As Russians withdrew, people who had fled returned. They found their towns destroyed, their loved ones hiding in basements, bearing witness to executions and tortures. This is the story of occupation – about those who could return, those who were forced to stay, and those who had to endure and witness Russian detentions, humiliations, and killings.
The road to Chernihiv is marked with explosion holes. Cars slow down to a crawl to manoeuvre across a landscape strewn with cut down trees, shrapnel, and debris. Burned vehicles – some bearing Russian markings – stand charred and twisted.
The movement to and from the city of 280,000 people now passes a single-lane temporary bridge set up by the Ukrainian military. A man in fatigues guides the cars over the precarious metal construction, while the line to cross takes hours.
Among those returning is 25-year-old Ira Hoisa.
“I am feeling anxious about returning,” she says on the way. “I am afraid to see what my city looks like.”
Under siege
Located close to the Belarusian and Russian borders, Chernihiv was an easy target for the invading forces. On February 24, when the war began, Russia’s ground troops raced toward their prized target – Kyiv. Chernihiv, standing on its path, was one of the first cities to bear the brunt of the fighting. Ceding ground to the enveloping forces, the city became fully surrounded on March 10.
Once bridges were blown, that was it. A local journalist, Vladislav Savinok, recalls being approached by a member of a local self-defence unit from the Territorial Defence Force. There will be no more bread, the man said, as he handed a loaf to Vladislav. You have five people in the family, take it, the man said. So Vladislav took it.
Thousands of families like his dug in for a siege.
The Russian military positioned in villages and forests around the city pounded area upon area with artillery and airstrikes. One such hit massacred ten people queuing for bread.
The army mobilised to fight, while the people did what they could. Locals recall scenes witnessed all across Ukraine – hundreds of volunteers lining up to sign up to the territorial defence forces before they were full. Others took to volunteering, as did Ira.
She met her friends by chance, they were thrown into ad-hoc teams who would brave shelled roads to deliver aid and help pensioners who could barely move from their beds. At nights, when the fighting raged, Ira would lie on the floor, holding hands with her brother Andrii.
“When my sister and I slept on the floor, we would hear the sounds of planes overhead, so she held my hand and stayed close to me,” he says. “I did the same.”
It is impossible to remain calm, says Andrii. “You just sit and hold hands.” And wait.
Andrii, 17, had spent a whole night preparing for an exam, only to hear Russian missiles in the early hours of February 24.
During the first week, there was still internet service. “You always had a phone in your hand, connected with everyone, and now – nothing. Only books are left, exactly how it was before”, in previous wars, Andrii says.
Their friends recall being faced with the unfathomable, having to process the thought that a war had begun. They lined up to dig trenches, with scenes of war movies vivid in their imagination. I saw how they dug trenches during the Second World War, says Ira’s friend Dymytro, so I guess we will dig trenches, too.
Andrii’s sister left, but he decided to stay put with his family who refused to leave – out of patriotism, but also the need to take care of the grandmother.
“I was scared, but I couldn’t leave. I wanted to stay here. A person without a homeland is nothing, and, in the worst-case scenario, it’s better to die in Chernihiv as a free man than to slave to these Russians,” he adds.
Day after day, the fighting got closer.
“I was upstairs in the apartment with my mother, we heard shells fall really close. My mother was cutting an onion in the kitchen or something. I said let‘s go,“ remembers Ira.
They headed down to the basement. Outside, a group of people were making their way across the yard.
“We were trying to get them to come to the shelter, but they said they would get back home,“ adds Ira‘s mother Svitlana, pointing to another brick apartment block nearby.
Seconds later, a shell crashed directly in front of them. Ira‘s family rushed out to help.
“The woman had a huge shrapnel lodged in her side,” recalls Svitlana. She died later, leaving a child behind, while three other people were injured in the same attack. This made Svitlana push her daughter to leave.
“Only after these deaths, only then you understood what was really happening to us. That this was war, that no one will return the mother to this child,” says Svitlana. “Only then do you begin to understand what war is.”
Intensifying shelling pushed more and more people to seek routes out, however dangerous. According to city officials, around a third of the population left.
“They left at their own risk because there were no humanitarian corridors,” says Svitlana. You could die in the city, or you could die on the road, she adds. It all comes down to luck.
The decision to leave was hard for Ira. Torn, she heeded her mother’s calls to flee – even as she tried, and failed, to get them to follow her. This left a lingering sense of guilt, one that pushed her to come back as soon as she could.
