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Reporting from Ukraine, a veteran war correspondent chronicles a campaign to collect evidence of Russian atrocities that might stand up in court against Putin, his commanders, and their troops. Bucha became a commuter town, where those who couldn’t afford city prices built Soviet-style apartment blocks and small, pretty, pastel houses with neat square gardens and iron gates. Now this is a place that stinks of death. Evil things happened here. According to Amnesty International, those things included torture. Extrajudicial killings (murders without lawful authority). Indiscriminate shelling of homes. Still, life returns, even to the most haunted of places. And it is returning to Bucha in slow motion. After all, life must return after war: Bosnian schools opened in Srebrenica after the 1995 genocide. In Rwanda, where more than 800,000 civilians, primarily Tutsis, were slaughtered in the spring of 1994, farms were replenished and soon grew coffee and corn, even after so much blood was spilled on that same earth. A little more than a month after the Russians retreated, the cleaning of Bucha had begun. Read the full story in Vanity Fair here.

A disturbing video out of Ukraine evokes similar scenes from Srebrenica. In July 1995, 12-year-old Senada Ibrahamovic leaned out the window of her house in Srebrenica, a former mining town in eastern Bosnia, and caught a fleeting glance of her father, Smail. A defender of the embattled city, he was running into the forest. He turned around and waved goodbye to his daughter. He was wearing his favorite blue jean jacket. When I spoke to her in 2005, Senada remembered this detail and also that she was angry with her father for leaving as the town’s warning sirens went off. But he had kissed her and told her he would see her in a few days: that the family would be reunited. Read the full story in Foreign Policy here.

Valentyna told me that not long after Russian troops arrived in Yahidne, her village in northern Ukraine, a tall, blond soldier came to use her bathroom. She asked him what the Russians were doing in Ukraine. “We want you to be with us,” he told her, “for you to be with Russia.” In Yahidne, the reality of being “with us” meant the following: The Russian soldiers herded some 300 villagers into a cellar underneath a school next to their artillery, turning them into human shields. The oldest villager was 96. “We are here to protect you,” the Russian soldiers told them. But they held the villagers in the cellar for about a month, and 10 died after Russians did not provide proper medical care. Others, including Valentyna, a pensioner who lives alone, stayed in their homes, which Russian soldiers ransacked, looking for money and loot. I went to Yahidne in mid-April, not long after it had been liberated by Ukrainian troops. The village is not an unusual example of the brutality that Russia tries to sell as brotherhood in Ukraine. Throughout the war, being “with us” has been synonymous with atrocity: the mass bombings of schools, homes and hospitals, and the rape and execution of civilians. It’s also been synonymous with humiliation. To humiliate people is to exploit your power over them, making them feel worthless and dependent on you. It is clear, then, that the Russian military seems intent on humiliating Ukrainians, taking away their right to independence and their right to make their own decisions. This war is an act of imperialism, a colonial war meant to destroy another nation’s right to exist and to subjugate it. But it is not empire building in the sense of a coldly considered plan for territorial gain and economic resources; it is the next act of Vladimir Putin’s empire of humiliation. Read the full story in The New York Times here.