‘People were used as living shields’, Jahidne village residents recount weeks of Russian occupation

Bukvy talked to the people who survived the Russians occupation or several weeks.The accounts of the locals paint a grim picture of terror, abuse and pillage.

People felt visibly uncomfortable recollecting the harsh experience. The invaders took them for a living shield and made them hunker down in the local school basement where they had no access to food, water, and toilets.

The Russians would casually say with a taunt, ‘Learn the Russian anther and we will let you go.’ People suffered but they didn’t give in.

Adults and children were usually locked in. The door leading to the place still has a sign ‘children’ – it looks like it was painted with blood.

Many people didn’t survive the ordeal – some of them were caught in shelling, others failed to endure confiment, torture and hunger. The locals had to improvise a burial site nearby so the sad ritual could have some semblance of what it was in peaceful times.

Children were also targeted with intimidation.  A father of a 12-year old girl was killed while the girl allegedly died later suffering torture. Is it what Russian call the ‘de-Nazification?’

The girl –her name is Veronika – was laid into the grave with a wooden cross, her name awkwardly scribbled on the sign.

The school walls are graced with children graffitis. ‘No to war’, flowers, a rainbow, the Ukrainian flag, hearts, and a figure of a cruel green man. The childhood of those kids was marred by the Russian aggression.

The scrawl on the walls lists people who died in captivity. It lists  their names and death dates.

The grim wall list also features the names of those who  died in other places of Jagidne community.

The aggressors didn’t allow to take out the dead bodies – they would live there, in the place packed with locked-in people and their kids.

Although the Russian troops called themselves liberators, but the ugly truth is they took away people’s lives, houses, belonging, and, surely, their freedom.

The Russian occupation is about death, devastation, torture and hat towards  Ukrainians and their children.