On the night of February 24, 2022, Viktor Marunyak woke up to the sounds of rockets. He saw flashes and clouds of black smoke in the sky; then got dressed and went to work.
Marunyak is the headman of Staraya Zburivka, which is located on the opposite bank of the Dnieper from Kherson. He immediately went to an urgent meeting with the heads of neighboring villages to discuss options for action. They quickly realized that it was too late to contact the Ukrainian military. Their area was cut off. They were under occupation.
Marunyak expected war, but did not understand what the Russian occupation would mean for his village.
Like his colleagues, Marunyak is an elected official – elected fairly in 2006 in accordance with Ukrainian law (which gives real power to local self-government bodies), and not as a result of rigged elections, as could be the case in Soviet times or in modern Russia. So, when the occupation began, he, feeling a huge responsibility, stayed in Staraya Zburyivka and helped his constituents cope with the avalanche of critical situations.
“After a few days, some families did not have enough food,” he recalls. – “There was no bread or flour, so I tried to buy grain from farmers… Many locals started giving food that they could share, so we created a fund to help those who needed it.”
Similar plans were developed for finding and distributing medicines.
Since the Ukrainian police were no longer working, the community recruited night patrols from local volunteers. Marunyak was preparing for negotiations with those whom the Russians would send to Stara Zburivka. “I told the people: don’t be afraid, when the Russians come, I will be the first to talk to them.”
And he spoke. But he paid a terrible price for it.
The Russian military that arrived in Kherson – just like those that occupied Bucha and Irpin, Kharkiv region, Zaporizhzhia region or any other area in Ukraine – were not ready to meet people like Marunyak. The invaders did not fully understand where they were entering and what they had to do there, it seemed to them that they were simply entering Russian territory, which is ruled by a weak and unpopular Ukrainian elite.
The actions of the Russians showed that their immediate goal was to decapitate the leaders: capture, kidnap, kill. But they did not think that it would be difficult.
Their method of occupation was not new. Soviet soldiers entering Eastern Poland or the Baltic states during World War II also arrived with lists of people they wanted to capture. In May 1941, Stalin personally provided such a list for occupied Poland.
For the Soviet dictator, anyone associated with the Polish state – policemen, military officers, leaders of political parties, civil servants, their families – was a “counter-revolutionary”, “kurkul”, “bourgeois”, or, simply put, an enemy, which was subject to destruction.
Russia made such lists a year ago before the invasion of Ukraine, some of them became known. They included the President of Ukraine, the Prime Minister and other leaders, as well as well-known journalists and activists.
But the Russian soldiers were not ready to meet widespread resistance, and they certainly did not expect to see loyal to the state, conscientious, honestly elected heads of villages and towns.
Perhaps this explains why Marunyak, 60, was punished with such horrific brutality by the Russians when they arrested him on March 21.
The elder of Staraya Zburivka and three other local men were kept blindfolded and handcuffed for three days. Russian soldiers beat Marunyak. They did not feed the man at all, gave him little to drink. Once he was stripped naked and forced to stand in the cold for several hours. They put a gun to Marunyak’s head and threatened to drown him. They said that their wife and daughter would also be taken away. Once, he said, the soldiers choked him until he passed out. They constantly asked where he hides weapons.
Since Marunyak did not fall into any category known to the Russians – and perhaps because his local patriotism and civic stance seemed strange to them – they decided that he was a secret member of a Ukrainian “subversive group”.
He was not a saboteur. He also had no weapons and military skills.
A few days after the arrest of the head of Staraya Zburyivka, Marunyak briefly saw his wife, Kateryna Ohar, before he was transferred to Kherson. The soldiers told Katya that she would not see her husband for the next 20 years.
He was then sent to another torture room, where other Russian soldiers tied wires to his thumbs. In this method of torture, wires are attached to the fingers and toes, sometimes to the victim’s genitals. Then the current is supplied from the battery of the field phone – according to one witness, the soldiers called it “calling Putin”.
Torture of prisoners by electric current was used during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Chechen wars in Russia, and now it is being used again in all the occupied territories of Ukraine.
When Marunyak was tortured and interrogated, he noticed that the kidnappers never wrote anything down. They conducted the interrogation carelessly; he could not understand what they really wanted to know. Maybe nothing.
