The day the Russians arrived in the sleepy, windswept village of Staryi Bykiv, they killed six men. By the time they had departed 32 days later, the soldiers had carried out at least three more killings, destroyed the school, systematically looted dozens of houses and turned much of the central street into a wasteland of charred buildings and rubble.
The images from Bucha, west of Kyiv, have shocked the world and intensified Ukrainian anger over the Russian invasion, but the story emerging in harder-to-access small towns and villages east of the Ukrainian capital suggests those war crimes are far from an anomaly.
Novyi and Staryi Bykiv, two halves of one village separated by a small river, are about 50 miles east of Kyiv. Dotted with ramshackle cottages, their combined population is about 2,000. In normal times very little happens here: ducks waddle through the potholed streets, people work the fields or tend to their own small plots of land and livestock holdings.
The Russian army entered the area on 27 February, three days into its invasion, as part of its drive towards Kyiv from three directions. When the advance stalled, they set up a base, moving in tanks, artillery and surface-to-air missile systems.
The accounts given by dozens of residents in Staryi and Novyi Bykiv during a two-day visit by the Guardian paint a picture of a thieving, violent and demoralised invasion force that was confused about whether it was supposed to be liberating Ukrainians or destroying them.
Finally allowed to walk around freely after a month of terror, men and women wandered the streets on Thursday still in a state of shock. In the car park outside the small village administration building in Novyi Bykiv, children gawped at the charred shells of two Russian armoured vehicles, one with the uniform of a Russian soldier still draped over one of its hatches.
Older people aired their grief and their grievances to anyone who would listen as they picked up plastic bags of food aid. Recollections were frequently accompanied by tears from men and women, young and old. One elderly woman, wearing a bright green headscarf and brandishing a curved wooden walking stick, was incapable of answering questions, simply repeating in a wailing voice: “Woe! Woe! Woe!”
Tamara and Petro Lysenko, a married couple in their 60s, gave a tour of their handsome cottage on the central street. Russian soldiers had broken in and lived there for several weeks while the Lysenkos cowered in a cellar with relatives.
The Russians ate all the food, killed a piglet and several chickens, stole the washing machine and all of Petro’s clothes and a computer, smashed up the three family cars and daubed Z symbols in orange paint on the side of the fridge and the kitchen door.
“I have been coming in and out for two days and I just don’t know what to do. It feels like it wasn’t my house they destroyed but my heart,” said Tamara, surveying the filthy floors and ransacked cupboards.
Yet by the standards of the past month, the Lysenkos had been lucky.
In the first hours after the Russians arrived, Viktoria Vovk’s large family was hiding in the cellar next to their house. Some relatives had arrived from towns closer to Kyiv; they had travelled here when the war started, making the reasonable assumption it would be safer than close to the capital. That turned out to be a terrible miscalculation.
Vovk’s 29-year-old son Bohdan Hladky, a post office employee, and her brother-in-law Oleksandr Mohyrchuk, 39, a factory worker, left the cellar to breathe some fresh air and smoke a cigarette. A few minutes later Hladky’s wife, Olesia, heard raised voices and went up to see what was happening. The two men had disappeared. A neighbour came running from across the street. “The Russians have taken your boys,” he said, breathlessly.
Olesia and Viktoria dashed to a spot on the main road where Russian soldiers were setting up a base, and begged for information.
“These non-humans were standing there, we were asking them to let my son and my brother-in-law go. They said they would interrogate them and then let them go,” Vovk said, recalling the ordeal with difficulty. She said the Russian soldiers were speaking a “non-Slavic language” between themselves, leading her to believe they could be Chechens.
An hour later the women heard gunshots from the area of the base. The next morning they again went to seek out the soldiers, and they saw three dead bodies in front of the building. At the back there were another three bodies, including those of Hladky and Mohyrchuk. Their hands were tied behind their backs and they had been shot in the head, Vovk said.
For nine days the Russians did not allow the family to remove the bodies. Then, on 7 March, a new rotation of soldiers arrived and agreed the six men could be buried in the cemetery.
Moving around the village was generally forbidden by the Russians, but on that day they allowed people to walk to the cemetery for the burial. A procession of villagers wrapped in white sheets made their way to the spot. There, they dug shallow graves to bury the six, while a Russian armoured personnel carrier stood guard.
The newly arrived Russian soldiers seemed ashamed of the killings, but one of them claimed to Vovk that it was “Ukrainian Nazis” who had shot the men, not his own comrades. Vovk still cannot fathom why her relatives were taken in the first place. She said her son was “far from politics and weapons” and had no links to the Ukrainian army or territorial defence units.
In the days after the killings, the Russians took over several buildings in the village to use as bases, and established their headquarters in the local school.
A stamped and signed inventory paper lying on the floor inside the school identified its occupants as the 297th anti-aircraft missile brigade, stationed in Penza region in the Urals and equipped with Buk M-2 surface-to-air missiles.
Inside the school – a recently renovated two-storey building painted lime green and sandy yellow – the destruction was almost total. The headteacher, Natalia Vovk, navigated shards of glass, ripped-up Russian ration packs and other debris as she surveyed the damage, stepping carefully as the building had not been fully checked for mines.
“I don’t know how we’ll teach. The school bus is destroyed, so we can’t take the children to neighbouring villages,” she said. The school would try to arrange distance learning, but the Russians had stolen all the electronic equipment. A natural optimist, she had begun the conversation with a stoic demeanour and talk of revival, but after a few minutes she was in tears at the enormity of the destruction.
