THE RUSSIANS rolled into Yahidne, a small farming village just south of Chernihiv in northern Ukraine, shortly after 4pm on March 3rd. The weeks that followed may not be forgotten for centuries. At least 20 of the villagers died during 28 days of occupation. Six were shot in highly suspicious circumstances. A father and his 12-year-old daughter were gunned down as they tried to escape; the weapons used were so powerful they severed the girl’s head. Another dozen died from suffocation in a basement in the local school. They were locked in there, along with the entire village, as human shields to protect a massive Russian army camp above ground during the whole period.
Olga Martienko mops up tears with a pink scarf as she recalls the experience. She is 57, but looks a great deal older. There were 370 people sheltering in the school basement (pictured), she says; the youngest was a month old. Four to each square metre, the neighbours slept standing against one another, breathing in the same increasingly putrid air, and relieving themselves in the same bucket at the top of the stairs. On some days they were allowed out to breathe some fresh air; but on others they were not. “Almost as soon as the bombing started, people started hallucinating,” Mrs Martienko says. For significant periods, the villagers were forced to cohabit with corpses in the basement, as the most frail passed away and there was no way of taking the bodies out.
Ms Martienko’s spot was at the entrance to the cellar. She was first to face Russian soldiers when they dropped by with their regular inspections. She braced herself whenever she saw torchlights under the cracks of the basement door. Some of them whispered words of horror at the conditions, she says. Others came in drunk, and asked why she was so old; they wanted young girls for sex, they said. One rotation tried to make them sing the Russian national anthem; the villagers refused, and they recollect this moment of solidarity with laughter and with pride. “We counted the days right up until they left,” says Ms Martienko. “It was like being born again when we saw they had gone.”
The Russians left quickly on the night of March 30th, bolting the door and ordering Yahidne’s residents not to leave the basement until morning. In their rush, the soldiers left behind equipment and stark insights into their primitive ways. Cigarettes, bottles, human waste and stolen clothes—bras included—still litter their dugouts and sleeping quarters in the school’s ground floors. Outside the school, just beyond six white body bags, is a crate of military propaganda. The “military patriotic preparedness” boxes were apparently used to explain to the soldiers why they were fighting in Ukraine: teaching aids sketch key dates of glorious Russian history and the Russian military oath; a map shows most of Ukraine as historic Russia. Another crate contains reading materials: a book of the Dalai Lama’s teachings, and a magazine from Tuva, the Buddhist region of southern Russia where some of the units came from.
The villagers say that the Tuvan soldiers were the most cruel of all—especially when they started drinking. “They couldn’t handle their alcohol and didn’t understand us,” says Natalya Cherepenko, a small-scale farmer. “We did our best to avoid any contact with them.” The Tuvans lived away from the school, commandeering the villagers’ ramshackle but proudly kept huts in five parallel streets. Those streets were no-go areas without an armed escort, says Mrs Cherepenko. Ethnic Russian soldiers, generally more “understanding” of the Ukrainian villagers, would occasionally offer that protection, allowing the villagers to their homes to collect a change of clothes and medicines. They even kept guard as Mrs Cherepenko milked her cows, which she was allowed to do once a day. “One of the young lads kept saying sorry to me. He said he was from Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, that he thought he would be doing military exercises, and that his mum had no idea he was in Ukraine.”
The villagers tell stories of soldiers and commanders making ethical choices inside a lawless military structure that expected nothing of them. One type of soldier killed and ransacked their homes, they say, stealing expensive laptop computers, alcohol, chickens, and everything else they could lay their hands on. But another category went out of their way to make life easier for the villagers, allowing them out when commanders weren’t looking. They were the ones who brought water, and doctors to them during nights of the worst bombardment. “Of course, we all understood we were human shields locked in a basement at their pleasure,” says Nadezhda Tereshchenko, “but they told us they were taking responsibility for our safety while we were there, and I think there is some truth to that.”
Halyna, a villager whose missing brother-in-law was found buried with gunshot wounds to his head, is less charitable. She says the majority of the soldiers belonged to a third category: oblivious to the destruction they were creating, yet arrogant enough to believe they were doing God’s work. “The most upsetting thing was seeing them bring you water, and thinking they were doing you a good deed,” she says, “while you realise they are wearing your kid’s brand new trainers.”■
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