After Russians’ retreat, scarred Ukrainian village recounts month of terror

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On a two-day visit, tales emerge of killings and looting by a demoralised invasion force

he day the Russians arrived in the sleepy, windswept village of Staryi Bykiv, they killed six men. By the time they had departed 32 days later, the soldiers had carried out at least three more killings, destroyed the school, systematically looted dozens of houses and turned much of the central street into a wasteland of charred buildings and rubble.

Finally allowed to walk around freely after a month of terror, men and women wandered the streets on Thursday still in a state of shock. In the car park outside the small village administration building in Novyi Bykiv, children gawped at the charred shells of two Russian armoured vehicles, one with the uniform of a Russian soldier still draped over one of its hatches.

In the first hours after the Russians arrived, Viktoria Vovk’s large family was hiding in the cellar next to their house. Some relatives had arrived from towns closer to Kyiv; they had travelled here when the war started, making the reasonable assumption it would be safer than close to the capital. That turned out to be a terrible miscalculation.

For nine days the Russians did not allow the family to remove the bodies. Then, on 7 March, a new rotation of soldiers arrived and agreed the six men could be buried in the cemetery. An inventory paper inside the school identified its occupants as the 297th anti-aircraft missile brigade.Inside the school – a recently renovated two-storey building painted lime green and sandy yellow – the destruction was almost total. The headteacher, Natalia Vovk, navigated shards of glass, ripped-up Russian ration packs and other debris as she surveyed the damage, stepping carefully as the building had not been fully checked for mines.Damage inside the school in Novyi Bykiv.

In another classroom, the board read “Let’s live peacefully”, a grotesque message given the carnage all around. Maksym Didyk spent 12 days tied up and blindfolded in a small outhouse across the road from the school after being grabbed at a checkpoint on 19 March.The soldier in charge of the prisoners, who never gave his name or rank, appeared and said he had been ordered to provide “four corpses”, Didyk recalled.

His father, Oleksandr, also saw the bodies the next day, and recalled that one “had his brains spilling out”. A patch of thick, congealed blood was still visible in the soil when the Guardian visited. Didyk did not know the names of the three men, saying they were not locals of Staryi or Novyi Bykiv. It is not clear what happened to the fourth man the soldier claimed to have killed.

 

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