BORODIANKA, Ukraine – The first sign of trouble was when a squadron of Chechen soldiers stormed through the gate.
They jumped out of their jeeps, slammed hard on the sidewalk, and ordered the 500 patients and employees of Borodianka’s special needs home into the courtyard at gunpoint.
“We thought we were going to be executed,” Maryna Hanitska, the director of the house, said in an interview this week, days after Russian troops withdrew from Borodianka.
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She told how the soldiers pulled out a camera. They barked at Hanitska to make everyone laugh. Most patients cried.
“We order you to say to the camera, ‘Thank you, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin,'” Hanitska’s soldiers demanded.
With several guns to her face, she said, she quickly ran through her options. She would never thank the Russian president, whom she called “a liar” and “a murderer.”
But she didn’t want the soldiers to hurt anyone. So she managed to utter, “Thank you for not killing us.”
And then she fainted.
Thus began a nightmarish ordeal at a Ukrainian psychiatric facility in Borodianka, a small town with a few apartment blocks at a strategic intersection about 80 kilometers northwest of the capital Kiev.
In more than a dozen interviews conducted over the past two days in Borodianka and other towns in the devastated areas around Kiev, villagers described the Russian soldiers as brutal, sadistic, ill-disciplined and youthful. The villagers’ stories could not be independently verified, but they matched other reports and visual evidence about Russian behavior in the region.
The siege of the psychiatric facility lasted for weeks, with the building losing heat, water and electricity and more than a dozen patients killed. What transpired there represents the depths of despair and at the same time astonishing harvest under a brief but harrowing Russian occupation.
In areas of Ukraine recently liberated from a month-long Russian occupation, a long line of disturbing stories is circulating about terror and death inflicted by Russian soldiers on unarmed Ukrainian civilians under their control.
Every day Ukrainian detectives step into a damp basement or muddy field or someone’s backyard and discover bodies of villagers who have been shot in the head or show signs of torture. There are growing reports of civilians being held as human shields and of some dying from lack of food, water or heat. On Friday, Ukrainian officials said Russian troops had killed at least 900 civilians as they withdrew from the Kiev region.
Much of this misery was doled out in small towns near Kiev, where the Russians occupied much of the war in the early days of the war but were driven out two weeks ago by less equipped but much more determined Ukrainian troops.
Administrators of Borodianka’s psychiatric facility said Russian soldiers robbed their pharmacy of rubbing alcohol to drink. Villagers in other places said they had stolen sheets and sneakers and that they defaced many of the houses they took over with childish graffiti. Mental health workers also said that on their way out, Russian soldiers scribbled profane messages on the walls – in human feces.
“I threw up when I saw that,” Hanitska said. “I don’t understand how they were raised, by whom and who can do this.”
Lypivka, an offshoot of a village dwarfed by immense wheat fields, was occupied by Russian soldiers until March 31. Here villagers said that the Russians cheated on them.
Some village women had begged Russian commanders for permission to evacuate, and the Russians seemed to agree. So on March 12, a group of elderly men, women and children got into 14 cars and started slowing down to what they thought would be safety.
“We all had white flags and we had permission,” said Valriy Tymchuk, a shopkeeper, who was driving a minibus in the convoy.
But then Russian armored personnel carriers swung their turrets at them, villagers said. A grenade ripped into the first car. And then another. And then another.
The convoy turned into a fireball.
Tymchuk said he saw a family of four, including a young child, trapped in their car and engulfed in flames. Many of the scorched cars are still on the road. That kid’s charred bones are still in the back seat, Tymchuk said. What looked like bits of bone were scattered among the blackened metal and piles of ashes.
Two dead dogs lay beside the cars, their furs singed.
Tymchuk narrowly escaped after his minibus was hit and shrapnel cut into his face.
He shook his head when asked why he thought the Russians were doing this.
“They’re zombies,” he said.
These villages were on the front lines, part of Russia’s failed attempt to surround and take Kiev. The same was true of Bucha, another village north of Kiev and the site of the worst atrocities discovered to date. All these places are now quiet so forensic investigators can do their job. And the more they search, the more they find.
In Makariv, another small town near Kiev, authorities said they recently discovered more than 20 corpses, in various yards and houses, many of which bore the marks of torture. In the Brovary area, further east, police officers just found six bodies in a basement, all men who had apparently been executed.
“We have seen bodies with knife wounds and traces of beatings, and some with their hands tied with tape,” said Oleksandr Omelyanenko, a police officer in the Kiev region.
“The places that were hit hardest,” he added, “were occupied the longest.”
That was the story for Borodianka and the Borodianka Psychoneurological Nursing Home.
Hanitska, a 43-year-old former school principal, said she watched from the windows of the three-story special needs building as the Russian trucks poured in. She counted 500.
Then, concerned about snipers, Russians began shelling apartment blocks along the roads, and dozens of residents died under a cascade of rubble, according to emergency officials.
The shockwaves shook the special needs home built in the 1970s to cater for adults with neurological and psychological conditions. Hanitska said some of her patients became aggressive and three even escaped and have yet to be found. Others were terrified and curled up under their beds and in their closets.
“It was scary more than 10 times,” said Ihor Nikolaenko, a patient.
On March 5 it got worse.
Then the Chechens showed up. Chechen troops, in particular, are feared and seen as more ruthless than other Russians, as a result of their own failed separatist war against Russia’s central government.
Hanitska and other staffers said they could tell the troops were Chechen by their light-colored beards and the language they spoke among themselves. Ukrainian authorities posted messages on social media referring to the Chechens and warning the patients not to hurt them.
“These are mostly sick people with developmental disabilities,” Oleksandr Pavliuk, a senior Ukrainian military official, said in a statement. “But these are our people and we can never and will never leave them.”
At this point it was too late for some people inside. Hanitska said her first patient died from exposure to the cold in late February. In early March, half a dozen more died. In total she lost 13.
It was 20 degrees Fahrenheit inside the building, even colder outside. There was no heating, no electricity, no running water and little food. Borodianka was finally besieged.
“We started drinking water from the pond,” Hanitska said. “We all got sick.”
The Chechen contingent mysteriously withdrew the same day it arrived, but other Russians took their place. They did not allow anyone to leave the building, not even to go outside for food, and they surrounded the building with artillery, mortars and heavy cannons, knowing that the Ukrainians would be reluctant to hit it.
“We became human shields,” said Taisia Tyschkevych, the house’s accountant.
The Russians took everyone’s phone. Or almost everyone’s.
Hanitska said she hid hers and used it to communicate in secret. She would peek out the nurse’s room window and see Russian vehicles, she said, and then they text the details to Ukrainian troops. “They were hitting the Russians,” she said. “If we had not done this, the fighting would have taken place in Kiev.”
Many Ukrainian citizens have helped in this way, Ukrainian officials said.
While spying on the Russians, Hanitska also cooked meals on a fire outside, pushed patients into the basement when the artillery became deafening, set up sleeping quarters in the hallways for dozens of people fleeing bombed buildings in the city, and flocked to her facility for shelter, and – more than anything – helped calm everyone’s nerves.
On March 13, Hanitska peered out the same window and for the first time in weeks saw something that lifted her heart: a convoy of yellow buses. She stormed out the gate.
“I would either get shot,” she said. “Or save people.”
Humanitarian workers had organized a rescue and the Russians eventually let the patients leave. They were taken by bus to other facilities in less contentious areas.
Hanitska is tough but modest with a dry sense of humor.
When asked how long she had been working in the house, she laughed.
“Two months,” she said. “You could say I’m lucky.”
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