The Russians not only looted the school and comprehensively trashed the interiors, their actions also suggest a mission of cultural destruction.
Almost all the library books were stacked in piles against windows to form shields, sealed together with foam, thus making them unreadable. On posters of Ukrainian historical and literary luminaries around the school, the faces had been defaced. An embossed Ukrainian trident on the wall was daubed with paint.
The only place to remain relatively unscathed was a small exhibition room dedicated to villagers who fought in the second world war. “Do not touch the museum,” a Russian soldier had scrawled in pen on the door.
On the blackboards in the classrooms, different soldiers had left behind messages in chalk. One had drawn a bat, a symbol of GRU military intelligence. Another had written: “Slavic brothers, you are being conned!” Next to it, someone had written: “Forgive us, we did not want this war.”
In another classroom, the board read “Let’s live peacefully”, a grotesque message given the carnage all around.
After killing the six men on the first day, the Russians staged at least one more mass killing during their time in the village, according to Maksym Didyk, who spent 12 days tied up and blindfolded in a small outhouse across the road from the school after being grabbed at a checkpoint on 19 March and beaten by Russians who demanded information about Ukrainian positions.
Sometimes, the Russian soldier in charge of guarding the prisoners there was friendly, but at other times he got drunk and became violent, Didyk recalled. Didyk said he was beaten, hit over the head with bottles and forced to sing Ukrainian folk songs at gunpoint. Eventually his captor took a shine to him and allowed him to sit upstairs in the building, not in the cellar. He was even given proper food to eat.
On 30 March, the day before the Russians left, a group of them had a party not far from the outhouse where the prisoners were held, Didyk recalled. “They sat and grilled meat, and they were drinking a lot. They were packing their bags and preparing to leave and were celebrating their departure. But then their mood got worse; they said their positions had been hit,” he said.
The soldier in charge of the prisoners, who never gave his name or rank, appeared and said he had been ordered to provide “four corpses”, Didyk recalled.
“He said he didn’t want to do it … he had tears in his eyes … but he said it was his orders and he had to shoot four people. He asked for volunteers.”
The soldier marched 10 prisoners out of the hut in pairs, walking them to the cemetery across the road. He later told Didyk he had shot four of them and allowed six to slip away, ordering them to sleep in a barn and then escape in the morning, when the Russians had departed, so that his superiors would not know he had spared them.
The next morning the Russians did indeed leave the village, as part of a wholesale abandonment of their bloody, failed advance on Kyiv. Didyk and the other prisoners walked through the fog to a neighbouring village in the early hours of 31 March. When they left the hut, in a mortar crater in the cemetery Didyk saw the bodies of two of the men who had been taken the night before. At another spot in the cemetery he saw a third corpse.
His father, Oleksandr, also saw the bodies the next day, and recalled that one “had his brains spilling out”. A patch of thick, congealed blood was still visible in the soil when the Guardian visited. Didyk did not know the names of the three men, saying they were not locals of Staryi or Novyi Bykiv. It is not clear what happened to the fourth man the soldier claimed to have killed.
One fellow prisoner Didyk did recognise during his time in captivity was Viktoria Andrusha, a maths teacher from Brovary, outside Kyiv, who had returned to the village to be with her parents because she thought it would be safer. The Russians raided the Andrusha house on 26 March and demanded to examine the family’s phones.
The soldiers said they found evidence on Andrusha’s phone that she had been passing information to Ukrainian authorities, and marched her away blindfolded. Two days later they came back to arrest Andrusha’s mother, Kateryna.
Kateryna was held for three days, blindfolded and alone in a basement. At one point, one of the Russian soldiers asked her why her husband, Mykola, had problems standing, and she explained he had painful knee joints. “Do you know that not far from you there’s a laboratory where the Americans are making biological substances and injecting your people with them?” the Russian soldier asked her.
Kateryna was able to walk free when the Russians left town, but nobody knows what happened to Viktoria. Nobody has seen her since the day she spent together with Didyk as a prisoner.
“I am so proud of my daughter. Will they find her? I don’t know. I don’t have words any more,” said Mykola, his breaths deep sighs and his eyes crimson with sorrow.
He was clutching a 10-year-old photograph from their daughter’s school days; all of the more recent pictures were stored on their phones and computers, which had been stolen by the Russians.
While the Andrusha family waits in agony for news of their daughter, the relatives of the six men killed on the first day received a terrible kind of closure this week when the men’s bodies were exhumed and reburied so that authorities could issue death certificates. Examination showed one man had his throat cut and another was stabbed in the heart; the other four were shot in the head, according to locals who were present at the examination.
Thursday marked the 40th day since the murders, a symbolic milestone for Orthodox believers. Hladky’s aunt, Yulia, took white cloth banners with religious inscriptions to the cemetery, to fasten to the simple iron crosses that marked the graves.
Back at the family home, she had stayed strong for her sisters. Now, alone in the cemetery, she had a moment of terrible catharsis as she crumpled by the grave.
Kissing the photograph of her slain nephew and running her hands along the freshly raked soil, she interspersed peals of grief with howled curses about the Russians, the invaders who had arrived so unexpectedly and brought death and destruction to her family, her village, her country.
The material damage done by the month of Russian occupation in places such as Staryi Bykiv will take many months, perhaps even years, to repair.
The emotional scars will take much longer to heal.
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism