attacks and the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Even Ukrainian amputees don prosthetics and return to the front lines to continue the fight.
Maria continued to serve guests after Russian missile strikes damaged her coffeehouse. "How could they break us?" she said while making coffee beneath a smashed shop window. RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty
This dogged unwillingness to give in to the Russian attack is inspiring, but it is not going to hold the Russian army back by itself. Ukrainians recognize this. Putin’s war is existential for Ukraine: it is quite literally victory or death for them. In a sense, it is existential for Putin as well. He has reworked the framework of Russian society as well as domestic and foreign policy to justify his aims, dragging the nation backwards to much darker days. While Americans are becoming distracted, Russia has been moving to a more long term war footing. Many European nations know what the consequences of a Russian victory in Ukraine would mean for themselves and the world, but without clear strategic and moral leadership from the United States, the continual grinding assaults on Ukraine are having an effect.
At the end of the day, it is not just the 42 million Ukrainians who are at stake, but the whole structure of the post World War Two Western system of law and liberty. The shadow of lawless brutality and conquest as the new norm is growing; however, it can be stopped. We in America and the West have agency, but we must be able to see it for what it truly is.
In the last two years of war in Europe, we have seen great evil, cowardice, and fear, but also great courage, faith, and defiance in a conflict where tomorrow is not promised. In Bucha we saw the depths of cruelty people can sink to when fueled by lies and hate. We also saw the ability to overcome that for a brighter future. We should learn from both the perpetrators of that cruelty and the Ukrainians who overcame it.
