BORODIANKA, Ukraine — The first sign of trouble was when a squad of Chechen soldiers burst through the gate.
They jumped from their Jeeps, combat boots hitting the pavement hard, and ordered the 500 patients and staff of Borodianka’s special-needs home into the courtyard, at gunpoint.
“We thought we were going to be executed,” Maryna Hanitska, the home’s director, said in an interview this week, days after Russian forces withdrew from Borodianka.
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She told how the soldiers pulled out a camera. They barked at Hanitska to make everyone smile. Most of the patients were crying.
“We command you to say to the camera, ‘Thank you, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin,’’’ the soldiers demanded of Hanitska.
With several guns in her face, she said, she quickly ran through her options. She would never thank Russia’s president, whom she had called “a liar” and “a killer.”
But she didn’t want the soldiers to hurt anyone. So she managed to utter: “Thank you for not killing us.”
And then she fainted.
Thus began a nightmarish ordeal at a Ukrainian mental health facility in Borodianka, a small town with a few apartment blocks that lies at a strategic intersection about 50 miles northwest of the capital, Kyiv.
In more than a dozen interviews conducted in the past two days in Borodianka and other towns in the devastated areas around Kyiv, villagers described the Russian soldiers as brutal, sadistic, ill-disciplined and juvenile. The villagers’ accounts could not be independently verified, but they were consistent with other reports and visual evidence about Russian behavior in the region.
The siege at the mental health facility dragged on for weeks, during which the building lost heat, water and electricity, and more than a dozen patients lost their lives. What unfolded there represents the depths of despair and at the same time amazing pluck under a brief but harrowing Russian occupation.
Throughout the areas of Ukraine recently liberated from a monthlong Russian occupation, a long string of disturbing stories is emerging of terror and death that Russian soldiers inflicted on unarmed Ukrainian civilians under their control.
Every day, Ukrainian investigators step into a dank cellar or muddy field or someone’s backyard and discover bodies of villagers who were shot in the head or bear signs of torture. More accounts are surfacing of civilians being held as human shields and some dying from lack of food, water or heat. On Friday, Ukrainian officials said Russian forces had killed at least 900 civilians as they withdrew from the Kyiv region.
Much of this misery was meted out in small towns near Kyiv, where the Russians occupied a large swath in the early days of the war but were driven out two weeks ago by less-equipped but much more determined Ukrainian forces.
Administrators at Borodianka’s mental health home said Russian soldiers robbed their pharmacy of rubbing alcohol to drink. Villagers in other places said they stole bedsheets and sneakers and they defaced many of the homes they took over with childish graffiti. Workers at the mental health home also said that on their way out, Russian soldiers scrawled profane messages on the walls — in human excrement.
“I threw up when I saw that,” Hanitska said. “I don’t understand how they were raised, by whom, and who could do this.”
Lypivka, a blip of a village dwarfed by immense wheat fields, was occupied by Russian soldiers until March 31. Here, villagers said the Russians double-crossed them.
Some village women had begged Russian commanders for permission to evacuate, and the Russians seemed to agree. So on March 12, a group of older men, women and children piled into 14 cars and slowly began to drive to what they thought would be safety.
“All of…
Read More: ‘Thank You for Not Killing Us.’