Olena Naumova’s descent into two weeks of terror began in late August when three Russian soldiers armed with automatic rifles knocked on her door in the occupied city of Kherson. She said she was ordered to hand over her weapon. I had none.
“‘Don’t lie,'” he said the Russians warned him. “‘We will give you an electric shock. We will break your bones. We’ll put construction foam on your body.”
Stunned, Naumova, a kindergarten teacher who had posted some pro-Ukrainian videos, said she was crushed when soldiers threw a plastic bag over her head and dragged her into a car. She was then taken to an underground prison where, according to her, they interrogated her, they beat her and forced her to listen to screams coming from other cells.
As Kherson celebrates its new liberation after eight long months of Russian occupation, and as residents take to the streets with smiles and sparkling flags, there are also disturbing accounts of torture and abuse at the hands of Russian soldiers, and people are finally free to speak.
Several residents described being dragged to underground torture chambers, sometimes just for publishing patriotic poetry. Others said they witnessed random outbreaks of violence, such as Russian soldiers punching young people in the face and sending them to hospital, for no apparent reason.
Anyone suspected of belonging to an underground partisan group or spying on Russian military posts was at grave risk, according to interviews with dozens of city residents and Ukrainian military officials.
Soldiers were breaking down gates or driving people off the streets with tactics that looked like authoritarian regimes from another era. It was all part of failed attempt by the Russians to forcefully make Kherson part of their homeland.
disappeared
Ukrainian authorities said the Russians had kidnapped more than 600 people and many are still missing. Residents have also reported disappearances and killings, in line with allegations of documented war crimes in Bucha, Izium and other Ukrainian cities where Russian President Vladimir Putin’s troops have rampaged, leaving behind vandalized homes and mass graves. .
But Kherson is now a liberated territory.
On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived for a triumphant surprise visit, calling last week’s Russian withdrawal “the beginning of the end of the war”.
Outside the imposing regional administration building where the Russian tricolor had flown days earlier, hundreds of people, some draped in Ukrainian flags, said: “Step by step, we are reaching the whole country.”
But as everywhere seized by Moscow’s forces, the Ukrainians now have to come to terms trauma that they left behind. Zelensky said the Russians had committed more than 400 war crimes in Kherson.
horror city
“It was a scary city,” said Olena Samofalova, an unemployed saleswoman who came to the main square on Monday to “feel some of the positive energy.” Like many others here, she looked stunned, almost unable to believe that her country’s army and her president were crossing the same cobbled square that had recently filled with Russian soldiers.
Vyacheslav Lukashuk, a 27-year-old office worker, recalled how a dozen soldiers and officers of the Russian Security Service they had broken into his house and thrown him face down on the ground, shouting, “Where are your weapons?” and “How do you contact the Ukrainian military?”.
They kicked and beat him with rifle butts, and a soldier put a plastic bag over his head to suffocate him.
“It’s hard to call it detention,” he said. “They just came in and started beating me. At that point I said goodbye to my life.”
His crime? “Glory to Ukraine” spray paint at the bus stop.
Naumova was more of a thorn in the side of the Russians, according to her account and that of other Kherson residents. In February, after the Russian troops entered, she started blogging about the invasion and posting patriotic videos on TikTok.
As the Russian occupation hardened, its messages also strengthened. He called on the people of Kherson to rebel against the Russians. On the morning of August 23, his cell phone service was abruptly cut off. Then the soldiers came and asked him: “Where is your weapon?” She replied: “Are you serious?”
Hugs
She was followed by friends and supporters on Monday as she toured Zelensky’s main square itself, with a victorious Ukrainian flag draped across her shoulders and a small one painted across her right cheek. Everywhere Naumova looked, someone was waiting to hug her. They seemed surprised to see her alive.
“I was really worried about you,” a woman said as they embraced. She then she turned and looked at Naumova’s face. “Are you OK?”
Naumova, 57, might seem like an unlikely freedom fighter. Throughout her adult life she has been a kindergarten teacher, specializing in the education of children aged 2 to 6. Before the war she blogged about her, mainly on children’s issues. You grew up in the Kherson area and never strayed far. But when the Russians arrived, he felt a revulsion within him that surprised even herself.
“I lived under the Soviet Union and I never want to go back to the Soviet Union,” he said. “It was like a prison camp.”
Divorced and alone, she began to raise funds, including from Israel and the United States, to donate to the elderly and disabled living in Kherson and suffering from the occupation. She then started making patriotic videos, first with poems for children, then with speeches and then directly making fun of Russians.
He had a huge audience – 105,000 subscribers to his TikTok channel. Some of her videos have received 380,000 likes.
“He made jokes, like ‘My dear Russians and the FSB, you won’t take an old lady from kindergarten, will you?'” he said, citing the Russian intelligence agency. “My friends asked me: Aren’t you afraid of being taken away?”
In late August, according to residents, the Russians began detaining more people. The crackdown seemed to coincide with the Ukrainian army’s announcement of an offensive in the south to recapture Kherson.
As Ukrainian forces inched forward, methodically choking Kherson’s bridges and encircling the city, residents said Russian soldiers have become increasingly unpredictable.
“It was dangerous to approach them,” said Andrew Kirsanov, a computer programming student. “You never knew what they had in mind.”
Samofalova said that one night in August, Russian soldiers attacked a group of nurses and doctors and some men who happened to be sitting near them.
His crime: singing patriotic songs in the main square of Kherson, on the day of independence of Ukraine. He said he later learned that the group had been taken to “an underground prison”. Several other residents used the same words, “dungeon”, to describe where they or their loved ones had been taken.
Apparently, the Russians had created a network of dungeons, using Cold War-era bomb shelters in Kherson as places of torture. Samofalova said she herself had spoken to the victims after their release and that Russian soldiers pounded the butts of their rifles on the women’s breasts and detained them for 10 days.
Horror story
Naumova said her captors locked her in a dark, windowless room with only two chairs. A Russian officer stood in front of her and shouted: “Who is your network? Where did you get the money? Who works with you?” Then she withdrew her arm, said about her, and slapped her across the face.
She said they interrogated and beat her for four days, and that they kept her in the cell for another seven. Before releasing her, the Russians forced her to record an apology video. In it, she listlessly looked at the camera and said that he regretted calling the occupiers “pig dogs” and calling Kherson Ukraine.
“I was afraid they would kill me,” she said. “I’m a good actress, so I decided to play the part of an emotional, unintelligent girl. I cried all the time, pretending to be weak. If I acted like a hero, I would have died, real fast.”
One of her friends, a thin man in his forties, hugged her as she told the story in the sunshine of the main square. “She’s a beautiful woman with great spirit,” said the man, Olexander.
Olexander, who declined to give his last name because he feared the Russians might continue to harm him, said he too had made patriotic videos, including ones in which he read Ukrainian poetry.
He was arrested in June, blindfolded with an old hat and taken to a police station. There, Russian soldiers attached wires to his fingertips with alligator clips and they hit him with electricity.
He was released after a week, when he was also forced to record an apology video for pro-Ukrainian graffiti. The Russians posted the video online, along with confessions from other residents, in an apparent attempt to shame and intimidate people.
The last thing the Russians did with her, Naumova said, was try to extort the equivalent of a few thousand dollars from her, far more than she had. She told them that she would get the money from her friends. Instead he hid.
On Monday, he seemed happy to give interviews to reporters and tour the sunny Kherson square.
“I can finally breathe,” she said. “It’s like waking up from a coma.”
Source: New York Times
B. C
Source: Clarin
Mark Jones is a world traveler and journalist for News Rebeat. With a curious mind and a love of adventure, Mark brings a unique perspective to the latest global events and provides in-depth and thought-provoking coverage of the world at large.