Seven days after the invasion of Ukraine, Russian troops entered the village of Yahidne. They forced the residents out of their homes and into the basement of the local school, which they had turned into their headquarters. Until they withdrew on March 30, 2022, the Russians kept almost the entire population of Yahidne—more than 360 people, including children and the elderly—in that basement for nearly a month.
It was so cramped, people had to sleep sitting up. Instead of a toilet, there were buckets. Food had to be foraged. There was no ventilation, so the oldest went crazy and died. The Russians did not allow the dead to be buried immediately, and when they finally did, they fired on the funeral.
“People jumped into the pit with the bodies,” says one six months later, recalling the ordeal, at a feast for those who emerged alive. Many had not.
In the intervening months, the survivors repeated their experience to one another, and to investigators working for justice. Their confinement in the basement may serve, one year after Vladimir Putin invaded on Feb. 24, as a microcosm of the sadism that arrived with the invaders. But to more than one survivor, what comes to mind is a concentration camp.
“What day,” one of them asks, “did people start going crazy?”
A year into the invasion, certain places in Ukraine—the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, the southern city of Mariupol—are known for what Russian forces did to the civilians there. To the list add the tiny village of Yahidne, which lay in the north of the country, directly in the path of the advancing army. As soon as the artillery barrages began, the informal village leader, a man named Valeriy Polhui, made a bomb shelter out of his cellar. When Svitlana Baranova and Lilia Bludsha, a travel agent and an engineer at Chernobyl, pulled into the village in a car struck by shrapnel, its windshield shattered, Valeriy took them in too.
There was fighting all around the village. Svitlana and Lilia called their families to say that it was too dangerous to leave Yahidne and that they would stay there a while longer. On March 3 the military vehicles entered the village in a long column. Valeriy hurried everyone—the nine members of his extended family and
