Bucha and the Work of Documenting War Crimes While the War Goes On

On the first days of April 2022, journalists and Ukrainian soldiers walked into Bucha, a commuter town of tidy apartment blocks and garden plots northwest of Kyiv, a few days after Russian troops pulled back from the capital region. What they found on Yablunska Street, a long road lined with houses and fences, went around the world within hours: bodies of civilians in the road, some near bicycles, some with their hands bound. People who had lived through a month of occupation came out of basements and told reporters where neighbours had been taken. The images were the beginning of the story most people remember. The part fewer people saw came next, when investigators in protective suits started counting, photographing, measuring and labelling, in a country where the shelling had not stopped.

In short: Bucha became a symbol of atrocity in Ukraine, but its lasting importance may come from the evidence work that began there: forensic exhumations, satellite imagery, witness interviews and open-source verification. This post explains how war-crimes evidence is gathered and protected during an active war, which courts might use it, and why steady American support for that work is a cause worth keeping alive.

The street, the satellite and the alibi

Within days of the photographs, Russian officials said the scene had been staged after their soldiers left. That claim is where the documentation story really starts, because it was answered not with outrage but with timestamps.

Commercial satellite imagery, analysed by news organisations including The New York Times, showed dark objects on Yablunska Street in mid-March, weeks before the withdrawal, in the same positions where bodies were later photographed. Drone footage taken during the occupation, intercepted communications reported by German intelligence to the press, and the testimony of residents fit together into a timeline. No single piece carried the weight. The case rested on independent sources agreeing with each other.

That is the first lesson of modern war-crimes documentation: the strongest evidence is a pattern built from many kinds of proof, each collected so that a skeptical judge years later can trace where it came from and who touched it. A photograph is a fact. A photograph with its original metadata, the name of the person who took it, the place it was stored and a record of every copy is evidence.

What investigators actually do in a town like Bucha

The work in Bucha and the surrounding Kyiv region looked less like a television drama and more like a cross between a coroner's office and an archive.

Ukrainian police and prosecutors, working with forensic teams, exhumed bodies from yards and a mass grave near a church, performed autopsies and tried to establish cause of death. Gunshot wounds at close range, signs of torture and the position of a body all matter in law, because they help separate deaths that happened in combat from killings of people who were already detained or posed no threat. International teams arrived to help, including French forensic specialists who worked in the area in the spring of 2022, and the International Criminal Court's prosecutor visited Bucha that April.

Alongside the bodies came the paperwork of the living. Investigators took statements from survivors about who was in the town, which units were quartered in which buildings, what the soldiers said and wore. Ukrainian authorities and journalists identified military units believed to have occupied the area. Every one of those statements had to be recorded in a way that would survive cross-examination: who interviewed the witness, in what language, whether the witness had been shown photos first.

None of this is glamorous. All of it decides whether anyone is ever held to account.

The rules that make evidence usable later

War-crimes cases can take a decade or longer to reach a courtroom. The trials for crimes in the former Yugoslavia ran for years after the fighting ended, and some of the most important evidence there was gathered by people who did not know which court would eventually use it. Ukraine's investigators face the same problem at a larger scale and with modern tools.

Three practical principles run through the work:

• Chain of custody. Every item, physical or digital, needs a record of who collected it, when, and where it has been since. A gap in that record invites a defence lawyer to argue the evidence was altered.
• Preservation before analysis. Original files are copied and stored with a mathematical fingerprint, called a hash, so anyone can later prove the copy has not changed. Analysts work on copies; the originals are left alone.
• Do no harm to witnesses. Interviewing a traumatised survivor several times, by several different organisations, can hurt the person and weaken their testimony, since small inconsistencies between versions get used against them. Coordination among investigators is a protection, not a bureaucratic nicety.

For digital material, a set of guidelines called the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations, published in 2020 by the University of California, Berkeley's Human Rights Center with the UN human rights office, lays out how to find, verify and preserve online content so it can stand up in court. War in Ukraine is the first major conflict in which those standards were available from the opening weeks.

Who might put it in front of a judge

People often ask which court will "handle Bucha." The honest answer is several, and that is part of the design.

Ukraine's own courts carry most of the load. Ukrainian prosecutors have registered a very large number of suspected war crimes since the full-scale invasion, and the first trial of a Russian soldier, for killing an unarmed civilian in the Sumy region, ended with a conviction in May 2022. Many later cases have been tried in absentia, because the accused are in Russia. Those judgments still matter: they create a record, and they can follow a person if they ever travel.

The International Criminal Court has jurisdiction even though Ukraine had not joined its founding treaty when the war began, because Ukraine had formally accepted the court's authority over crimes on its territory in declarations made after 2014. The prosecutor opened an investigation in early March 2022 after dozens of member states referred the situation. In March 2023 the court issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Russia's commissioner for children's rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, over the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children. The court cannot try people in their absence, so those warrants wait.

Courts in other countries can act under universal jurisdiction, which lets some national systems try grave international crimes no matter where they happened. Germany used it to convict a Syrian intelligence officer for crimes against humanity in a landmark case decided in 2022. Several European prosecutors have opened Ukraine-related investigations.

