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Andrii Pobihai wore his army uniform to the funeral in Bucha, even though he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Mr. Pobihai, who held a red carnation in his weathered hand, said he was disgusted by what President Trump had said only hours earlier: that this war with Russia was somehow Ukraine\u2019s fault<\/a>. He wondered what those comments portended, after a day of negotiations<\/a> on ending the war that included high-level representatives from the United States and Russia, but none from the country the Russians invaded.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m very, very angry,\u201d said Mr. Pobihai, 66, who retired as a commander in the rifle company of the 11th Separate Motorized 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 \u2014 the last just four days earlier.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe best guys are dying,\u201d Mr. Pobihai said. \u201cHow can you talk to these jackals?\u201d<\/p>\n Bucha, a suburb of 37,000 about 20 miles northwest of the capital, Kyiv, has become a notorious symbol of Russian brutality<\/a>. 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<\/a> of war crimes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Images from that time ricocheted<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n On Wednesday, many in Bucha seemed to be struggling to take in Mr. Trump\u2019s comments. When the Biden administration was in power, the United States was Ukraine\u2019s most powerful ally. Now they had many questions: Was Mr. Trump just speaking off the cuff? Was the United States really siding with Russia, a pariah on the world stage?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cNow he\u2019s going to help the Russians?\u201d asked Alla Kriuchkova, 40, waiting outside a military recruitment center in Bucha for her husband, who had just been called in. \u201cThey destroyed everything here, and now we\u2019re supposed to give up? How does that work?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Then she answered her own question: \u201cIf America leaves us, we are screwed.\u201d<\/p>\n The ghosts of the massacre are still everywhere in Bucha. In the Bucha municipal cemetery on Memory Street, the body of Oleksiy Onyshchenko, Mr. Pobihai\u2019s friend, rested maybe 50 yards from where scores of bodies in black plastic bags were once stacked.<\/p>\n On the corner of Yablunska and Vokzalna Streets \u2014 ground zero of the destruction in Bucha \u2014 Iryna Abramova<\/a> lives in a boxy new house built to replace the home that was burned down almost three years ago. Whenever Ms. Abramova leaves for work, she has to walk past the spot where Russian soldiers shot her husband, Oleh, point-blank in front of her.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Then there\u2019s the pink four-story 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\u2019s knees was found in the building. A slick of blood had dried on the floor.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cAnatolii,\u201d read one. \u201cAndriy,\u201d read another. A few trees still had Christmas decorations, tinsel in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag, balls of red and green.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ms. 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.<\/p>\n \u201cNow I am afraid that the court will do nothing, because of what\u2019s happening politically,\u201d Ms. Abramova said. \u201cThey will say that the Russians are fine. The thing I\u2019m most afraid of is that they will say we are guilty ourselves. That we are guilty of killing ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n The Rev. Andriy Halavin, an Orthodox priest at the Church of St. Andrew, Bucha\u2019s largest church, carries his city\u2019s memories with him, flipping through photos on his phone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n There is one of a smiling Myron Zvarychuk, the priest who founded their church community in the 1990s, and then one of him dead. Other photos show the burned bodies of the singer and several men, bent over, their hands tied, found shot dead in the cellar<\/a> of a children\u2019s camp. Still another portrays the bodies of the eight men<\/a> memorialized by the trees near the onetime Russian encampment. (A ninth escaped alive, because the Russians didn\u2019t notice he was still breathing.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n