Finally, after several days of imprisonment without food, he was released with nine broken ribs and pneumonia. He left the occupation zone.
During the last 10 months, more than a dozen journalists and researchers were engaged to record detailed testimonies of victims and witnesses of crimes in the regions of Ukraine that were or remain under Russian occupation.
Lawyers and analysts are studying these testimonies so they can be used as evidence in future trials.
Marunyak’s experience is not unusual. Oleg Yakhnienko, the head of the village of Mylove in the Kherson region, was detained twice. Elena Peleshok, the head of the village of Zeleny Pod, was kept in prison for more than two months. Mykhailo Burak, the head of Bekhteri village, was detained and tortured.
Police investigators have evidence of the existence of 25 torture chambers in the occupied Kharkiv region alone. The Ukrainian authorities provided data that, for example, indicate: out of 49 United Territorial Communities of the Kherson Region, most of the heads of United Territorial Communities, their deputies, and elders were detained and kidnapped. Some simply disappeared.
Many testimonies convey not only terrible details, but also an atmosphere of unreality.
Ukrainian prisoners were told that the Ukrainian state discriminated against them for speaking Russian; now they are “free”, the invaders insisted. But when the Russian-speaking elders and other representatives of the local authorities directly explained that no one in Ukraine offended them for using their native language or that the Russian language is widespread in the region, the soldiers had nothing to say.
The secretary of the city council of the occupied Novaya Kakhovka, Dmytro Vasiliev, recalled that his Russian language was more fluent and correct than the Russian language of the Russian soldier who interrogated him. The soldier was a Kalmyk, a representative of one of Russia’s national minorities; Vasiliev was born in Moscow. He considered himself a Ukrainian of Russian origin, which confused them.
“They could not understand why I, a Russian by origin, do not want to cooperate with them,” Vasiliev recalled. – “I said: ‘How can I look my son, my employees in the eye, if I become a traitor?’ They just didn’t understand.”
In January 2023, Vasiliev died.
But while torturing Ukrainians with the most pronounced civic stance, even attacking local leaders, the Russian military did not seem to know who to replace them with.
Unlike their Soviet communist predecessors, who could at least name the ideology that drove them to Poland, Estonia or Romania, the modern Russian army has no clear understanding and no concrete plans for how to govern the region. He doesn’t even have a clear idea of what “Russian peace” actually means, which some ideologues of President Vladimir Putin praise.
The Russian military does find collaborators in the places of elected officials, but many of them turn out to be random, low-skilled people without a pronounced ideology or previous ties to Russia.
In some places, the invaders hung Soviet symbols or flags, perhaps hoping that nostalgia for the USSR would evoke some sympathy for Russia among the enslaved Ukrainians. But for the most part, nothing was offered: neither explanations, nor improvements in life, nor even competent management.
In addition to mayors, representatives of local self-government, elders, and other elected officials, the occupiers are most worried about Ukrainian volunteers: philanthropists, heads of public organizations, people who rush to help others. Perhaps they seem suspicious to Russian officials because their own country suppresses all initiative, independent associations and mass movements.
The journalists interviewed a man from Skadovsk (this part of the Kherson region is still under Russian control), a volunteer. (He asked to remain anonymous because he fears for his family’s safety.) He was a member of one of the local patrols that replaced the police and worked at a humanitarian aid distribution center. After his father was captured in April 2022, a few weeks after the occupation began, a volunteer went looking for him – and was also detained.
During further questioning, the volunteer was asked about other local activists and about his connection with the Ukrainian security agencies (he is not connected with them) and the CIA (to which he is also not related), as well as with the George Soros foundation (also unfounded ).
Like Soviet officials who treated Boy Scouts in occupied Central Europe like conspirators, the Russians could not believe that he was just a local volunteer working with other local volunteers. Their questions suggested that they did not understand anything about such activities.
He described how he was beaten by four men at the same time, with a hammer, a baseball bat, and tortured with electric currents, trying to force him to admit his participation in a larger conspiracy. His rib was broken. Later, the man was ordered to make a video confession and sign a statement that he would not spread “fake news” about the Russian occupation. After further detention and release, he left the region.
In one of the cities of the Kherson region, also still occupied, another volunteer had a similar experience.
