The mere sight of a child here – wearing sunglasses, pulling a scooter, bugging his mother to buy him sweets – was enough to impress Petro Trotsenko, a stall owner at a market in Bucha that reopened this past week.
Just over a month ago, the market lay bare, looted of all its wares, cut up by shrapnel. The nearby glass factory where Trotsenko, 74, worked in his younger years was being used as a torture chamber by Russian soldiers occupying this suburb of Kyiv. The bodies of 22 people from his neighborhood, summarily executed over the course of March, lay where they had fallen in the streets. Nearly every yard was filled with rubble, burned-out vehicles and makeshift graves. Nearly every family with children had fled.
