I Survived the Bucha Massacre
Ukrainian journalist: I know what “compromise” with Putin looks like.
Olya Bilan is a journalist working for Ukraine’s Channel 24.
The question of whether Ukraine will cede land to Russia isn’t about drawing lines on a map. It’s about the lives of the people who live on that land. The families and communities torn apart by the invaders’ brutality. For American and European diplomats now bandying about the idea of a compromise solution, the conflict is abstract. For me, this is reality.
My name is Olya. I am a Ukrainian television reporter. Together with my family, I survived the Russian occupation of my hometown, Bucha, just west of Kyiv.
Before February 2022, I could never have imagined Russian soldiers outside of my house. Their armored vehicles, emblazoned with the infamous Z, rolling down my street. The kidnappings, rapes, and murders.
Eleven of us crammed into a basement. We warmed our hands over candles and rationed bread. It was cold, and we slept with our shoes and jackets on. We fell asleep and woke up and fell asleep again to the terrifying sounds of explosions and gunfire. Outside, the marauding Russian occupiers were killing my friends and neighbors. They burned down my grandmother’s apartment. They bombed my godfather’s house.
My father bravely volunteered as a partisan, passing information to the Ukrainian military to help them evict the Russians. Soldiers shot at him on at least three occasions. One day, he disappeared. We could not reach him. It was the longest day of my life. By some miracle, he came back. Sadly, many Ukrainians cannot say the same for their fathers.
Occasionally, we dared to venture out of our shelter. We went out to assist others. To distribute aid. My professional obligations as a journalist—which continued, even in wartime—also required it. I had to find a stable signal to broadcast. When I would come up from the basement, I saw bodies. Cars riddled with bullet holes. Houses destroyed. I worked hard to share the reality of the situation with other Ukrainians and the rest of the world, but my ability to report was often dependent on the ebb and flow of fighting in the area. I risked being shot by snipers I could not see or maimed by landmines buried beneath my feet.
One day, about a week into the invasion, I set out for Bucha City Hospital. I’d gotten word that a Russian soldier was being treated there after being badly injured in combat. I wanted to interview him—his testimony would be an important peak behind the modern-day Iron Curtain of Putin’s Russia.
When I found my interviewee, he was severely burned. He struggled to speak, but the words eventually came. A father of two, he came from Kemerovo Oblast in Siberia, closer to Russia’s borders with China and Kazakhstan than with Ukraine. The soldier told me he’d reported for training not knowing that he’d be participating in an invasion of Ukraine. But as our conversation progressed, his narrative changed. Now that he was here, in my country, he insisted that he was fighting a war with NATO (Ukraine is not a member of the NATO alliance). Though Russia and Ukraine are neighbors, we exist in completely separate information ecosystems and moral universes.
The next day, the soldier died.
Returning home from these brief expeditions was often the most perilous part of the journey. I was entirely at the mercy of the occupiers. In one instance, my father and I asked a soldier if we could return to our home. The soldier pointed his gun at us. I knew that Russian troops were arbitrarily arresting, torturing, and murdering Ukrainian civilians. I would simply be another name on a long list of martyrs. But on that day, the soldier waved us along.
That was cold comfort. Imagine having to ask a foreign army for permission to simply enter your home. Imagine coming and going from your house being a life and death proposition.
A little after a month after the full-scale invasion began, the Ukrainian Armed Forces swept back into Bucha and expelled the Russian occupiers. Their heroic counterattack proved to the world that our nation can fight and win against the invaders.
The war continues because what I experienced for just over a month remains the reality for millions of Ukrainians living under occupation behind the line of contact. Now, in foreign capitals, people who have never been to Ukraine are working to turn that frontline into a permanent border.
Every occupied town is a place where love once blossomed. Where people dreamed about their futures. Now, they are places of fear, grasping to just survive. If a deal is accepted based on the current state of play in the war, roughly six million Ukrainians would be consigned to perpetual Russian control. Six million people would be forced to submit to indiscriminate arrests and brutal electrical torture. Millions of men would risk involuntary conscription into the Russian Army, forced to fight against their friends and loved ones. Millions of women risk harassment, abuse, and worse. Millions of children will grow up not knowing their language and national heritage.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We need humanitarian aid to help those worst affected by this war of terror and ensure that our nation remains viable the day after we decisively win. We Ukrainians need military support from the allies of freedom to make that goal a reality. And we need the most influential players in the international arena to reject any deal asking for major territorial concessions. Sacrificing land is one thing; but we cannot sacrifice the people living on it.
Ukrainian land is not empty. It is my home and the home of so many people I love and care about. We are not asking for you to sacrifice your sons and daughters, as we have—only to give us the means to protect our friends, families, and futures.
Olya Bilan is a host and broadcast journalist on Ukraine’s Channel 24.
A deep bow of gratitude to Olya and all Ukrainians for so bravely standing up to the biggest bully with the worst weapons. I am sickened by Trump and Vance’s inclinations to appease Putin instead of wholeheartedly helping defend Ukraine.
I fear her message will fall on deaf ears; although, I certainly hope not. I can’t fathom what is currently happening to those still behind Putin’s new ‘Iron Wall.’ Were Ukrainians summarily executed in place like Mariupol, who haven’t seen freedom in 3 years? What about towns that have only recently found themselves under that dark shroud of Putin’s reconquest—I can’t imagine what is not coming out because of the control of the narrative, and the language disparities that don’t allow the many stories to come out.