Over 300 villagers near Kyiv trapped in basement for weeks, say residents

Residents of a village north of Kyiv have said that more than 300 people were trapped in a school basement for weeks by Russian occupiers, scrawling the names of the dead on a peeling wall.

Halyna Tolochina, a member of the Yahidne village council, struggled to compose herself as she went through the list, scribbled in black on the plaster either side of a green door, in the gloomy warren where she said she and hundreds of others were confined.

To the left of the door were the names of seven people killed by Russian soldiers. To the right were the names of 10 people who died because of the harsh conditions in the basement, she said.

Reuters spoke to seven residents of Yahidne who said that in total at least 20 people died or were killed during the Russian occupation. No official death toll has been released by Ukrainian authorities.

The Kremlin did not respond to requests for comment on the events in Yahidne.

The accounts of what happened in the village add to growing testimony from Ukrainian civilians of suffering in the towns around Kyiv during the weeks of occupation by Russian forces.

The last victim recorded on the walls of the basement, Nadiya Budchenko, died on 28 March, Tolochina said, two days before Russian troops withdrew from the village after their drive towards the Ukrainian capital stalled.

As well as those, mostly elderly, who died of exhaustion in the stifling, cramped conditions, Tolochina named others she said were killed by Russian soldiers, including Viktor Shevchenko and his brother Anatolii, known as Tolya.

The villagers said they were ordered on 5 March into the school basement where they were to spend the next 25 days, with only brief breaks to relieve themselves or stretch their legs.

The Russian soldiers told them the confinement was for their own protection, the villagers said. They described sharing buckets for a toilet and taking turns to sleep in the small, crowded rooms as there was not enough space for everyone to lie down.

She said the Russian soldiers demanded a list of the people in the basement to organise food, and she had tallied 360. Two other villagers said there were more than 300 people.

Yahidne, a small farming village of five streets, had been a popular place for people from the nearby city of Chernihiv to take a holiday cottage. It is now a desolate ruin of burnt-out houses scattered with cast-off military gear.

Viktor, she said, had stayed behind to guard his house after sending his wife and two children to the school basement.

Russian soldiers had told the villagers that Viktor had been wearing a military uniform and was armed with a shotgun.