Journalist Oleksandr Ostapa decided to leave Bucha at the early stage of the invasion in February 2022 with his wife and his two-year-old daughter. During that time, he recruited volunteers and found ways to let in humanitarian aid, including food, batteries, and so on. As a public activist, he also worked to deliver humanitarian aid to civilians and worked with military and volunteer organisations. TheBuchaCity, the winner of the 2023 Best Restart of Local Media Award, is a project started in 2015 as a way of bringing the community of Bucha together. From a simple picture posted on social media, it is now the most followed news outlet in Bucha. 

How did TheBuchaCity project start? How did it go from being an Instagram account to an independent media?

Really interesting story. It was Orthodox Christmas of 2015, I just woke up in my apartment and took a picture of the view of our local stadium with my phone from my window. I just opened an account on social media and posted there. One month later, more than one hundred people had joined this page, so I started to share new photos of Bucha every day. In one and a half years, my combined audience on Facebook and Instagram was 5,000. Then I launched the website of TheBuchaCity with the help of a friend.

Having another job as well at the time it was a problem to continue to work with TheBuchaCity and I asked my friend to help me with this, and he is now our editor-in-chief, Oleksandr Bortsov. 

After the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we agreed to create a chat on Telegram for Bucha residents. At 6 am on the 24 February, it was just me and him. By the end of the day, there were 2000 people in this chat, sharing information about what was going on around the city. In one month, it was 15,000 people in just one chat. And we increased even more to 20,000 people on Telegram, and 15,000 people on Instagram just in the first months of the full-scale invasion. On 28 February, I created 15 new chats for districts and Bucha just to coordinate the aid inside each district. People who did not have food or did not want to leave the house would communicate with neighbours living in the same area and collaborate to gather primary needs.

Tell us more about the time that Bucha was invaded. What were your first thoughts? 

I was ready. I had additional water and additional gas tanks. All my stuff was in the back of the car. On 18 February I passed my training in first aid. And on 24 February in the morning, a colleague of my wife called us and said that the invasion had started. We woke up, started to gather all the stuff, and then decided to just wait for one day to see what was going on. Because we used to live one kilometre away from the airport, I saw all the bombings happening at extremely close quarters. I thought of my two-year old daughter hiding in the shelter. The next morning, on 25 February, we decided to go to a nearby region. Several days later, my wife and daughter, together with some family, took a car and moved to Strasbourg, France. But I stayed in Ukraine. At first, I thought of driving back to Bucha on my own, but 100 kilometres from Bucha my friend called me and told me that Bucha was under occupation, so I could not go back. 

I gathered nine volunteers from Bucha, eight guys, and one girl who works alongside me as a designer in TheBuchaCity. We moved to a city 10 kilometres from Kyiv into a ‘storage house’. These existed because a lot of organisations had sent humanitarian aid. The house, however, was situated 600 kilometres from Bucha. We understood that it would take several days to get the aid into the city from there, so we started to gather it all just half an hour away from there. On 1 April, thanks to multiple contacts I had with the army and intelligence services, we were the first cars to enter Bucha to help people after the Russians were pushed back. I remember seeing that my apartment had been looted by Russian soldiers. They had destroyed the doors and looted everything. I am back now living in that same apartment. 

Has your role as a journalist changed since then? 

Yes indeed. When I went back to Bucha I was mainly volunteering to deliver aid. My friends, my volunteers, and my mother asked me to become a journalist. Before the full-scale invasion, there were 50,000 people in Bucha, now there are no more than 25,000. So they wanted me to engage in the Bucha community also for those who did not come back to see what was happening in Bucha at the time. A lot of people wanted to find out if their houses were okay, so every day I would post numerous photos of different houses to show their conditions. Another big part of my job was to try and help people in a concrete way every single day with my reporting. Together with volunteers, we would each day go to different districts to provide any help needed. It was interesting to see how volunteering and journalism were so connected through what I was doing. I would give people humanitarian aid and, at the same time, listen to their stories about what happened under the occupation, or inform them of what was happening in the city. Without electricity, the usual means of news sharing that we have become used to relying on did not work It was like going back to a primitive form of communication. When the Russian troops left Bucha and we came back into the city, a lot of people had no idea that the city was freed, and they were still hiding in shelters. We went around to let them know that they were safe, and saying it face-to-face was the only way. 

Two years after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the war is still raging, despite vanishing from many international headlines. How is the situation on the ground?

I moved back to Bucha now and things are back to normal. We were told that it is forbidden to go into the woods that surround the area as the Russian troops left unexploded mines there. It will take up to 67 years to get rid of all of them, according to the authorities. The Bucha City channels on Telegram still work very great, even for smaller tasks or requests, and they helped create an ever stronger sense of community in each district of the city.

Chiara Alfieri is a BA Journalism student at the University of Galway and currently a communication intern at the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ).