Mariupol, the city where Putin fought

Mykola Diachenko thought she was dying. Mayor of a town comprising thirteen villages, a hundred kilometers east of kyiv, in the oblast of Tchernihiv, he is a survivor of this war led by the Russians. Face marked by the ordeal, this 64-year-old man was, like ten others, held prisoner for twenty-six days. On March 5, barely five days after their arrival, enemy soldiers, armed with Kalashnikovs, landed in his house in Novaya Basan, his village. They took him away with his deputy, preventing him from taking the Ventolin needed for his asthma attacks. “You won’t need it,” said one.

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“They drove us to the post office, remembers the city councilor. And they lined us up against a wall, blindfolded, hands tied behind our backs. A Russian officer questions him several times, his phone is searched. Brutal tone, precise questions. Above Mykola Diachenko’s head, bullets slam into the wall. “He wanted information about local Ukrainian territorial defense forces and ammunition depots,” he said. I had erased everything in my laptop and burned the notebook where the vehicles and units were listed. I said nothing. »

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They are taken elsewhere, by bus; they will thus change their place of detention five times. “During a trip, I saw cans of gasoline. I then thought that they were going to kill us and burn our bodies in the forest. We tried to escape, but they caught up with us. Their executioners promise them a “terrible” death. Some captives are beaten with rifle butts, fists and feet. Oleksii Bryzgalin, 38, a construction worker, testified to authorities that he had been tied to a chair for nearly thirty hours with a grenade between his legs. Their conditions of detention are appalling. Ukrainians have access to toilets once a day, and they are starving. “We were only allowed two potatoes. Soldiers sometimes shared their rations with us, as some were kind. They came from different regions of Russia, some from Buryatia [République bordant la Mongolie], others were Tatar or Kazakh. One of them seemed dubious about their presence in Ukraine. Others repeated how much they loved Volodya [le diminutif de Vladimir, prénom de Poutine] and said they were proud of this “special operation””, remembers, bitterly, Mykola. As the Russians hold him, his occupied village dies.

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A thousand men took its approximately 3,000 inhabitants hostage. Rains of Ukrainian shells fall. Stationed in gardens and vegetable patches, tanks and armored vehicles spit their fire all day long. The shards chop the walls of houses, shops, trees. Nothing is spared by the artillery. A French legionnaire, on his way to kyiv to join his girlfriend, is said to have died in his car during one of these bombardments.

The “invaders” sow terror and death. On February 28, the first day of the occupation, a man and a 14-year-old boy were shot dead in the middle of the street – their corpses were still lying around after the liberation. At 5 p.m. that day, a few kilometers across the Supiy River, six men, chosen at random, were tortured with knives and beaten before being executed in a hangar. Among them, two members of the same family aged 29 and 39. “We were all hiding in our shelter with the women and our dog,” said Victoria, 48, in tears. My son Bogdan and my brother-in-law Oleksandr went out to smoke a cigarette. Our neighbors saw the Russians embark them; they never came back. We found them, their ribs broken, finished with several bullets in the head. These people snatched our lives from us…” In the same town, around twenty prisoners, among them the wounded and an elderly person, were held for several weeks, buried in the darkness of a cellar. A man says he stayed there for seven days with a dozen people, without food or water, just a bottle of lemonade to share. The survivor lost fifteen kilos. The day before his release, eight other detainees, chosen at random, were killed.

The inhabitants implore clemency from the Russians. In vain. Confined, trapped in their shelters – without water, electricity or gas, cut off by the military – they are forced to live on their meager reserves. Four of them, chronically ill, including a diabetic, will succumb for lack of care. We bury them in the garden. The Russians settle without regard in the houses that the inhabitants have fled. “Except for the electronic and technological devices that were useful to them, they ransacked everything in our house. They didn’t use our toilets and relieved themselves in all the rooms,” a villager explained furiously. In each city they occupy, Russian soldiers confiscate Ukrainian telephones, seizing SIM cards in the process to call their loved ones: their only means of communicating. In the Novaya Basan supermarket, they loot the stocks of cigarettes and alcohol. “When by misfortune they approached us, says a lady, we pretended to be old women by hunching over, hiding our hair, pretending to limp. Women are the first victims of these drunk soldiers. At the edge of a dirt road, a mother, puffy light blue eyes, red with grief and anguish, remains planted in front of her gate. Her 20-year-old daughter was abducted. Without news since, she is convinced that the young woman is kidnapped in Russia…

Russian soldiers confiscate phones and SIM cards to call loved ones

Many other Ukrainian women have disappeared. Their desperate families are appealing for witnesses on social networks. Some have recovered the bodies of their loved ones, abandoned. Others don’t. No village was spared the bestiality of the enemy. In the surrounding countryside, no one is unaware of the atrocities committed here or elsewhere, everywhere. Kidnappings, torture, rape… Sordid stories circulate, rumors buzz around every corner. Like that of a woman in her forties tied to a pole, a bag over her head, abused by several Chechens who then left her there to die of her injuries. Another was allegedly assaulted and tortured in front of her 4-year-old son. We are talking about the rapes of children, boys, girls, babies… According to the Ukrainian authorities, nine raped women are pregnant. Aliona Kryvouliak, head of the emergency cell within La Strada, a public organization for the defense of human rights, speaks of “ethnic cleansing”: “Many of the victims allege the same comments made by their attackers at the time of the events: ‘I I’m going to rape you until you feel nothing and you can’t have any more children…”

On Wednesday March 30, after fourteen hours of fierce fighting, the Ukrainian army liberated Novaya Bashan. “In their flight, the occupants robbed our houses, taking eggs and chickens, but also our clothes, our televisions, our computers and printers, our microwaves, our vacuum cleaners and sometimes even our toilets! gets carried away by an old man. On the facades of gutted buildings, the Russians have tagged the numbers of their units: 60, 56, 53, 67… Sometimes the names of their towns of origin. On the blackboard of the school crushed by the bombs, one of them wrote in chalk: “We are Slavs. So let’s all live as friends! We did not want this war. A little late to express remorse… Novaya Basan and its surroundings mourn their dead. In the country, there are hundreds, maybe thousands. From now on, almost as many Ukrainian or international investigators begin with meticulousness the inventory of the crimes committed by the henchmen of Vladimir Putin. A team of the French National Gendarmerie, from the Criminal Research Institute, is thus hard at work. Responsible for identifying the victims, determining the causes and origin of their death, all will contribute to the 6,000 investigations already opened. A first step towards justice.