A Ukrainian village tries to make sense of Russian occupation

rolled into Yahidne, a small farming village just south of Chernihiv in northern Ukraine, shortly after 4pm on March 3rd. The weeks that followed may not be forgotten for centuries. At least 20 of the villagers died during 28 days of occupation. Six were shot in highly suspicious circumstances. A father and his 12-year-old daughter were gunned down as they tried to escape; the weapons used were so powerful they severed the girl’s head. Another dozen died from suffocation in a basement in the local school. They were locked in there, along with the entire village, as human shields to protect a massive Russian army camp above ground during the whole period. Olga Martienko mops up tears with a pink scarf as she recalls the experience. She is 57, but looks a great deal older. There were 370 people sheltering in the school basement (pictured), she says; the youngest was a month old. Four to each square metre, the neighbours slept standing against one another, breathing in the same increasingly putrid air, and relieving themselves in the same bucket at the top of the stairs. On some days they were allowed out to breathe some fresh air; but on others they were not. “Almost as soon as the bombing started, people started hallucinating,” Mrs Martienko says. For significant periods, the villagers were forced to cohabit with corpses in the basement, as the most frail passed away and there was no way of taking the bodies out.