Before the Russian military detained him, he ran a makeshift pharmacy where medical supplies were collected. He was interrogated, beaten and, like other volunteers, constantly asked about the true purpose of his charity work.
And again, the Russian soldiers could not believe that there was no secret organization behind this, that ordinary people took part in this joint project at the call of their hearts, that information about it simply spread by word of mouth, on social networks and on the radio, and not as a result of some dark conspiracy.
The volunteer was asked to provide a description of how his group worked. “How it worked,” he wrote: “People brought what they had and got what they needed. Provided we had it.” The Russians demanded more and more information about the non-existent conspiracy. Then they confiscated the painkillers he was collecting for cancer patients.
This man, who was also forced to leave his region, believes that the real problem of the military who interrogated him was their fear because they could not control the volunteers. That anyone can be independent from the state and from the political system – any political system. “This really pisses off the Russians, annoys them.”
This explains why the list of captured and tortured volunteers is so long, and why their testimonies are so similar in different occupation zones.
Ruslan Mashkov, a volunteer of the Red Cross of Ukraine, was detained by the Russian military north of Kyiv in March and interrogated.
A woman from the Kherson region, who was helping to sort packages with humanitarian aid, told the journalist that she was grabbed, tortured with electric current, money taken and beaten. (She asked not to be named.)
Nakhmet Ismailov, a native of Kherson who organized charity events and concerts before the war, was also tortured with electric current.
Anyone who does any independent activity – who works with civil society or who can be called a social entrepreneur – is at risk in an occupation zone run by people who may never have seen a real charity or a real volunteer organization before.
The nihilism of the invaders is especially noticeable in the inconsistent approach to the Ukrainian education system.
Theoretically, schools and universities are a central element of comprehensive Russian ideas and plans, just as they were during the times of the Soviet Union. After the Second World War, the Red Army in a completely devastated occupied East Germany postponed the organization of food supplies and road repairs, instead first issuing a ban on private kindergartens and organizing the training of new preschool teachers.
In the spring of 2022, the Russian occupiers showed interest in changes in Ukrainian schools. In the still-occupied Melitopol, the Russian military kidnapped several school principals, as well as the head of the local education department, although the principals were later released. In Kakhovka, the director of school No. 1, Viktor Pendalchuk, was captured and interrogated for two weeks before he left for the territory controlled by Ukraine.
However, many schools in the occupied territories were initially closed or operated online, as in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. Some of the educators were forced by the occupiers to return to work.
Witnesses told about a teacher of geography, mathematics and computer science (his village in the Kherson region is still occupied), to whose house Russian soldiers came at the end of June. His 18-year-old son was handcuffed, a bag was pulled over his head and led away. Maybe they took him because he was planning to enter the university at the Faculty of History of Ukraine.
The teacher was told that the son is alive, he is being fed and will be sent home if the teacher returns to work. He obeyed. His son did return and said that he was interrogated, threatened with weapons and tortured with electric shock.
Closer to autumn, the occupiers intensified the Russification of schools, which caused great excitement among Ukrainian teachers who feared that they would be accused of collaborationism if they went to work. From the Russian side, it was an unsystematic process that took place differently in different areas.
In at least one of the regions of the Zaporizhzhia region, all books in the Ukrainian language, even children’s books, were taken from schools; in other places, only specialized Ukrainian literature on law and history was removed. In one still-occupied village of the Zaporizhia region, soldiers forced schools to open, threatening to take children away from their parents if they did not go to school. In other places, low attendance is allowed.
Residents of some districts said that the occupiers introduced the Russian language of instruction, but many programs were weak. Only four textbooks were brought to one region: Russian language, Russian history, mathematics, and natural science, and the rest were thrown away.
When asked what she did at school during the occupation of Kherson, 14-year-old Oleksandra recalls that students spent time looking at their phones.
Higher education also suffers from this haphazard approach.
Russian soldiers physically occupied Kherson State University, Kherson State Maritime Academy and Kherson State Agrarian and Economic University, but few classes were held there.
In June, when the city was still under occupation, the Russians announced that Dmytro Krugliy, one of the teachers of the Kherson State Maritime Academy, would become the rector. All others were released. Kruglii, who previously taught the subject “global maritime communication system during a disaster”, announced that the new task of the university was to build a shipyard, but he took few steps in this direction. After the liberation of Kherson, Krugliy disappeared from the city, possibly fleeing with the Russians.
