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.

Pobihai, who held a red carnation in his weathered hand, said he was disgusted by what President Donald 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 US and Russia, but none from the country the Russians invaded.

“I’m very, very angry,” said Pobihai, 66, who retired as a commander in the rifle company of the 11th Separate Motorised 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,” Pobihai said. “How can you talk to these jackals?”

Bucha, a suburb of 37,000 about 32 km 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 Trump’s comments. When the Biden administration was in power, the US was Ukraine’s most powerful ally. Now they had many questions: Was Trump just speaking off the cuff? Was the US 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, Pobihai’s friend, rested maybe 46 metres 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 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-storey 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.

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.

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,” Abramova said.

New York Times News Service