“May the Lord answer you in the day of adversity and bring you to safety. These bend and fall, but we stand and stand firm.” On the dirt road in front of the people of the village of Lukashivka, the pastor reads Psalm 20 from the Bible, which sounds halfway between a prayer and a battle hymn. Immediately afterwards, the believers throw themselves for minutes in the rain with folded hands and feet in the mud at the bread and food bags coming from a van. Beyond lies the rubble of the Church of the Ascension, which became the headquarters of Russian soldiers for over a month. A scene that has been repeated every day for a little over a week since Putin’s militias retreated under the pounding of Ukrainian artillery. For more than a month, the village in this church and its surroundings turned into the militia fortress of the Russian Far East Battalion: here, too, they tortured, killed and plundered everything they could, like Archbishop of Kyiv Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
There was no resistance. Until then, Lukashivka was a quiet place near the border north of Kyiv, a stone’s throw from Chernihiv, inhabited by peasants speaking a dialect halfway between Russian and Ukrainian: out of two hundred and thirty residents (another hundred had escaped earlier) about ten were killed. Until a few hours ago their bodies lay in the fields, in some houses and on the small playground in front of the churchyard, now they collapsed under the blows of the battle. On the muddy and asphaltfree roads, the dogs turn among the carcasses, content with the carrion of the cows raised in the village. It’s more than houses, it’s huts and in one of these huts Ivan Korobka, 36 years old, was taken: “They came home and said: ‘Now let’s go and talk’. They sat in front of me, they asked, ‘Where are you? the Ukrainian soldiers?” I replied that I didn’t know, and they pulled out a dagger and started sticking it in my legs says Ivan, while showing three large wounds on his thighs and mimicking the gesture of stabbing . Her lieutenant came in time. He stopped her and helped me with the medication.”
Torture and soldiers like crazy splinters, a sign that the Russians were in disarray in these areas and could not fully control the troops. “Some soldiers were violent, others tried to contain them,” the people explain. There’s no telling who got worse: a young man in his 20s was left naked for hours in the cold with his hands tied behind his back, also guilty of not being able to provide information about the Ukrainian military. At the farm of Olexander Chernenko, militia officers broke in and shot everywhere before settling.
They then held eight civilian prisoners in the basement for a week, taking away food, clothing and boots. “Even the socks,” he says. As they retreated, they burned their own tanks before leaving Lukashivka.
The outskirts of Chernihiv are an endless ordeal. In Yagydne, another poor village a few kilometers away that was almost entirely destroyed, the 380 residents were held captive in an underground school bunker for over a month while Russian militiamen bivouacked in their homes on the surface, taking what they could wanted, and meanwhile organized the advance. Eleven civilians reportedly died from asphyxiation or heart attacks, and another eight were killed. “By pointing the rifle at us, they allowed us to bury them little by little. In order not to starve us, they gave us their food,” says Volodymyr, showing the many boxes of Krations from the Russian army inside Jam, slices of bread and tins of meat “while they gorged themselves in our homes”. Here, too, a shepherd comes by every day. The villagers pray, but in return they want the loaf of bread.
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