‘Our great-grandparents talked about war, but now it is us and our children’

The school in Bohdanivka near Kyiv is still much as the Russian soldiers left it: fire-blackened walls beneath a collapsed roof, sandbags in the shattered windows, books scattered on the classroom floors and two burnt-out minibuses in the yard.

The village’s kindergarten fared even worse during an occupation that began on March 8th two years ago. The Russians used it as an ammunition store and fired a tank shell at it when they retreated three weeks later, blowing the building to pieces and spraying shrapnel and explosives over a wide area.

“It was a moment of horror and shock for us all”, says Lyudmila Deyko, the director of both schools, who now runs classes with colleagues in Bohdanivka’s cultural centre and arranges for some children to go by bus each day to study in nearby villages.

Moscow had launched its full invasion of Ukraine two weeks earlier and hundreds of Bohdanivka’s 3,000 or so residents had fled as Russian troops approached on their way towards Kyiv, which is 40km down the motorway. But Deyko describes a village that was totally unprepared for what lay ahead.

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“It was about 11am. People were in the streets and the shops were busy. I was making food with friends for our territorial defence volunteers who were guarding the village in shifts. We didn’t understand the seriousness of the situation. We thought the Russians would go past and we would keep cooking and take the food to the lads. We thought the Russians would fight with our army but not do anything to civilians.”

Some Russian units sent to take Kyiv were reportedly given only enough supplies for three days and packed dress uniforms for a victory parade in the Ukrainian capital. When they were stopped and started to take heavy casualties, they dispersed into an arc of commuter towns and villages outside the city, from places such as Motyzhyn and Kopyliv in the west to Bucha and Irpin in the north and Bohdanivka in the east.

“Something like 200 armoured vehicles came into the village and the shooting started immediately. People scattered and went to hide in their cellars. The Russians seized the school and made it their base. They took mattresses and sheets and everything else they wanted from local people,” Deyko says.

“We stayed in our cellar until March 12th, sitting there in the cold listening to the shelling. Then the Russians started to go street-to-street, checking people’s documents and taking their phones. We had heard they might round up the women and my husband and I were worried for our daughter, who was 18.

“Our house is on the edge of the village, so one day we decided to make a break for it. We ran across the fields, hiding in bushes ... The Russians didn’t see us and we made it through the woods to my mother’s village, which was not occupied.”

Deyko was right to be fearful. The Russians raped at least one local woman after killing her husband, and officials say five people were killed in the village during the occupation and the fate of another five who went missing is still unknown.

Escape was not an option for Nina Basyuk, who has worked as a nurse in Bohdanivka for nearly 50 years, and her husband Valeriy.

They spent 11 days in a cellar with 18 neighbours, including three young children, guarded by Russian troops who made the men, many of whom were elderly, climb out of the cellar several times a day in a ritual that was part humiliation and part roll call.

In the early hours of March 17th, when the soldiers had been drinking, they ordered the men out of the cellar. Either because he moved slowly or because they suspected him of hiding a gun at his house – local accounts differ – one of the Russians shot a pensioner called Vasyl, almost tearing off his lower leg. Vasyl declined to be interviewed for this article.

“Everyone was shocked by the gunshot and we thought they might kill us all,” Nina says.

“We bandaged up Vasyl, and I had brought my medical bag to the basement, so I had antibiotics, drugs to help stop the bleeding and other things. For two days we looked after him in the cellar, while he was in terrible pain ... But we knew he couldn’t survive for much longer, so we asked a young Russian officer to help us. He said he couldn’t because it was against his orders.”

On March 19th, Nina and the others in the cellar found out that an evacuation route had been opened to allow villagers to flee to the nearby Kyiv suburb of Brovary, which was still under Ukrainian control – but they missed the brief window for escape.

Nina says the young officer agreed to help them, while his commander was resting and many other soldiers were drunk. He allowed the severely injured Vasyl to be loaded into an armoured vehicle, which led two cars packed with 17 other people from the cellar through Russian checkpoints to the edge of occupied territory.

At the Ukrainian-held village of Semypolky, some 14km from Bohdanivka, the local doctor said he could do little for Vasyl and the damaged part of his leg had to be amputated. From there, Vaysl was taken in the boot of one of the cars along remote back roads to Brovary – a journey of about five hours instead of the usual 30 minutes on the motorway – where surgeons removed the bottom of his right leg.

A volunteer drove Nina and Valeriy from Brovary to the relative safety of western Ukraine, and they returned home after Russian troops left Bohdanivka on March 29th amid their retreat from the entire area around Kyiv, which remained a free city.

Russian soldiers lived in and looted their house during occupation, stealing things ranging from clothes and shoes to a television and a chainsaw; they also removed the cooker from the kitchen but dumped it in the village before fleeing.

[ 'We are living a postponed life': Crimean Tatar exiles long for home ]

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Many stolen household appliances were stashed in the kindergarten along with artillery shells and other ammunition, all of which the Russians blew up as they left.

“It was terrible to see the village after that, of course. It was like a hurricane had blown through. Fences had been flattened by tanks, buildings were burned and had holes in them, the school was gutted and the kindergarten was completely gone. All the shops were wrecked and the Russians had taken away five men on suspicion of helping our armed forces”, says Deyko, whose own house had been hit by shells.

“But even on March 30th people started coming back, although it was still dangerous. They wanted to see how their houses were and protect whatever was left, and they started fixing things and clearing up. They did whatever they could.”

Recovery will be slow and hard for one of hundreds of villages damaged in a war that rages on, in a country forced to devote much of its scarce resources to survival.

“About 600 people have filed claims for damaged buildings and 44 private homes were totally destroyed”, says Yuriy Bezpaliy, the main official in Bohdanivka, adding that many locals are struggling to navigate different compensation schemes and gather the legal documents required to prove ownership of land and other property.

It all feeds tension and the potential for recrimination in a traumatised village where the usual gossip is now sprinkled with talk of who did what during occupation.

“Did people co-operate with the occupiers? There are such claims. The security services have come here and detained people and then released them again ... due to lack of evidence,” says Bezpaliy, who was in a nearby village when Bohdanivka was overrun.

“It’s a very complicated question and I don’t want to dwell on it. I also lived under occupation and I know what it’s like not to be able to leave your yard. To be in one place and claim to know what happened somewhere else is not right ... The appropriate agencies should deal with that.”

Deyko says the school and kindergarten were the lifeblood of Bohdanivka, and to see them in ruins was and remains painful for villagers. Coca-Cola, which has a big factory nearby, is funding the reconstruction of the kindergarten, but changes to official bomb shelter requirements have delayed approval of plans to rebuild the school.

“Lots of people, from children to grandparents, are waiting for the school and kindergarten to be rebuilt. We promise them that it will happen, but it takes so long that it weakens people’s belief that things will get better,” she says.

“People talk constantly about all this. When we have guests over, it seems that all they talk about is the war – what happened, who has been lost, who has died. It used to be our great-grandparents who talked about war, but now it is us and our children. And I think it will be like this for a long time.”

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