Even in the relative peace of Lviv, a city that had little to do with the violence in the war with Russia, it was an ordeal it could not stand. “Tears do not let me see until the end,” he said as he played the video in a wooded area pushing Barbara’s 1-year-old daughter into a stroller. In early March, Kovalenko and her family were in their car, leaving the Chernihiv region, one of the most heavily besieged of the war. A shell exploded at a Russian outpost near the village of Yahine. The car windows were broken, he said, and she and her 12-year-old daughter Veronica were injured by the broken glass. The next thing she remembers is her husband’s voice shouting at them to leave the car. “Veronica started screaming, her hands were shaking, so I tried to calm her down. She got out of the car and I went to follow her. As I got out, I saw her fall. When I looked at her, her head was gone.” he told the BBC last week. Mother Ukraine: I saw my daughter killed and then held captive in the basement https://t.co/OAQzBJB9Yh – BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) April 9, 2022 In those shocking moments, her husband Victoria also lost her life. Victoria and Barbara’s youngest daughter escaped, only to be captured by Russian troops and taken to the basement of a school in Yahide. Locals said more than 300 villagers were forced into the basement. Then, during weeks of stress and deprivation, some began to die. The BBC visited the basement and spoke with other people being held there. The captives describe the corpses that lay unnoticed for hours, sometimes days. Kovalenko and Barbara spent weeks in the basement of the school, doing everything they could to stay alive. Yahine residents told the Associated Press that they were forced to stay underground day and night, except for the rare occasions when they were allowed outside to cook in open fireplaces or use the toilet. As people died one by one in the basement, neighbors were occasionally allowed to place the bodies in a mass grave in a nearby cemetery. Kovalenko’s husband, Peter and Veronica, were initially buried in the forest, but were later reburied in the Yahideh Cemetery, where they were carried to coffins along an uneven path as friends and relatives wept, and some laid flowers at the grave and were buried. soil. The re-burials took place after Russian troops withdrew from Yakhine in early April, when troops withdrew to focus their struggle in eastern Ukraine. Kovalenko’s hot memories are tangled in the twisted debris of their car. And in a concrete block at a village checkpoint, someone spray-painted a macabre joke: the words “polite people,” the term Russian authorities used to describe the forces that annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. The BBC asked Viktoria what she would say to the people who did this to her family. “If I had the opportunity to shoot Putin, I would do it,” he said. “My hand did not tremble.” More