Strong evidence suggests that Moscow had bigger plans for Ukrainian schools, but the military on the ground failed to implement them.
In Vovchansk, a small front-line town in Kharkiv Oblast, liberated in September after six months of occupation, journalists received a copy of the five-year educational plan for the city’s schools.
The document consists of 140 pages of bureaucratic text that looks like a sloppily made copy of the curriculum for schools in Russia, with no particular attention paid to the needs of schools in the newly occupied territories. There, for example, it refers to the annual commemoration of the Day of Solidarity in the Fight against Terrorism in honor of the infamous attack on a school in Beslan in the Russian region of North Ossetia (2004); lessons about the fascist blockade of Leningrad during the Second World War; course “Fundamentals of spiritual and moral culture of the peoples of Russia”.
There are only two lines about Vovchansk in the entire document – they refer to excursions to local museums and cultural monuments.
It seemed that despite Moscow’s intentions, the Russians who were actually carrying out the occupation didn’t really care what happened to the schools. There was no approach similar to the systematic Soviet planting of Marxist ideology and history in Central Europe in the 1940s or similar to the installation of a pro-Russian regime in Chechnya during the Second Chechen War.
In one of the occupied cities of the Zaporizhzhia region, teachers were ordered to organize a celebration on May 9, the day when Russia celebrates the anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. But the occupation authorities obviously did not care whether many children came to the event, whether they learned something about the war, or whether the celebration really took place.
“A few children will be enough,” they were told. Activity for the sake of showing off. The point was to report back to Moscow, not to talk about World War II in class. Each region of Ukraine has its own history and traditions, and some historical examples may seem extremely relevant. In 1787, four years after Russia defeated the Ottoman Empire and annexed the territory of modern southern Ukraine and Crimea, the Russian empress Catherine the Great visited these lands.
The trip was organized by Grigory Potemkin, her lover and favorite minister, and it was from this trip that we inherited the expression “Potemkin villages”. According to the legend, Potemkin ordered to erect facades along the path that Catherine was traveling and put disguised actors there, and at the end of each day – to disassemble and install again in the next village, so that the tsarina saw only happy peasants and wealthy surroundings.
Historians doubt whether this elaborate production actually took place, but Potemkin is indeed associated with the region. In the end, he was buried in a crypt in Kherson, and the Russians, retreating from the city, stole his remains.
The legend of the Potemkin villages is alive because it reflects the phenomenon we see: a courtier creates a false reality to please a distant monarch.
For Ukrainians who have been under Russian occupation, the story of Potemkin explains what they experienced.
Marunyak, the elder of Staraya Zburiyivka, describes it this way: “I watch what they do. All this is done for a picture in Russia. Even people who live under occupation do not believe that this is true. It is like a huge Potemkin village . It’s not working. They’re trying to glue it together, but it’s not working.”
The story of Potemkin can also partially explain the terrible violence inflicted by ordinary Russians on ordinary Ukrainians. Time and time again, victims said that such out-of-bounds behavior arose by itself. Nothing that Ukrainians did to Russians either in the distant past or in recent memory could explain the beatings, electric shocks, prisons, torture chambers in garages and basements, complete disregard for the lives of Ukrainians.
Only the disappointment of the Russians at their own inability to force the Ukrainians to obey; in fact, their inability to understand Ukraine in general may clarify the situation.
They have been ordered to change their education, but they don’t know how.
They were ordered to find secret Ukrainian organizations, and instead they find town mayors and local volunteers. On the one hand, they must report to Moscow that everything is under control. On the other hand, they get angry because they don’t really have much control.
This misunderstanding also fits into an older tradition.
In 1928, the Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vynnychenko wrote a letter to the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, who denied the existence of the Ukrainian language, calling it a dialect.
Ukraine, Vynnychenko wrote to him, exists whether Gorky wants it or not. “You can think that the Dnipro flows into the Moskva-river, because of this the Dnipro will not flow into the Moskva-river.”
Wishing that Ukraine would not exist will not make Ukraine disappear. Rewriting history will not erase the historical memory of millions of people. Russia may try to change the geography of the region, but it will not change the geography of the region, no matter how many bodies are beaten or electrocuted.
