The Prisoners in a Cellar in the Ukrainian Village of Novyi Bykiv

 

 

 By Joshua Yaffa

The New Yorker

 

In Novyi Bykiv, a village sixty miles east of Kyiv, I was led to a cellar. For a month, Russian soldiers had taken up residence in the town’s Soviet-era house of culture, laying mattresses on the floors and positioning anti-aircraft missiles outside. During that time, they used the boiler room in the basement of an outbuilding to hold as many as twenty-two prisoners. Within the boiler room, there was a deeper chamber, a stone-walled crawl space the size of a refrigerator turned on its side. Maxim Didyk, a twenty-one-year-old mechanic, told me that he spent eight days inside it. The interior was barely long enough to lie down, and only high enough for Didyk and a few other captives to squat on their knees. At one point, he said, the space held seven people.

Around noon on Saturday, March 19th, Didyk and his grandfather had walked down the road from their house to feed the family’s cows, chickens, and pigs. By then, Novyi Bykiv had been occupied for several weeks. As Didyk and his grandfather passed a Russian checkpoint, soldiers told them that they had twenty minutes to return, and they had better hurry up. By the time they came back, a different group of soldiers was manning the checkpoint. They separated Didyk from his grandfather and interrogated him: Who in town has gold? Who has weapons? Who is a member of the local Territorial Defense Forces?

As Didyk recalled, soldiers put a bag over his head, and eventually took him to the cellar, where he was severely beaten, with his hands tied. At one point, a soldier struck each of his knees with a hammer. The questions continued. His captors asked for the locations of nearby Ukrainian military positions. Didyk often knew the answers, but “stayed quiet to the last,” he said. “All I told them was where the closest Ukrainian checkpoint was, but they knew that anyway.”

A number of other local men from the village soon ended up in the cellar. Igor Zanko had gone out to buy a pack of cigarettes when Russian troops stopped him. “You have been detained by the Russian Federation under the rules of martial law,” a soldier told him. Another man, Vasily Tirpak, told me that he had been approached by Russian soldiers and forced to his knees at gunpoint. He was asked where weapons were hidden in the village. One soldier drew his pistol and fitted it with a silencer. He pointed the barrel at Tirpak’s head and then hit him with the gun. “If you don’t want to tell us,” the soldier said, “we’ll put you in the cellar for a few days and see if your memory comes back.”

Mykola Andrusha holding a photograph of his daughter Victoria Andrusha.

All three men—Didyk, Zanko, and Tirpak—remember the arrival of another prisoner, Victoria Andrusha, a twenty-five-year-old schoolteacher from the neighboring village of Stariy Bykiv. I went to see Victoria’s father, Mykola, a proud man with thick arms and a powerful chest who, as we spoke, was frequently moved to tears. He told me that, on March 25th, a pair of Russian armored personnel carriers showed up on his family’s street. Fifteen men spilled out and searched Mykola’s house, emerging with three thousand dollars in cash—the entirety of their life savings. One Russian soldier sat on the swing in front of the house. “I don’t give a fuck,” he told Mykola. “No one is waiting for me back in Russia. I don’t have a father, and my mother is an alcoholic.”

The Russian soldiers accused Victoria of passing information about Russian military movements to Ukrainian intelligence. Two days later, Mykola saw her being marched at gunpoint in front of the house, but he didn’t dare say anything. “She’d be shot, and so would I.”

Tirpak told me that Victoria insisted on speaking in Ukrainian with her captors. On her second day in the cellar, soldiers took her away. Tirpak said he overheard that she was meant to be part of a prisoner exchange. “She’s a very valuable asset,” he heard a Russian officer say. Zanko told me that Victoria was led away without explanation. He also said that the Russians were erratic; their moods often depended on how much they had to drink. They didn’t say much about why they were in Ukraine, though the commander once told Didyk, “Your country has a bad President, and because of him we had to come here.”

On March 28th, Russian soldiers told the prisoners in the cellar that they were pulling out of Novyi Bykiv. No one mentioned the larger context, that the Russian military command, having failed in its attempt to seize the capital, was withdrawing forces from the region and re-centering the fight in the country’s east. As far as the prisoners could tell, their captors were in a good mood, grilling a pig that they had stolen from a nearby back yard and saying that the war was almost over. The men in the cellar were told that they would soon be set free.

A house with a destroyed Russian tank in Novyi Bykiv, a town in Ukraine, liberated from the Russian Army.

I arrived in Novyi Bykiv a few days after Russian forces left. Burned-out armored vehicles dotted the streets. The walls of houses had been ruptured by direct strikes, bricks and wood spilling out into yards. Petro Lutsenko led me to his house, which had been occupied by Russian troops for a month. He and his wife, Tamara, lived with friends in the village during that time. Early on, Tamara went back to pick up some food, and the soldiers were nice enough. The next time that she stopped by, she noticed that one of her pigs was missing. A soldier shooed her away. “Don’t come back or we’ll shoot you,” he said.

Now that the Russians had left, Tamara and Petro were taking stock of what was missing. Every room looked as if it had been ransacked, with clothes and papers and documents covering the floor. Wrappers from Russian-military M.R.E.s lay scattered about. “They took the washing machine, the television, stove, mattress, rugs from the wall,” Tamara said. On the kitchen door, someone had painted a “Z,” the Kremlin’s pro-war symbol. “Savages,” Petro said.

A room in the building where Russian soldiers stayed in Novyi Bykiv. 

Now that Russian forces have completed their pullback from the Kyiv region, leaving newly liberated towns and villages in their wake, accounts of the monthlong occupation are beginning to emerge. Looting appears to have been a near-universal practice. I heard multiple stories of abductions, torture, and murder. The Kyiv suburb of Bucha, where hundreds of civilians are estimated to have been killed, with bodies strewn in streets and gardens, has become a focal point for the documentation of Russian war crimes. It may prove to be among the more grotesque and horrific examples of indiscriminate violence committed by Russian forces. But assaults on civilians appear to have taken place in many parts of the country.

I stopped in Velyka Dymerka, where people in line for humanitarian aid—the town had been occupied and blockaded for a month, with virtually no access to food or medical supplies—told me that in the first days of occupation, a Russian armored personnel carrier would drive down the streets, shooting at whoever stood nearby. “My friend stepped out of his house, then tap tap tap, he was dead on the ground,” Ivan Chapaev, who witnessed the killing, said. His friend’s body lay in the street for two weeks. In Hrebelki, a village thirteen miles away, I came to the house of Nadezhda Gerasimenko, who is in her late sixties. Her two adult sons, Oleg and Vladimir, had left Kyiv in late February, thinking that Hrebelki would be a safer place to wait out the war. But in early March Russian forces captured the village. Soon after, five Russian soldiers showed up at Gerasimenko’s house. Oleg was standing by the kitchen window; Vladimir near the front door. The soldiers fanned out in the garden and, without warning, opened fire.

Bullets shattered glass and struck Oleg in the back; they ripped through the front door and hit Vladimir in the groin. Gerasimenko fell to her knees and screamed. She heard Vladimir say, “My legs have gone out.” Blood pooled where he lay. “It took a minute for him to die,” Gerasimenko told me. Oleg was still alive but had been hit multiple times. The soldiers stepped inside the house. “Don’t shoot!” Gerasimenko yelled. “You’ve already killed one. And for what?” One of the Russian soldiers offered a vague reply: you killed our guys, so we’re killing you. Gerasimenko didn’t know how to respond. “We don’t have weapons, we don’t have anything,” she said. The soldiers searched the house, took the family’s mobile phones, and left.

Several days later, with Vladimir’s body starting to decompose, Gerasimenko called some neighbors to help bury him in the yard. There was no ceremony; none of the priests from the surrounding villages could make the trip because of the occupation. Oleg was eventually evacuated for treatment to a hospital in western Ukraine.

Gerasimenko and I walked around the side of the house and stood near a mound of dirt marked by an iron cross. “My son, my son, my son,” she wailed. In the days after her son’s killing, she approached Russian soldiers on the streets of Hrebelki, asking repeatedly, “Why did you kill my son?” One of them told her, “Don’t cry, grandma.” Another turned and walked away. A third tried to offer her some money. She refused. “I said, ‘I don’t need your money, just tell me one thing: When are you leaving?’ ”

As in other villages, when the Russians finally did depart, they ransacked homes on their way out. They tore through Gerasimenko’s house, taking her sons’ winter coats and boots, the tires from their cars, even ripping out a back seat. As they drove off, Gerasimenko saw appliances, mattresses, and bags of clothes hanging off of their tanks. Now that they’re gone, Gerasimenko wants to give Vladimir a proper burial, but Russian soldiers are said to have laid mines on the grounds of the local cemetery.

A dead pig lies on the streets of Novyi Bykiv. 

On the day after the Russian troops told their captives in Novyi Bykiv that they would soon be leaving, another contingent of soldiers brought seven more Ukrainian captives. This seemed to anger the soldiers guarding the cellar. “You ruined our nice time,” the commander in charge of the prisoners—no one ever managed to learn his name or rank—said.

A day later, on March 30th, the same commander came into the boiler room. He fired his gun into walls, and into the air, forcing people on their knees and shooting just beside them. Zanko and Tirpak believe he was drunk; Didyk said that the commander was crying. He didn’t want to do what he was about to do, he said. He needed to deliver four dead bodies, and he asked for volunteers. “We have nothing to lose, if that’s our destiny, so be it,” Didyk remembers one prisoner saying as he raised his hand. The Russians took two men away. A few minutes later, they came back and said, “We need two more,” Tirpak told me. “The selection process started again.” I asked Didyk who was killed. “Two older guys and two I didn’t know,” he told me. The soldiers gave each a glass of vodka before they were taken into the night.

Near dawn, the commander came back to the cellar. The Russian units were pulling out at six in the morning, he said. “Wait until after that and you can break down the door and run away.” Around 6:30 A.M., Didyk and seventeen others broke out of the cellar. They ran through the cemetery and toward the neighboring village. Along the way, they passed the bodies of three of the four men who had been shot hours before.

I visited the cemetery in Novyi Bikiv, which is across the road from the cellar where the prisoners had been held. Two of the bodies had been found in a pit near the cemetery’s entrance; another was laying under a piece of corrugated roof on the road. They had since been removed, but I could still see dark splotches of blood in the dirt.

Victoria is still missing. In the days since Russian forces left the area, she has not surfaced on any prisoner-exchange lists; Mykola said that he had heard, secondhand, that she might be in Belarus. I didn’t ask about the other possibility. “My daughter’s a patriot,” Mykola said. “I’m proud of her.” He hasn’t found the words to tell his mother, who is eighty-one and suffering from dementia, about her granddaughter’s disappearance. In fact, he has avoided the details of Russia’s invasion altogether. Instead, he has explained the situation using an analogue from her childhood: “I told her, ‘Mom, the Germans are back.’ ”

NEW YORKER