No Time for Funeral Rites
The gravedigger of Bucha provides evidence of Russian atrocities.
Three hundred sixty-five days of war, and my mind keeps drifting back to one of them: the June morning when I met Andriy Galavin, the gravedigger of Bucha.
Sunburned and baggy-eyed, he stood at the end of a stairway on a small hill that led to an imposing church. War hadn’t muted the vibrancy of spring; a charred remnant of a backyard garden, all ashes and burnt shards of terra cotta, sat next to an unscathed plot of growing vegetables. Workers carrying weed trimmers tamed ankle-high patches along the side of the road, maneuvering around the steel corpses of armored vehicles.
The gravedigger was the human wreckage of the war. Like some mythological figure, he seemed fixed to the landing in front of the church, doomed to
