Badly frightened and hungry, residents of Nova Basan, a town east of Kyiv, emerged from their cottages and farmhouses on Monday, and described living through the terrifying ordeal of the Russian occupation — detentions, threats and a strict curfew that confined them to their homes with no outside communication for more than a month.
Nova Basan, about 60 miles east of the Ukrainian capital, is one of a stretch of towns and villages retaken from Russian control after battles through the last week of March, and just now coming back to life.
“It was terrible,” said Mykola Dyachenko, the official responsible for the administration of the town and surrounding villages. “People were not expecting such things.” He said he was among some 20 men who were held prisoner by Russian troops for 25 days during the occupation.
He looked exhausted, his face waxy and pale. He said he had been put through what he called a mock execution 15 times while being questioned about local Ukrainian territorial defence forces and ammunition stored in the area.
His interrogators fired an assault rifle over his head during the questioning, he said. His eyes were bound with sticky tape but he heard and felt the gunshot above his head. “It was psychological pressure,” he said. “They were trying to kick out of me information that I was not sharing.”
Two other men also described being detained by Russian troops and told of soldiers beating them with rifle butts, and punching and kicking them. One described being tied up with his arms suspended. Another, Oleksiy Bryzgalin, 38, a construction worker, said he was strapped to a chair with a grenade between his legs for 30 hours and also had a gun fired beside the side of his head during interrogation.
The detainees were moved around and held in barns and cellars and fed only two potatoes a day, with only one toilet break daily, Bryzgalin said.
The detainees said they escaped from their makeshift jail as the Russian troops were preparing to withdraw last Wednesday. Five days later Bryzgalin said he still had pain in his legs from the cramped conditions and had trouble sleeping.
The community administrator, Dyachenko, said he did not know the level of civilian casualties yet and said he was only just starting to organise search teams to check on residents.
On Monday, he was heading out to investigate the report of an execution on February 28 of six people by Russian soldiers in a nearby village, he said. That was just after Russian troops had arrived in the area, he said.
(New York Times News Service)