The Russians have left their village, yet the Ukrainian residents of Kupyansk have fled headlong. Because after the withdrawal, the Russian artillery continues to bombard the village in order to cause as much destruction as possible. “Everyone was confused.”
Suddenly a man, a woman and a boy of about 10 years old are standing on the square of Shevtjenkove, a village in eastern Ukraine, on Saturday. In the morning they were still at the place where they live, or lived, 30 kilometers away – where they have or had a house, with everything that goes with it. Now they are in a square with a bag, some toys and a cat in a travel basket.
What now?
They come from Kupyansk, a village from which the Russians were definitively expelled the day before, but where they are more present than ever after their departure. By bombing those left behind, they show how much they care about the village they owned for six months as if it belonged to Russia.
“They came down everywhere, the rockets, even on the houses,” says Andrej Postoepnoi (32), the father. He is squatting, with both hands on his son’s hand, who has sat on the curb and stares ahead. “He doesn’t show his fear,” says Andrej. “But I can feel it when he’s shaking.”
Kupyansk is located on the Oskil River, which roughly forms the border between liberated and occupied territory. The city was liberated incredibly quickly by the Ukrainian soldiers: military analysts in the West also expressed their amazement and admiration. Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksy Reznikov called the counter-offensive in the Financial Times ‘a snowball that rolls down a hill, it gets bigger and bigger’. On Thursday, the Ukrainians managed to cross the river and also liberated the eastern part of the city.
‘We saw that they were ours; we were so happy’
“We heard fighting, and then it was quiet,” says Katya, Andrej’s wife. “We came out of the basement to run errands, trying to avoid the soldiers. And then suddenly we saw that it was ours. We were so happy.’
Their son Kyrill has taken a small plastic Humvee and a tank out of the bag and starts playing war. He shows his most beautiful toy: a plane made of surrogate Lego, still in the box, with the price still in rubles on the package. It’s all he has with him.
They had already made an attempt to move to a safer place during the liberation battles, Andrej says. But the bus they tried to escape was shot at by the Russians. They lay flat on the floor, only the driver and one passenger were hit. Today they fled on foot, across a broken bridge to the other side. There they were met by volunteers, who drove east from Kharkiv this morning in small columns.
Now they have arrived at the square too big for such a small village, made for parades in more glorious times. On one side the town hall, where United Nations employees unload a truck with boxes of food. On the other side, a ruined cultural palace with on its facade the peeling achievements and ambitions of the old world power: a conveyor belt, a man at the wheel, a wheat field, the moon, an atom, a book, a trumpet and a woman with a Erlenmeyer flask. But the refugees have to go to the third building on the square, in normal times the editorial office of the local newspaper. Now this is the so-called filtration center.
Russians destroy villages from which they have withdrawn
About a hundred and fifty people stand in front of the door, which is guarded by policemen. If you want to go further, you have to go here first: here they ask questions and they check which stamps you have in your passport – too much Russia is suspicious. The refugees have their folders in hand, with papers, proofs, names of friends who can vouch for them. Or not.
‘I see people here who are pro-Russian,’ whispers Oxana Gritsenko, a 78-year-old babushka (grandma) with a headscarf and a face lined with life. “Maybe I can talk to someone about that later.”
She also says that the bombing started from the moment the Russians withdrew. “Everyone was confused, shocked,” she says. That cities are shot to pieces when armies try to conquer them is already a terrible consequence of the war. That cities are shot to pieces by a retreating army is part of this war. On Saturday, a fairly insignificant village like Tjoukhoejiv, far from the front, is fired upon, killing an 11-year-old girl. On Sunday, four people were killed at a psychiatric facility in a liberated town near the Russian border. The tactic of the scorched flats: the Russian artillery continues to fall back on it consistently.
When Gritsenko learns that the photographer is Italian, she asks if he can call her daughter as soon as he is back in range. She fled at the beginning of the war and ended up in Turin. “Let her know you’re okay,” she says, her voice trembling. “She doesn’t have to worry about me anymore.”
She has been out of contact for months: telephone and internet connections with the free side of the world had been cut in Kupyansk. Now, after the liberation, many from the occupied territory are hearing for the first time in six months what happened to their relatives and other loved ones. Katya Postoepnoi says there was one hill outside Kupyansk where people could call for a fee using the phone of someone with a Russian SIM card. Communication with other residents, often hidden in cellars, was through papers on the doors.
‘The Russians show them their most terrible face’
Life was hard among the Russians. Rubina, the female head of a Roma family who arrives on the square with children coughing in their arms, says they have lived in cellars for months and have just escaped, ‘We didn’t have time to do anything with them. to take.’ All this time they were afraid of any contact with Russians. “We know our past.”
The refugees here, unlike residents of distant cities such as Izyum and Balaklia, have not yet reported a Russian reign of terror. “We weren’t really scared,” says Andrej Postoepnoi. ‘The Russians were calm. If you also kept quiet, they stayed quiet’. Russian stuff came to be in the shops, there was Russian TV and you could also pay with rubles. Nevertheless, he says, some residents fled to Russia in search of a better life.
“There were a lot of people here with friends in Russia,” he says. ‘They felt related to them. Some thought that we are in fact one country. When the war started, all they could do was cry about what happened and hope it would be over.’
“The Russians behaved reasonably well in the city,” Gritsenko said. ‘But there was no friendship. In fact, we expected that once they understood that we didn’t want to live under Russian rule, they would leave on their own. Instead, they’re showing their worst faces now.’
That they have to flee after the liberation is the last straw
A battered and frayed Dacia arrives on the square. In the roof and a door the coarse holes from shrapnel, lamps and windows are gone. A man in sunglasses is sitting behind the wheel, his daughter is sitting next to him, his wife in the back among the household effects. ‘Buy a car?’ he asks. His name is Georgy Soekhumi and today he started the next leg of his odyssey.
It started in March during the shelling of Izhum: they managed to break through the lines and reach a monastery, where they could drink water again for the first time in days, says Georgy’s wife Victoria. There the car was hit by a rocket. Then they went to Slovyansk, to get on an evacuation train to the west, but it was overcrowded. Before they knew it, their only way out was occupied Kupyansk, where they found shelter in the dormitory of a medical school.
Now they have fled from there again. The next leg of their flight should take them back home to Izhum, as long as there is a home left. Georgy and Victoria have heard that their house has been destroyed; they hope that their daughter Kristina Kotyk’s apartment is still habitable. Or else? They raise their arms in the air.
‘Don’t you need nurses in the Netherlands?’ Kristina suddenly asks. ‘I worked in the hospital for seventeen years. Functional diagnosis of heart disease. I am no longer attached to this place, I can go anywhere, away from here. Can you please let me know?’
The fact that they still had to flee after the months they endured in occupied Kupyansk, a flight after the liberation, is also the last straw for Andrei Postoepnoi. ‘We’re not going back. I think our house was shot today or will be shot tomorrow. I’m not going to wait for the rebuild, for fear it will happen again in a few years. My son is 10. I want to give him a life with more future.’
They have passed the filtration and are now going first to Katya’s mother in Kharkiv, whom they have not seen or spoken to for six months. Then Kyrill brightens up. “I dreamed about her so much,” he says. “Now I can really see Grandma again.”