The regional capital Zaporizhzhia endures occasional missile strikes and waits anxiously to see if Russian forces will move a few dozen kilometres northward to capture it. The city is filled with soldiers and sandbagged positions. Road signs are painted out to confuse invaders. Refugees straggle in with harrowing tales of Russian depredations.
To live on the edge of the Russian-occupied zone of southern Ukraine is like peering into the seething crater of a volcano.
Human Rights Watch reported on July 22nd that Russian forces “have turned occupied areas of southern Ukraine into an abyss of fear and wild lawlessness”. The group catalogued dozens of cases of murder, disappearances, unlawful detention, torture, mock executions, forced video confessions and racketeering.
Sixteen-year-old Vlad Buryak stayed on in occupied Melitopol after his mother and sister fled to Europe. His parents are divorced, and at the beginning of April Vlad decided to go to Zaporizhzhia, where his father Oleh is head of the regional administration. At the Vasylivka crossing point, a Russian soldier noticed Vlad manipulating his smartphone and demanded: “Are you filming me?”
The Russians found pro-Ukrainian messages on Vlad’s phone, ordered him out of the car and threatened to kill him. They quickly realised that Vlad was the son of a high-ranking regional official and put him in solitary confinement. After four days, a young Ukrainian who had been beaten and tortured with electricity was brought to Vlad’s cell.
“He had a mental breakdown and did not want to live. He cut his wrists,” Vlad says. “I held him in my arms while he was bleeding. A soldier called a doctor and they took him away. I do not know what happened to him.”*
For the first days of Vlad’s captivity, Vlad and Oleh were able to talk on the telephone. Oleh urged Vlad to make himself useful to the Russians. He washed dishes and cleaned the prison, including pools of blood from the torture victim’s attempted suicide in his own cell. The teenager took risks, passing cigarettes and notes between cells. He saw Russian soldiers leading a hostage and shouting, “Make way for the humiliated one.” He understood from this that the man had been raped.
Oleh’s worst fear was that his son would disappear without trace, so he alerted media, Ukrainian authorities and international organisations. He engaged in elaborate negotiations, details of which he does not want revealed, because the life of one of those involved is in danger.
After 90 days of captivity, Vlad was dropped off at Vasylivka. Police filmed the long, emotional embrace of father and son, then whisked them away because there is often shooting or shelling at the crossing.
Oleh Buryak describes the mafia-like power structure inside the occupation zone. Separatists from the DNR, the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, occupy the lowest rung. Then come regular Russian troops. Above them are agents of the Russian intelligence service FSB. Chechens, known as Kadyrov men after Ramzan Kadyrov, the pro-Moscow head of the Chechen Republic, work in parallel to the FSB.
“The Chechens control all cash operations; handovers of ransom, the theft of equipment and export through the ports. They share the spoils with the FSB,” Oleh Buryak says.
These details are corroborated by refugees from the occupied zone. I met Tetiana, a 45-year-old housewife from Kherson, at the regional humanitarian hub in Zaporizhzhia, where she had just registered herself and two children as internally displaced persons. It had taken the family three days to travel 315km from Kherson, because they were stopped and searched at 40 Russian checkpoints, some only a few hundred metres apart.
Tetiana’s husband, Oleksandr, accompanied his wife and children on the journey, then returned to Kherson to look after the family’s house and dog. Tetiana did not want to give her family name because she is sick with worry about him.
“Everything [in Kherson] has become Russian,” Tetiana says. “There is no work. There is constant surveillance. They stop you in the street for nothing. If they hear you speaking Ukrainian, they take you to the police unit and they can hold you for several days. You don’t live there. You just exist.”
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Tetiana considers her family fortunate to live in a private house. “Apartment buildings are worse, because they loot empty apartments, or settle in them. They steal everything: fridges, washing machines, appliances.
“The resistance goes out at night and in the morning you see Ukrainian posters on the walls,” Tetiana continues. “In the market you can still pay with hryvnia [the Ukrainian currency], but in stores you pay in roubles. There are a lot of armed Russians in the street, in civilian clothing. They drive stolen cars.
“The FSB men have brought their families and they are settling in empty apartments. We spoke with some from Moscow. They taunt men in the market saying, ‘Aren’t you ashamed to be unemployed? Why don’t you go to Russia and work there?’”
The Russians position Grads and other missile launchers in residential areas. “The Russians are constantly firing missiles from Kherson towards Mykolayiv. And the Ukrainians shell [the airbase at] Chornobayivka a lot. It is very noisy, and the children are terrified. Not just the children. Everybody. The pressure is constant.”
The Russians fought their way into the largest nuclear power plant in Europe at Enerhodar, 53km from Zaporizhzhia city, at the outset of the war. Olha Panchenko (43) and her son Danylo (22) fled Enerhodar in early July because all normal life had stopped there. Supermarkets, pharmacies and banks have all closed, including the bank where Panchenko worked.
Harassment of power plant workers and pressure on schoolteachers are the biggest problems in Enerhodar, Panchenko says. “They kill power plant workers who refuse to co-operate. They want them to sign contracts with [the Russian power company] Rosatom. They are going through all the plant records. They want to redirect electricity to their network in Crimea but they cannot work because our system is more advanced.”
Panchenko says the Russians killed a diver at the power plant because he refused to drain the cooling ponds where the Russians accuse the Ukrainians of hiding weapons. She learned this from a newsletter by the elected mayor of Enerhodar, who has taken refuge in Zaporizhzhia. The first collaborator mayor appointed by the Russians was wounded by the resistance. “They have appointed a second one now, a Russian citizen from Donetsk.”
The Russians are also putting pressure on schoolteachers, Panchenko says. “They want the curriculum limited to four subjects only: Russian language and literature, Russian history and mathematics. The teachers refuse, so they plan to bring their own teachers from Russia. They also threaten to take children away from parents who do not send their children to school.”
Tetiana and Panchenko say they stayed on in Kherson and Ernerhodar through four months of occupation because they clung to promises by the Kyiv government to liberate them. Ukrainian forces have massed men and materiel on the approaches to Kherson, and say they will retake the city by September. Russia has vowed to complete its seizure of the entire Donetsk region in the same time frame. The next stage of the war is looming.
*Article amended at 12.30 on July 27th, 2022
