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By Tom Balmforth
BALAKLIIA, Ukraine (Reuters) – The guns had fallen silent after three days of fighting in the battle-torn northeastern Ukrainian town of Balakliia, but Mariya Tymofiyeva said it was only when she saw Ukrainian soldiers that it hit her that over six months of Russian occupation was completed.
“I walked away… when I saw an armored personnel carrier enter the square with a Ukrainian flag: my heart just tightened and I started sobbing,” said the 43-year-old resident, her voice shaking with emotion.
On Tuesday, she was among a crowd of residents receiving food parcels from a van in the same square where the Ukrainian flag was dramatically raised last week in one of the first images of Ukraine’s extraordinary northeastern counter-offensive.
The city – which had a population of 27,000 before the war – is one of a chain of key urban outposts that Ukraine has recaptured over the past week following the sudden collapse of one of Russia’s main front lines.
On Tuesday, the streets around Balakliia’s main square were eerily quiet. The Ukrainian flag flew over a statue of national poet Taras Shevchenko in front of the regional government building.
A short walk away, regional police officers led journalists to the grave site of two people. The bodies had been dug up and were laid out on the grass in open body bags.
The two men, they said, were civilians who had been shot dead at a checkpoint in the city on September 6, when the city was still under Russian control. The locals had buried them there because they had nowhere else to do it.
At the site of the exhumed grave, Valentyna, the distressed mother of one of the dead men, 49-year-old Petro, cursed the war and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“No one can give my son back to me,” she said.
Reuters could not independently verify the details of what happened in Balakliia. Russia has denied targeting civilians in what it calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine.
RUBLES AND RUSSIAN SOLDIERS
Tymofiyeva said it had been clear to her that Russia, which invaded Ukraine in February, had planned to annex the city and the surrounding area.
The prices in the shops were indicated in both Russian rubles and the Ukrainian hryvnia; pensioners were paid in rubles, she said.
The city was almost completely isolated from the outside world. There was no television, internet or cell phone coverage as of late April, she said, except for one spot where residents would try to find a weak signal.
She said the Russian soldiers would stop residents on the street and take their phones to check them for pro-Ukrainian slogans or to see if they were subscribed to pro-Ukrainian social media channels.
At one point, her husband was forced to strip to his underwear in the street to ensure he had no pro-Ukrainian tattoos and had not served in the Ukrainian army fighting Russian-backed forces in the Donbas region, she said.
Artem Larchenko, 32, said Russian forces searched his apartment in July looking for weapons. After they found a photograph of his brother in military uniform, they took him to a police station where they held him for 46 days, he said.
He said he was kept in a small cell with six other people.
His captors at one point used wires to give him electric shocks in his hands as they interrogated him and asked him where other former military servicemen in the city were, he said.
He could sometimes hear screams from his cell, he said.
The allegations could not be independently verified, but police led reporters to several windowless cells with rudimentary beds strewn with old clothes and other trash.
Larchenko said he and other prisoners were taken to the toilet twice a day with a bag over their heads and were fed a diet of tasteless porridge.
“Occasionally there was soup – if the soldiers didn’t eat it, it was kind of a feast,” he said.
COUNTRYSIDE
The road to Balakliia through liberated areas was littered with charred vehicles and destroyed military hardware.
Groups of Ukrainian soldiers smoked, laughed and chatted by the side of the road. A soldier was stretched out on top of a tank as if it were his living room couch.
In the nearby village of Verbivka, emotional but happy residents, many of them of retirement age, told of the terrible lives they led during nearly seven months of Russian occupation.
“It was scary: we tried to walk around less so they would see us less,” said Tetiana Sinovaz.
She said they had been listening from their hiding places to the fierce fighting to liberate the village and had been amazed to find many buildings still standing when they emerged, although the school the Russians had made into their base was destroyed.
“We thought there would be no village left. We came out and it was all there!” she said.
Nadia Khvostok, 76, said she and other villagers in Verbivka had met arriving soldiers with “tears in their eyes”.
“We couldn’t have been happier. My grandchildren spent two and a half months in the basement. When the corner of the house was torn off, the children started shivering and stammering.”
The children had since left with her daughter, she said, to an unknown destination.
In the rubble of the village school, Kharkiv regional governor Oleh Synehubov told reporters they were trying to record and document evidence of war crimes.
“We have found some places where civilians are buried. We are continuing the exhumation process. So far we know of at least five people, but unfortunately this is not the end, believe me,” he said.
(Reporting by Tom Balmforth; additional reporting by Anna Voitenko, editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
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