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‘Your wife will be in a cell next door, and your son will be in a Russian penal colony’. In Kharkiv Region, Russian soldiers tortured a school principal

Vitalii Chernov was taken by the Russian troops to the police station in Kupiansk (Kharkiv Region) on 2 September (2022). He refused to cooperate with the Russians. On 8 September, during the counter-attack of the Ukrainian troops, 150 prisoners broke out of their cells and set fire to the hated prison. We publish the story of the school principal’s capture and subsequent rescue.

‘If they gave me a machine gun, I would have killed them all...’

Olena Movchan is a resident of Shybene village in the Kyiv Region. The settlement was occupied from the first days of the full-scale invasion. The woman experienced many hardships. Olena says that she was forced to communicate with Russians. Mostly, these were Buryats and Kadyrovites [Chechens].

‘An old lady’s leg was torn off and her blood splashed on the granddaughter’

From the first day of the war, Kharkiv and its suburbs were brutally bombed. The Russians destroyed entire districts. Despite this, some of our interviewee’s Russian relatives refuse to face the truth.

‘We were driving, and they were shooting at us’

Tamara Vyshniak met a full-scale war in her home village of Borodianka in the Kyiv Region. The woman was shell-shocked during one of the air raids, which destroyed a neighboring house. The wrecked slabs covered people, but it was impossible to save them. Her evacuation was also not easy. Tamara says that Russian helicopters fired at civilians.

‘Bodies were lying in the street. Neighbours covered them with blankets’

“The bus stop was crushed like a tin can. Concrete slabs flew into the neighbouring street, and shrapnel damaged houses and windows. Imagine the force of the rocket strike,” said a resident of Lysychansk (town in Luhansk Region).

‘People were buried near the hospital’

Tetiana Solohub is a nurse at the Borodianka hospital in the Kyiv Region. She remembers how people buried the dead near the hospital, how the apartment caught fire, and how she ran home past Russian tanks that were shooting at the entrances. Tatiana has nothing left. She continues to work and save money to improve her life.

‘People came to get some food and were deliberately shot at’

“The destruction was catastrophic. Houses, shops — everything was destroyed. The Lysychansk Regional Children's Hospital was shelled. Children were evacuated, but neither the hospital nor the ambulance worked” — Lysychansk (town in Luhansk Region) was already under Russian occupation in 2014 and is now experiencing the horrors of the “Russian world” once again.

‘Two enemy shells destroyed my house’

Maiia Mykytenko lived in the Kyiv Region in the village of Borodianka with her husband and two daughters. During enemy bombing, she and her neighbors hid in the basement. In the end, the family evacuated, and when Maiia returned, she found the apartment destroyed. Now, the family lives in a small room in a modular town.

‘Playing Russian roulette’ — a village head in the Kherson region captured by the occupiers

In the first weeks of the full-scale invasion, occupiers’ checkpoints were set up around the village of Osokorivka, and the Russian military themselves began to rob and intimidate the local population, — village head Serhii Kunets, who himself spent three weeks in a torture chamber, speaks about occupation.

Buried alive — memories of a writer from Borodianka

Valentyna Lysenko is a writer who has lived almost her entire life in Borodianka, in the Kyiv Region. Together with her family, she endured several air raids and miraculously survived. The woman recalls how people in the basement of a destroyed house nearby begged for help for five days, but the Russians forbade saving them.

‘People were sitting without a piece of bread; everyone was afraid to get near here’

Vitalii Koretskyi is a resident of the Kopyliv village in the Kyiv Region. He says that he mainly saw Buryats in the village. His neighbor died when, out of desperation, he tried to drive out through a mined field, and his nephew and friend were found shot with their hands tied.

A Russian shot at me from a helicopter — Stepan Boiarchuk, Zahaltsi village

The tiles in Stepan’s yard are riddled with bullet marks left by the Russian helicopter pilot. His property burned to the ground. Fortunately, the dog managed to survive the terrible burns. The Russians tortured his neighbor, Hryhorii, and eventually killed him, as well as two peaceful women who simply ran down the street.

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