Russian troops commit atrocities in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine – war crimes and crimes against humanity: killings of civilians, torture, robbery, marauding.
BBC News Ukraine journalists published a terrible story of a woman who managed to escape from a village temporarily captured by the enemy, located in the north of the Kiev region.
Theft of food, looting and seizure of houses
< p> As Svetlana (the woman's name has been changed for security reasons) told us, the Russian invaders entered their village on the second day of the full-scale war in Ukraine (ie February 25). At the same time, the light went out in the village.
According to the woman, columns of tanks and other Russian military equipment were constantly transiting through the village from Belarus. The enemy made something like a rear base in the village.
The invaders drove many local residents out of their homes in order to move in there themselves. Svetlana said that she knew about 15 people with children who were kicked out into the street in this way.
– On the second day of the war, all our stores were destroyed, so from that time there was nowhere to get food … We ate livestock from many people, what it was: chickens, turkeys – they ate everything. Food was taken from the cellars, sometimes everything was cleaned clean, — the woman said.
The woman recalls that the Russian invaders had poor rations: they actually had nothing to eat, and they resorted to massive robberies and looting.
Soldiers stole the army of the Russian Federation and household items of the villagers.
– They stole from the houses everything that could be stolen. One of their tanks burned down here. The boys came to take a look. And there are perfumes, hair dryers, baby carriages. It seems that they wanted to bring something home for themselves, — noted Svetlana.
The military of the Russian Federation did not have telephones, and therefore they took them away from the villagers and called home.
The atrocities of the Kadyrovites< /h3>
As Svetlana said, the behavior of the Russian military differed somewhat from the way the Kadyrovites treated Ukrainians. The latter killed peaceful Ukrainians in the village: in particular, when they noticed that someone was trying to leave or was filming something on the phone.
– Chechens shot civilian men, women and children. There were many cases when civilians were shot. I personally know several stories of execution, about ten people, — Svetlana noted.
A woman told several horrifying stories of such massacres by Kadyrov's men. According to her, the first murder took place immediately after the capture of the village. A family (a woman, a man and a small child) was driving a car, and the enemy machine-gunned them.
In another case, a father and daughter were on their way to pick up a wounded mother from a neighboring village, and the Kadyrovites killed them with machine gun fire. Another man was shot in the head right in the center of the village, and the car he was in was blown up.
Svetlana specified that the invaders shot without warning everyone who filmed something on the phone (movement of equipment and the like) .
– One man was filming a column from the yard. He was shot in the leg. He began to crawl, and they finished him off close, – said the woman.
She added that the Kadyrovites sometimes pretended to be “kind”: sometimes they shared their dry rations, they didn’t kick people out of their houses if they had children.
They had better provision than the military -Russians, and therefore robbed less. At the same time, they occupied the best houses in the village, where it was warm.
Shelling and “humanitarian aid”
The woman informed that shelling was heard from all sides around the village every evening.
At the same time, both the Kadyrovites and the Russians were very afraid of the nearby forests.
– Somehow there was a rumor that our partisans would come from the forest. They were so frightened that for a long time this forest was just fired at random, — Svetlana remembered.
When it got dark, Russian helicopters constantly and very low flew over the village: they flew to the local church, after which they returned to Belarus. As it turned out later, the invaders took away their dead in this way (the distance from the specified village to the Belarusian city of Mozyr is approximately 180 km).
On the 14th day of the war, “humanitarian aid” – products of Russian production. A local priest was involved in this process.
The Russians filmed propaganda stories about how “the food” local residents.
– He and the priest are doing supposedly “good deeds” for propaganda. We know that our help from Ukraine was not let through at all,” the woman said.
Svetlana clarified that the head of the village hid a few days after his capture (the woman suggests that she could be intimidated).< /p>
According to Svetlana, the military of the Russian Federation wrote down the names and addresses of those villagers who, out of desperation, took this “humanitarian aid”, since they had been without food for two weeks. Thus, the enemy actually conducted a kind of “census” of the population.
Svetlana and her family managed to escape from the village a few weeks after it was captured by the Russian troops.
– There were rumors that there would be a corridor. Let's go at your own risk, the speed is 30 km, the windows are open, everywhere there are inscriptions “children” and white sheets. So we passed three Russian checkpoints,” the woman informed.
According to her, thousands of people walked to the blown up bridge (the last position of the enemy). There they were helped to cross to the other side by the Red Cross workers, after which the Ukrainian military met the people.