“I thought that I could still help somehow, that I could come back, but I felt guilty every day. I was still reading the news, always asking my friends and mother about what’s going on in the city.”
Ira took to organising humanitarian aid to Chernihiv, as well as other towns, from the relative safety in Lviv – a city in western Ukraine that has attracted thousands of people like her from across the country.
But the sense of displacement, as well as haunting elements of so-called survivors’ guilt, is pushing people to return home – both from western Ukraine and from abroad. Weekly, close to 100,000 people head back to the country.
We ask Ira’s mother, Svitlana, about what she would like her daughter to do. Silence fills the room, as Svitlana looks up at Ira. They pause.
“From one side, I was calmer when she was with me because children need to be with their parents. On the other hand, I want my child to be safe,” says Svitlana.
She pauses and looks at Ira before continuing: “I want her to go abroad. I was the one who talked her into it.”
As for herself, Svitlana has made her mind up to stay. “I have many relatives across the border, and they all invited us to come,” Svitlana says.
“They said, how will you help here? You don’t have any weapons, they will simply kill you. I said we will go out with flags to demonstrate, throw Molotov cocktails,” she adds. “We will do something.”
‘Even cars carrying children were shot at’
The only way out was over a footbridge and across fields separating the city from the next village – Anysiv. This was also the route that Ira took. On March 18, she packed her things and left.
A crowd gathered in the city, waiting for evacuation cars that never came. They all decided to walk, Ira remembers. There was intermittent shelling all around the town.
“At one moment, one guy shouted – get down to the ground. And everybody did, but not me. I still didn’t get what was going on.”
She just stared at the people dropping for cover. “It was like a movie or a nightmare.”
It was the peak of the shelling against the city, according to Ira’s mother, that would persist for several more weeks until the Russians were forced to withdraw. On April 5, the entire region was cleared from Russian troops.
“Even cars carrying children were shot at, women were killed,” says Svitlana. “The word ‘children’ was written on buses, but they shot at them anyway. Many cars are standing on the road, [left by] people who tried to evacuate,” says Svitlana.
What happened to people heading out may constitute a war crime – one of many that are now hanging over the decision-makers in the Kremlin, their lieutenants and executioners.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has already said attacks against civilians in Mariupol, the southern port city that has not yet managed to break the siege as Chernihiv did, may constitute war crimes. In a report published on Wednesday, the Vienna-based organisation said Russia was deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure and non-combatants all across the country.
The attacks on people attempting to evacuate from Chernihiv are no different. Such killing throughout Ukraine may constitute “extrajudicial killings”, the OSCE report said.
“They knew” what they were doing, says Svitlana.
Some of the people that did not manage to make it out may have ended up at a makeshift cemetery. Dozens are still missing, while 70 bodies could not yet be identified.
In the cemetery, a man wanders past row upon row of graves, topped with rudimentary handwritten signs identifying victims. Finally, he sees the name he is looking for.
He steps aside, breaks off a branch and sticks it in the grave, hunching over a small heap of wet sand, tears rolling down his face.
He calls his sister. “I found him,” he says.
The road home
The Russian withdrawal and Ukrainian success allowed people like Ira to return. For those who have remained, including her mother, silence – for now – feels deceptive.
“Silence in war makes you anxious,” says Svitlana. You understand that it can be broken at any second, she adds. “When there was silence [last time], very heavy shelling came after.”
“As long as they are on our land, even silence does not bring peace.”
The Russian forces failed to take the city. Had they entered, the result would have been similar to the scenes seen in Bucha – the frustration from military failures would have translated into mass repressions against civilians. This is a sentiment repeated by many in Chernihiv, including Svitlana.
“They could not take Kyiv, that’s why they behaved like that [around the villages]. They did not bomb heavily the areas around Chernihiv, which were occupied, but they really abused the people. There was a genocide,” says Svitlana. “People were being held in basements, not allowed to get water, go to the toilet. People died there.”
“Probably it would be better to have your home bombed than abused like that,” she adds.
While some like Ira have returned, others are only now finding out what happened to their neighbours. After weeks under forced detention in their basements, people are emerging to find their neighbours tortured and killed on the streets. The massacre in Bucha, which had made headlines around the world, was not an isolated incident. Read more in part two – soon.
Text and pictures: Benas Gerdžiūnas
Video report: Augustinas Šulija
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