Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦@IAPonomarenko
There's one moment from the liberation of Bucha that will stay with me for the rest of my life.
At the entrance to the city from the Irpin side, near the railway line, there's a very nice and cozy apartment complex, I once wanted to buy an unfinished flat there, but it was out of my price range.
When we returned to Bucha alongside Ukrainian forces, that same complex had been badly hit. The Russians had positioned artillery in the courtyards nearby, so shell and fuse crates were scattered everywhere. Burnt, torn-off BMP tracks lay strewn around.
In the parking lots, among mountains of debris and wreckage, Teslas burned to the ground. Nearby, rows of small buildings with little shops, cafes, bakeries, riddled with bullets, looted and torched.
All around -- grayness, darkness, the feeling of an exhumed grave, as if you could feel with your very skin that something evil had happened here.
And there, on the basketball court, a man was wandering aimlessly in silence. Just walking in circles, over and over again. He still couldn't come back to himself.
All 33 days of the occupation he had hidden in a basement right there under those buildings, literally right under the Russians' noses, hiding so as not to end up among those who, as captured on camera, were marched in single file with their hands behind their heads and taken around a corner to be shot.
But that guy was lucky.
Several days had passed since the Russians left, and he was still walking there in circles, in silence. I tried to talk to him, to ask if he needed anything, and he raised his eyes to me and said: "Do you know why they hate us so much?"
He started to sob, wiping away tears. "Do you know? Tell me, why, why, what did we do to them? Tell me."
I think that evening I came home to Kyiv after a day in the field reporting on the atrocities in Bucha, and for the first time in a long time, I got drunk.
