The invaders’ houses of horror
It wasn’t the sort of house that neighbours gave much thought to in peacetime. With its white brick walls and metal gate, it looked much like the others in Pisky Radkivsky, a small village east of Izyum.
But when Russian forces arrived, it turned into a place that residents looked away from as they hurried past. Asking questions might lead them to be the ones whose screams rang out at night, locals said.
Civilians and soldiers were tortured on Parkova St, according to the Ukrainian police investigators now combing the towns and villages from which Russian forces beat a hasty retreat last month.
Across at least five different provinces, Russian troops left the remnants of an archipelago of torture in their wake, often in buildings where families had lived or children had played.
The chief investigator of the northeastern Kharkiv province, Serhii Bolvinov, said yesterday his forces had recovered 534 civilian bodies in the eastern province of Kharkiv, most of them from a mass grave in the town of Izyum. Many bore signs of torture.
In Lyman, 160km to the southeast, a key transport hub for Russian forces before the Ukrainian army recaptured it last week, the local governor said another 39 ‘‘burial sites’’ had been uncovered.
It was unclear how many bodies were buried there, or how they had died.
Under Russian occupation, Ukrainians learned that even the most mundane of locations could
become a stage for terror.
Police have found torture sites in basements, living rooms and even gardens. In the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, men were abused and executed in the basement of a children’s summer camp. In Izyum, the Russians used a kindergarten and a medical clinic.
Bolvinov said his investigators had found 22 sites that were used for torture in the Kharkiv region.
The Russians interrogated civilian and military prisoners at the house in Pisky Radkivsky,
police said. Investigators found a gas mask that they believed had been placed on the heads of prisoners as they were beaten. There was a dildo and a box of extracted teeth in one room.
The house’s owner watched quietly from the street. ‘‘We don’t know what to do with this place now,’’ said Ivan, 40, who gave only his first name for fear of reprisal should the Russians return. ‘‘This was our home.’’
One of the victims, the caretaker at the local school, Andrei Dimitriev, said he had been arrested in the street by
Russian soldiers, and held for seven days in the house’s dank basement with five other men.
The beatings were savage, Dimitriev recalled. Soldiers hit his body with sticks and wooden bats. They were frequently drunk, and their questions were unfocused, as if they did not quite know what information they were seeking.
The Russians accused him of being a soldier in the Ukrainian army. ‘‘It didn’t matter what you said, they just kept hurting you,’’ he said.
In liberated areas, every street has a story. Victims have often fled. Witnesses often say that they did their best to ignore the horrors unfolding around them, for fear of being arrested themselves.
A series of explosions rocked the eastern Ukraine city of Kharkiv yesterday after Russia concentrated attacks in its increasingly troubled invasion of Ukraine on areas it has illegally annexed.
Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said on Telegram that the early-morning explosions were the result of missile strikes in the centre of the city.
Fighting near the Russianoccupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has alarmed United Nations atomic energy watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency, which yesterday reported more trouble at the plant.
It said external power had again been cut to one of Zaporizhzhia’s shutdown reactors, necessitating the use of emergency backup diesel generators to run safety systems.
In other Moscow-annexed areas, Russia’s Defence Ministry said its forces had repelled Ukrainian advances near the city of Lyman and retaken three villages elsewhere in the eastern Donetsk region.
Meanwhile, reports have surfaced of poor training and few supplies for the new Russian troops arriving at the front. At least two Russian cities, St Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod, announced yesterday that they were cancelling their Russian New Year and Christmas celebrations and redirecting that money to buy supplies for the troops.