Easter in Bucha: Four Years Later

​By Steve Richards
With assistance from ChatGPT

​Tragedy and hope—just like Christ on the cross.Four years ago, in April 2022, I found myself in Bucha, Ukraine—just weeks after the world first began to understand what had happened there. It was my first trip into the country after the invasion, and nothing could have fully prepared me for what I encountered.

Easter that year looked nothing like what I was used to.

Instead of a familiar church service or a family brunch, I spent the day in a cold parking lot beside an apartment building, gathered around a makeshift field kitchen. A group of us cooked chicken soup over an open fire—rain, sleet, even a bit of snow falling around us. The power had only just been restored after nearly two months. The meal took hours to prepare and fed more than a dozen people. I remember peeling potatoes, trying in some small way to be useful.
 

​What struck me most, though, was that it wasn’t even Easter for most Ukrainians yet.

As part of the Orthodox tradition, they were observing Palm Sunday. There were no palm branches—just small budding twigs, a quiet symbol of life beginning again. Their Easter would come next Sunday, marked by a midnight service I watched on a small screen in a darkened train station somewhere between Kyiv and Lviv.

​But my Easter—that year—was in Bucha.

At the church the world had come to recognize.

Near the ground where mass graves had been dug.

The evidence of what had happened there was everywhere—not distant or abstract, but deeply personal. I met people who had lived through it, people like Igor, an insurance agent who had been bound and blindfolded in his own apartment, then later struck by shrapnel from an armored personnel carrier before eventually being evacuated. He told his story simply, sitting in the very apartment where it had all occurred.

​It’s hard to describe what that does to you.

I’ve included here a short, four-minute video excerpt from Trek to Bucha—the first film I created from that journey in April 2022. It captures some of what I witnessed in those early days, and the reality on the ground as the world was just beginning to understand.

Now, four years later, I find myself reflecting on Bucha in a different way.

The town is no longer what it was in those early days. There has been rebuilding. Streets have come back to life. Churches are filled again. But nothing has been forgotten—and the war itself is not over. For the people of Ukraine, this is not history. It is still their present.

And yet, what stays with me most from that Easter is not only the tragedy—but the hope I saw alongside it.
Not a distant or idealized hope, but something very real. The kind that shows up in small acts: sharing a meal, welcoming a stranger, gathering to worship, choosing—day by day—to rebuild.

That’s something I’ve seen on every trip since.

So this Easter, I find myself returning to a simple idea: tragedy and hope—the cross, and what comes after.

If you have a few minutes, I hope you’ll take the time to watch this short excerpt. It offers a window into a moment when the lights came back on—and into a place that continues to shape everything that has followed.

Thank you, as always, for following this journey and for caring about the people and stories behind it. 

​Easter in Bucha video - April 2022 (4 minutes)