The modern Russian occupation belongs to the ancient and disgusting traditions of Russian imperialism and Soviet genocide. Moscow wants to destroy Ukraine as a state, and Ukrainianness as an identity. The occupiers believed that it was simple, because, like Putin, they believed that the Ukrainian state and Ukrainian society were weak. And this is not so. The discrepancy between expectation and reality also pushed the occupiers to more violence.
Wayne Jordash, a British lawyer who documents Russian war crimes in Ukraine, says that the extraordinary number of prisons in the occupied territories of Ukraine shows that the Russian army tried to implement its original plan to “capture and kill all the leaders” of Ukraine.
But the longer the occupation lasted, the more “the idea of who the leaders are” expanded. At first it was “Zelenskyі and the government”, and then quite quickly it became “local leaders”, which are everyone: from soldiers to civil servants, journalists and teachers – that is, anyone connected with the Ukrainian state”.
Failure and ignorance lead to violence. Violence breeds even greater resistance. Resistance, which is so difficult for invaders to understand, leads to greater, more widespread and indiscriminate destruction, pain and suffering.
This is the logic of genocide, and it is unfolding right now, in our time, in the occupied Ukrainian territories that have not yet been liberated. In cities where Russian soldiers still arbitrarily detain people on the streets. In villages where the Ukrainian state cannot even count the torture chambers.
Stara Zburyivka is still occupied, and Marunyak, its devoted headman, now lives in exile in Latvia.
He tries to maintain contact with his peasants, if possible to help, advise or listen, to protect social ties, which the Russians are cruelly and haphazardly tearing apart.
“They didn’t understand anything,” Marunyak says now, “they just ruined people’s lives.”
They saw a different world, not the one they were used to. And so they gutted him, struck him, and are still trying to destroy him completely.
Territorial and interregional territorial bodies of the State Inspectorate from February 24, 2022 to January 13, 2023 of the full-scale invasion recorded and calculated the quantitative indicator of the damage caused by the occupiers on the territory of our state.
This is reported by the State Environmental Inspection of Ukraine.
The agency noted that more than 280,000 m² of soil is contaminated with hazardous substances.
14 million square meters of land are littered with the remains of destroyed objects and ammunition.
Also, 687,000 tons of petroleum products burned during the shelling, polluting the air with dangerous substances.
More than 59,000 hectares of forests and other plantations were burned by rockets and shells, some of them may be restored within ten years, and this is according to the most optimistic calculations, the rest are lost forever.
1,597 tons of pollutants entered water bodies. 2 million 903 kg – the mass of foreign objects, materials, waste and/or other substances that got into water bodies.
The State Environmental Inspection noted that during the 11 and a half months of war, Russian aggression caused damage to the environment in the amount of more than 1 trillion 896 billion hryvnias.
“Such data are calculated in accordance with methods that determine the amount of damage caused to land, water resources, and atmospheric air,” the agency emphasized.
Therefore, the total amount of damage caused by soil pollution and soil pollution is more than 847 billion hryvnias.
For atmospheric air pollution, the total amount of losses is 992 billion hryvnias.
And for pollution, clogging of water resources, the damage is estimated at more than 56 million hryvnias.
After the end of the war, according to various estimates, the Ukrainian agricultural sector will need from two to five years to return to pre-war parameters, depending on the sub-sector.
As a result of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation in Ukraine, 461 children died, more than 924 children were injured, the press service of the Prosecutor General’s Office reports.
“As of the morning of February 19, 2023, more than 1,385 children were injured in Ukraine as a result of the full-scale armed aggression of the Russian Federation. According to the official information of juvenile prosecutors, 461 children died and more than 924 were injured of various degrees of severity. The most affected children were in Donetsk region – 445, Kharkiv region – 272 , Kyivska – 123, Khersonska – 87, Zaporizhia – 84, Mykolaivska – 83, Chernihivska – 68, Luhanska – 66, Dnipropetrovsk – 64,” the message says.
These numbers are not final, as work is ongoing to establish them in places of hostilities, in temporarily occupied and liberated territories.
On February 17, a 16-year-old boy was wounded as a result of shelling by the occupiers of Bakhmut, Donetsk region.