On 24 August Ukraine turns thirty-five. For Bucha that is the distance from a dacha settlement outside Kyiv to a town whose name is written into history books around the world.
This article draws on official data from Bucha City Council, the Kyiv Regional Military Administration, the Prosecutor General's Office, the National Police and the Antonov state enterprise.
The sky that began next door
Until 2022 the thing Bucha district was best known for abroad was the sky. A few kilometres from Bucha, near Hostomel, lies the Antonov airfield — both the home base of a cargo fleet and a testing ground for Ukrainian aircraft.
Its runway is 3,502 metres long. It was there, on 24 February 2022, that National Guard troops first met the enemy landing force and wrecked the plan to take Kyiv in three days.
The An-225 Mriya, the largest aircraft in the world, was based here. It first flew on 21 December 1988, and by 22 March 1989 it had set 110 world records for speed, altitude and payload in a single flight of three hours and forty-five minutes.
In 2001 the Mriya added another 124 world and 214 national records. Two airframes were laid down, but only one aircraft was ever completed.
On 27 February 2022 russian forces destroyed the Mriya during the battle for the airport. An An-26 and an An-74 burned with it, and seven more aircraft were seriously damaged. Antonov is now working to rebuild the Mriya using the second, unfinished airframe.
The people this land produced
The first Hero of Ukraine in history lives in Bucha. The Golden Star order number one belongs to test pilot Oleksandr Halunenko — the man who took the Mriya into the air on its first flight.
He holds 263 world records, 234 of them set on the An-225 and entered in the Guinness Book of Records. Halunenko is an honorary citizen of two towns in the district: Bucha since 2002 and Irpin since 2009.
Back in the nineteenth century Mykola Murashko, the painter who founded the Kyiv Drawing School, lived and died in Bucha. Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Vrubel and Mykola Pymonenko all came out of that school.
The village of Yablunka, now a district of Bucha, was the birthplace of the artist Liubov Panchenko. During the occupation she went hungry in her own house for a month, lived to see the town freed — and died afterwards in her eighty-fifth year.
The translator Oleksandr Kysliuk, who gave Ukrainian readers Aristotle's Politics, Xenophon's Anabasis and Tacitus's Annals, was killed by russian soldiers in Bucha on 5 March 2022.
Borys Paton and Oleksandr Ponomariov are also honorary citizens of Bucha. Irpin gave the same title to Bellator champion Yaroslav Amosov, who was born there, and to Olympic wrestling medallist Iryna Koliadenko, who returned to live in the town after evacuation.
Thirty-three days
Enemy vehicles entered Bucha on the morning of 27 February 2022. That same day a missile hit a residential building, and mayor Anatolii Fedoruk reported the first deaths.
On the same day, on Vokzalna Street, Ukrainian defenders destroyed a column advancing on Kyiv from the direction of Hostomel. The images from that street are recognised worldwide today.
The occupation lasted 33 days, until 31 March 2022. According to official data from Bucha City Council and the regional administration, 561 civilians were killed in that time, among them 12 children.
While the town was still occupied, on 24 March 2022, Bucha was granted the honorary title of Hero City of Ukraine — together with Irpin, Mykolaiv and Okhtyrka.
Casualty figures differ between sources, and that is not a contradiction but different counting methods. The council's archive department separately counts 381 killed in the town itself and 554 across the community. The Prosecutor General's Office once cited 637. The police speak of 422 exhumed bodies.
Across Bucha district as a whole, law enforcement recorded more than 9,000 war crimes and more than 1,700 civilians killed.
By the fourth anniversary of liberation the police had solved 124 of the most brazen crimes in Bucha — 84 killings and 40 cases of cruel treatment. Ninety-seven people have been served with suspicion notices, including 10 commanders; indictments against 46 are already in court.
In early 2026 Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko gave a wider figure: 211 suspicion notices to those who committed atrocities in Bucha and the district. It was in the Bucha cases that Ukraine first applied the principle of command responsibility under the Geneva Conventions.
A separate search team is still establishing the fate of more than fifty Bucha residents who were abducted and taken out of Ukraine.
The world came to Bucha
World leaders began arriving almost immediately after the liberation. On 8 April 2022 — a week after the town was freed — European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen came, together with EU High Representative Josep Borrell.
The next day, 9 April, Austrian chancellor Karl Nehammer was in Bucha. On 28 April came UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who that day visited Borodianka, Bucha and Irpin.
The list that follows reads like a roll call of countries: Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin in May, French foreign minister Catherine Colonna, a Korean parliamentary delegation, Luxembourg prime minister Xavier Bettel.
On 3 July 2022 Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese visited Bucha, Hostomel and Irpin — the first ever visit by an Australian prime minister to Ukraine. Three weeks later came Guatemalan president Alejandro Giammattei, also the first visit by a head of his state to Ukraine.
In August 2022 former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and a Nobel laureate visited Bucha as part of The Elders group.
2023 added Greek president Katerina Sakellaropoulou, Boris Johnson, Finnish president Sauli Niinistö, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, Israeli foreign minister Eli Cohen and Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida.
On 31 March 2023, the first anniversary of liberation, Bucha hosted the Bucha Summit — a town that had been under occupation a year earlier became a venue for international diplomacy.
Twenty-three towns that offered a hand
The official register of Bucha City Council lists 23 twin towns and partners. Most of those agreements were signed after 2022.
The first after the liberation was with Bergamo in Italy — a city that had itself lived through the worst of the pandemic signed a pact with Bucha in June 2022. Through the CESVI organisation Bergamo helped reopen the Veselka kindergarten and set up heating points for the winter.
That same year Bergisch Gladbach in Germany, Cascais in Portugal, Katowice in Poland and Kavadarci in North Macedonia became partners. In 2023 came Dunkirk in France, Kočevje in Slovenia, Albany in the United States, Ferencváros in Hungary and Sandnes in Norway. In 2024 — Kerava in Finland and Strassen in Luxembourg.
But some came to help before any agreement existed. The Polish towns of Pszczyna and Tuszyn and Lithuanian Palanga — pre-war twin towns — were among the first to organise and deliver humanitarian aid.
What has been rebuilt in four years
As of February 2026, 2,448 facilities in the Bucha community have been fully or partly restored: 331 apartment blocks, 2,055 private houses and 62 social facilities. During the occupation 3,156 infrastructure facilities here were damaged.
Vokzalna Street, that same street, lost every third building — 215 houses. Its reconstruction was co-financed by the Buffett Foundation and Global Empowerment Mission.
Bucha district suffered the heaviest destruction in Kyiv region: of more than 16,000 damaged private homes, over 11,000 have already been restored. Across the region about 75% of damaged infrastructure has been rebuilt.
The most telling figure is not about buildings. On 1 October 2021 the Bucha community had 62,101 residents. On 1 February 2026 it had 69,524, including 11,583 people displaced from other regions.
Bucha stood
Thirty-five years ago this was a settlement of pine trees, sanatoriums and dachas. Today it is a Hero City visited by presidents and secretaries-general, with 23 twin towns on three continents and more people living in it than before the war.
The town russia meant to erase in 33 days became proof of the opposite. It stood — and that is precisely why its name is now known everywhere.
Nota bene
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