There is a line of tidy houses on Vokzalna Street, where crumbling homes once lined a roadway littered with burned-out Russian tanks. There are neat sidewalks and fresh pavement with blue and yellow bunting hanging overhead. And there are backhoes and bulldozers plowing across a construction site where a new home goods store will replace a previous one that was burned to the ground.
They are remaking Bucha, the suburb of Kyiv, the capital, that became synonymous with Russian atrocities in the earliest days of the invasion of Ukraine, where civilians were tortured, raped or executed, their bodies left to rot in the streets.
More than a year after Ukrainian forces wrested back Bucha from Russian troops, the town has drawn international investment that has physically transformed it, and it has become a stopping point for delegations of foreign leaders who come through almost weekly.