The inhabitants of Yahidne, in northern Ukraine, say that at the beginning of the invasion the Russians behaved well, offered to share their food and expressed surprise at the appearance of the town. But it lasted very short. They started stealing almost immediately. “They started looting, they took everything they could,” said Petro Hlystun, 71, who witnessed the scene. “There was a flashlight, a tablet that my son brought from Poland. They took everything.”
On March 5, residents said they were ordered to go to the school basement where they would spend the next 25 days, with short breaks to relieve themselves or stretch their legs. The Russian soldiers told them that the confinement was for their own protection.
They described sharing buckets as a toilet and taking turns sleeping in the small, crowded rooms, as there was not enough room for everyone to lie down.
“It was almost impossible to breathe,” said Olha Meniaylo, an agronomist who said she was in the basement with her 32-year-old son, wife and grandchildren, a 4-month-old baby and an 11-year-old boy.
She said that Russian soldiers demanded a list of people in the basement to organize the meal, and she had counted 360. Others said there were more than 300 people.
“For the elderly, it was difficult to stay there in the dark without fresh air, so it was mostly the elderly who died.”
She said that the first burial took place after the murder of a man and four elderly people who died in the basement occurred on March 12. Russian soldiers allowed some young people to dig shallow graves.
“As soon as they started digging, there were shelling,” Meniaylo said. “The people who were digging had to lie on the bodies in the graves to protect themselves from shelling. My husband was there.”
One morning, a woman who had a cow was escorted to bring milk for the children. Others were allowed to leave occasionally according to the whims of Russian soldiers. When they returned home, Russian soldiers had taken everything from televisions to women's underwear.
The last victim recorded on the basement walls, Nadiya Budchenko, died on March 28, Tolochina said, two days before Russian troops withdrew from the village when their advance towards the Ukrainian capital stopped.
In addition to those, mostly elderly, who died of exhaustion in the suffocating and overcrowded conditions, Tolochina named others who said they were killed by Russian soldiers, including Viktor Shevchenko and his brother Anatolii, known as Tolya.
All photos of the Reuters agency by Marko Djurica, except where indicated
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