A tribunal for aggression fills a gap. The ICC cannot prosecute Russian leaders for the crime of aggression itself, the decision to launch the war, because of limits in its own rules. So European governments built pieces of an alternative: a centre in The Hague to collect evidence on aggression, opened in 2023, and an agreement between Ukraine and the Council of Europe, signed in June 2025, to set up a special tribunal. Its future depends on politics that are still unsettled.

The strongest objections, taken seriously

There is a fair argument that all this documentation is a luxury, or worse, a distraction. It goes something like this: wars end at negotiating tables, not in courtrooms; indictments of leaders make peace harder, because a man facing arrest has a reason to keep fighting; and the history of international justice is full of warrants that were never served.

Each piece has something to it. Warrants against sitting heads of state are rarely executed. Peace talks do sometimes trade justice for an end to killing, and people in the middle of a war may reasonably want the killing to stop first.

Here's the case for doing the work anyway. Documentation is not the same as prosecution, and it does not have to be timed to any negotiation. Evidence gathered now can wait twenty years; evidence not gathered now is gone, because graves are disturbed, witnesses die or scatter, and servers are wiped. The history bears this out. Prosecutors in the Balkans relied on exhumations and records collected long before anyone was in custody, and people who seemed untouchable were eventually tried. In Argentina, records of the dictatorship's crimes were gathered while its leaders were protected by amnesty laws; when those laws fell, the files were ready.

There is also a reason that has nothing to do with courts. Families in Bucha want to know what happened to the people they loved, where they are buried and who did it. An identified body returned to a family is justice of a kind, whatever happens at The Hague.

Where the United States stands, and why it shifts

American policy on this work has moved with administrations, and readers should understand the cross-currents.

During the first years of the full-scale war, Washington funded Ukrainian prosecutors, supported open-source investigators, and in late 2022 Congress passed a bipartisan law allowing US prosecutors to charge war crimes committed abroad when the suspect is in the United States, closing a long-standing gap in the federal war crimes statute. The Justice Department brought its first case under the war crimes law in 2023, charging Russian soldiers who were not in custody over the torture of an American living in Ukraine.

At the same time, the United States has never joined the International Criminal Court, and administrations of both parties have kept it at arm's length. In February 2025 President Trump signed an executive order imposing sanctions related to the ICC, and its prosecutor was named under that order. That decision was aimed at the court's work on Israel and Palestine, not Ukraine, but sanctions on the court's officials affect every investigation the court runs, including the one into Bucha.

I think the consistent position, the one a progressive foreign policy should hold, is that the same standards of evidence and accountability apply to every armed force and every government, allies included. Civilians in Bucha, in Gaza, in Israel's southern towns on October 7, in Sudan's Darfur, are equally people, and the law protecting them does not get stronger by being applied selectively. Supporting careful documentation everywhere is the way to make that principle more than a slogan.

The people doing the counting

It is worth remembering who carries this work day to day. Many are Ukrainian: local prosecutors who were not trained for mass atrocity cases and learned fast, forensic doctors working long shifts, archivists, and volunteer researchers who verify videos at night after their regular jobs. Some are from human rights groups that have documented abuses in the region since 2014. Others are international lawyers and investigators on short deployments.

Their work has a cost. Secondary trauma among people who handle atrocity evidence is well documented, and the volume in Ukraine is enormous. Funding for that support, and for the dull back-office tasks of storing and indexing terabytes of material, comes from governments, foundations and individual donors, and it tends to fade once the cameras leave.

Bucha was also not the only place. As Russian forces withdrew from the north in the spring of 2022, investigators found similar evidence in nearby towns such as Irpin and Borodianka, and later in the east after Ukraine retook ground around Izium in the autumn of that year, where a large burial site was exhumed in the woods. Each place needed the same patient routine: secure the site, record it, identify the dead, find the witnesses, and preserve everything in a form a court can trust. Multiply that routine across a front line hundreds of miles long, under drone and missile attack, and the scale of the job comes into focus. It is one reason that coordination tools, such as shared databases among prosecutors and a joint investigation team that several European countries formed with Ukraine through the EU's judicial cooperation agency, matter so much. They keep the same survivor from being interviewed five times and the same video from being verified five times by five different offices.

The town of Bucha itself has rebuilt much of what was damaged. Residents still lay flowers on Yablunska Street. They did not ask to become a symbol. What they asked for, and what the evidence work is meant to give them, is a record that cannot be argued away.

What you can do

The documentation of war crimes depends on public pressure for funding, on laws that let prosecutors act, and on people refusing to let the record be erased. Some places to start:

• Ask your members of Congress where they stand. Look up your House member and both senators on our representatives page, which lists their phone numbers, contact forms and latest votes, and ask whether they support continued funding for war-crimes documentation in Ukraine and consistent standards for every conflict.
• Support groups that do the slow work. Our directory of organizations lists nonprofits by cause in every state; the civil rights, immigrant and legal aid categories include groups that work with refugees and survivors of war.
• Follow the issue past the headlines. The human rights and foreign aid topic page gathers reporting on Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and accountability efforts, so a story does not vanish just because the news cycle moves on.
• Be careful with what you share. If you post war footage, keep the original source and date with it, and avoid images that identify survivors who have not chosen to be seen. Verification starts with ordinary people refusing to pass along material they cannot trace.

The images from Bucha shocked people for a week. The evidence gathered there is meant to last for decades. That second, quieter job is the one that needs help.