As Russians withdrew, people returned home. They found their towns destroyed and their loved ones hiding in basements. This is the story of occupation – about those who could return, those who were forced to stay, and those who had to witness detentions, humiliations, and killings.
Read part one here.
A long line of Ukrainian military vehicles stretches into the green fields, the multi-ton trucks kicking up dust as they move away from Chernihiv, a city liberated after a month-long Russian siege. People in the villages head outside, waving and thanking the passing troops. One elderly woman stands crying, holding onto the gates of her home.
Vadim Minevsky, a local pig farmer, returned only after the Russians were finally pushed out. His whole livelihood, as well as those of his neighbours, was devastated. Walking around the farming complex, modern John Deere tractors stand smashed, their expensive navigation equipment stolen, the tires slashed. He jokes with his neighbours that the “orcs” were at least not smart enough to steal the diesel.
Although the Russians stacked their vehicles with stolen goods – one destroyed armoured personnel carrier can be seen loaded with tools – they left their dead behind.
“We are still finding them,” says Minevsky.
He leads us across a narrow path toward what looks like a brick outhouse. Going over a small heap of earth, the sight stops us in our tracks – a man, who Minevsky says is a Russian soldier, lies with arms and legs outstretched. Another dead body, face down, is rotting inside the brick structure.
The locals found them by following pigs that were eating the bodies, according to Minevsky.
“Welcome to our world,” he says. “Before we used to live like you.”
A night-time escape
Minevsky uses an electric scooter to travel between Ivankiv village and the city of Chernihiv, a mere 15 kilometres away and only accessible via a footbridge. The same journey by car is close to 150 kilometres long due to the destroyed roads and bridges.
“I was never a public person, I never even had Facebook. But after what I saw, I wanted to share it as widely as possible,” he says.
When the war broke out, he took his wife and kids west but returned to the farm on February 25 to take care of his pigs.
There, Minevsky hid among the animals and later in the attic when the Russians occupied the area. “I understood that [hiding] was my only chance to survive,” he says.
Minevsky says he was a witness to their crimes, and the Russian troops would have killed him if they found him. The locals later found five civilians murdered inside a farm building.
When the Russians entered the village, they began firing indiscriminately at the buildings and people. The story is corroborated by a number of other locals who recall shells piercing their fences and house walls.
Minevsky used a GoPro camera he was given as a gift to record their potential war crimes and movements. He sent the footage to the Ukrainian army.
“All of us grew up in the USSR. We were told about the Great Patriotic War [Second World War]. Basically, the [Russian troops] are acting like fascists but worse.”
Minevsky continued hiding in the attic, listening to the Russian soldiers as they tortured and killed his dogs and began butchering the pigs.
Finally, he began crawling. Every time an artillery piece fired, he moved an inch further, with the war sounds masking his movements.
“I was hanging on the pipe and waiting 20 minutes to jump off into the bushes,” he says. After dropping down, he continued moving in tune with the sound of artillery firing. But the Russians spotted him and launched a drone in pursuit.
“I was rushing through the fields. My adrenaline level was high. I just wanted to stay alive. That was the only wish at that moment – I wanted to survive, to share [what I saw],” he says.
‘They put them into mass graves’
While the defenders inside Chernihiv, a city of 280,000 people north of Kyiv, held out, the surrounding villages fell under occupation.
The locals recall running to seek shelter in the basements when the first shelling started. While already underground, Yuliya Sheina, a woman from Ivankiv, remembered that they left the gas switched on while boiling water. Serhii, a man sheltering in the basement, volunteered to go outside to turn it off, making sure the house did not burn down.
“But as soon as he left the basement, they [the Russians] immediately shot him in the head,” Sheina recalls. Serhii was buried on March 8 in his own yard.
“Many of them [Russian soldiers] told us that you have to be liberated from something,” says Sheina. “A kid on a tank, younger than my elder son, said we were told to liberate you, but we don’t understand from what – you have everything. They were simply in shock.”
