Three-and-a-half years ago, Vadym Yevdokymenko lost his father during some of the worst war crimes in Europe since World War II.

Sitting on a bench beside a walking path on a sunny day in September, the 23-year-old Ukrainian recounts the story with a preternatural calm and poise. He has become a face of efforts by his hometown to rebuild not just its homes and buildings but also to reconstruct its collective psyche.

This is a story he’s told countless times before.

In the weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian soldiers occupied Bucha, just 20 miles northwest of Kyiv, the capital. During that month, they raped, tortured, and murdered more than 400 civilians, burying more than 100 of them in a mass grave.

His father, Oleksii, was one of them, his body burned beyond recognition, with just his ID card nearby.

The atrocities have been confirmed by international news outlets, documented by international bodies, including Human Rights Watch, and condemned by the United Nations.

But the war drags on. Many families still feel shattered. Some still don’t know what happened to their loved ones.

Yevdokymenko feels their agony and has listened to every detail of their ordeals. Over the last three and a half years, he has helped coordinate an online network through which he has helped more than 70 other families in the Bucha and broader Kyiv region to work with investigators to identify their loved ones’ remains or to track down whether they are still alive.

“Once families know that their loved ones are in captivity, they get a little calmer,” he says. “But you can see that they’re still struggling, and it’s really unnerving.”

Getting even morsels of information is crucial for a small sense of closure and some coherence to this dark chapter in their family history.

“Every murder is unique,” he says. “And every situation is different.”

The world awoke to the news of the Bucha atrocities on April 1, 2022, after Ukrainian troops “de-occupied” the city. Ukrainians use the term “de-occupy” because the absence of enemy troops does not immediately........

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