The NY Times does a piece on Bucha, Ukraine the site of bloody battles ….
The place has already begun to transform itself back to some sort of normal life….
This WILL be the future of the Ukraine like all war recovery zones….
Growth and memories…..
I hope the media story doesn’t invite a new round of Russian rocket bombing’s though…..
There is a line of tidy houses on Vokzalna Street, where crumbling homes once lined a roadway littered with burned-out Russian tanks. There are neat sidewalks and fresh pavement with blue and yellow bunting hanging overhead. And there are backhoes and bulldozers plowing across a construction site where a new home goods store will replace a previous one that was burned to the ground.
They are remaking Bucha, the suburb of Kyiv, the capital, that became synonymous with Russian atrocities in the earliest days of the invasion of Ukraine, where civilians were tortured, raped or executed, their bodies left to rot in the streets.
More than a year after Ukrainian forces wrested back Bucha from Russian troops, the town has drawn international investment that has physically transformed it, and it has become a stopping point for delegations of foreign leaders who come through almost weekly.
And yet behind the veneer of , the pain that suffused Bucha during its month of horror under Russian occupation still lingers….
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Walking through the streets of this leafy suburb, it is possible to look past the bullet holes piercing storefront windows and the shrapnel marks peppering building facades to see a more peaceful place emerging.
There is a lemonade stand selling cool drinks on a summer afternoon, and swarms of children playing in a fountain. Teenagers pass the time scrolling on their phones on an apartment building’s stoop.
Schools have been refurbished, and there are new shops on the main streets. Soaring cranes fill the skyline where workers repair high-rise residences damaged in the fighting…
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“It’s very difficult to get that balance right — between memorializing, rebuilding and moving forward,” said Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivska, the deputy mayor of Bucha. “We don’t want to just be a place of tragedy.”
Specifically citing Chernobyl, the site of a nuclear disaster in Ukraine in 1986, she said Bucha did not want to become a place for foreign tourists looking to gawk at catastrophe….
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“We want to be the story of Ukrainian of success,” Ms. Skoryk-Shkarivska said. “Yes, a place of tragedy with proper remembrance programs, but to be a place of success, of recovery”…..
Note….
The story above does NOT take from the fact that the conflict CONTINUES with lives lost in the fighting on both sides every day…..
image…June in Bucha, the Kyiv suburb that became synonymous with countless Russian atrocities in the earliest days of the invasion of Ukraine.Credit…Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times