On their way out, the Russians took everything they could. According to Sheina, they even ripped out a boiler and stuffed it in their armoured vehicle.
But in Ivankiv, it was “like a resort compared to Yahidne”, another village a few kilometres down the road, says Sheina. “Here, we were at least able to bury the dead. There, they put them into mass graves.”
In the basement among the dead
When the Russians swept across the villages, some tried to show defiance – much like in the viral videos seen at the start of the war, including of women telling Russian troops to put sunflower seeds in their pockets. But such acts of bravery were met with reprisals here.
At least one local recalls a woman being shot after venturing out into the road to tell Russians “everything she thought about their ‘Ruski Mir’. LRT could not verify the authenticity of the story.
In another instance, the Russians shouted out for a man to stop. The man, Anatoly Yanuk, turned to face them. “He said Slava Ukraini [glory to Ukraine]. Then they shot him,” says Olha Melnyk.
Anatoly’s grandmother, Ana Panteleyivna, stands outside her home, holding onto a crutch. In front, a children‘s bicycle and a car crushed under the weight of a tracked vehicle, its threads visible on the ground.
“They killed the younger ones in the village, they killed my grandson,” she says, confirming that his body had laid on the road for days.
Anatoly was just in his 30s. Another man, who was a retired policeman but still wore his uniform trousers, was also executed on the street. In many occupied villages, the Russian forces reportedly killed and abducted anyone bearing any links to the country’s armed forces or the law enforcement.
Another local woman, Olha, was among the dozens of villagers driven to the basement of a nearby school. There, they were kept hostage from March 5 until April 2, deprived for days of opportunity to fetch water, eat, or even lay down. At least ten people died in inhumane conditions.
Outside, the Russian forces dug in, positioning their gun emplacement and trenches in a ring around the school on the edge of the village. The Ukrainian lines were just up ahead.
“I spent four days only in the basement. I did not have enough air. I stood like a soldier. There was no space,” says Olha, Melnyk’s friend, who asked her surname to be withheld. Every few days, the soldiers would guide them to their homes at gunpoint to fetch food and water supplies.
But most of the time they were held inside for days at a time, sharing space with the dead. “I said there is a month-old child, he will die. They answered – let him die,” says Melnyk.
The abuse persisted. “They said, “you want to [leave the basement] to go home? Sing the Russian anthem, and I will take you there,” recalls Melnyk.
They also recall being grabbed by their hair and thrown to the ground, drunk soldiers asking men to bring their wives to them, as well as threats to execute them.
One Russian soldier said that letting civilians out meant being attacked themselves – he had allegedly learned that in Syria. “So, he said, we want to kill all of you, so you don't kill our troops,” says Olha.
But the behaviour of the Russians fluctuated. While some would hand over their own rations and allow the villagers to go outside for food and water, others threatened to throw grenades into the basement.
“One soldier came [...] and started giving out his food rations. My hands were shaking, but we took it,” says Olha.
Some Russian officers even allegedly took to protecting the civilians, asking them to report those who were drunk and threatening to kill or rape them. But little came of it, as the looting and abuse persisted.
Finally, they were allowed to bury the dead at a hastily dug site on the outskirts of the village. They recall seeing a Russian vehicle move into the woods adjacent to them. Then, the firing started, injuring several people digging graves. The villagers say it was the Russians, though the claim is impossible to verify.
At least 20 villagers died, although the published numbers sometimes differ, and there are no official statistics yet, while another six were reportedly executed.
While walking around the village, Vadim Minevsky, the pig farmer, is still burning with adrenaline, spewing out recollections and details of his daring escape. But during a more quiet moment, he sighs: “Honestly, I don’t know what I will do next. I am still in shock.”
Ukrainian villages saw extrajudicial killings and other war crimes. But what shocked the whole world, meanwhile, were the massacres around Kyiv. Now, Bucha is set to go down in history as the next Srebrenica. Read more in part three – soon.
Text and pictures: Benas Gerdžiūnas
Video report: Augustinas Šulija
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