“We don’t know what we did to deserve this,” says one resident.
Women with bicycles pass a damaged church in the village of Lukashivka, near Chernihiv, Ukraine, on April 4. The church was partially incinerated after a Ukrainian drone strike hit a pile of weapons next to it. Officials here, 90 miles north of Kyiv, buried hundreds of civilians in makeshift coffins and hastily dug trenches. Families held mass funerals, fearing they could be killed if they lingered in the cemetery. Water and electricity were almost entirely cut off, and no aid could come in.
Residents here described violence and brutality by soldiers that added to the growing litany of potential Russian war crimes committed during the war in Ukraine. Residents of one village near Chernihiv said that on Sunday and Monday they buried 12 civilians and that humanitarian workers removed more than 100 bodies, mostly of soldiers, both Russian and Ukrainian. They said most of the Russians were pulled from a century-old church they had been using as a place to sleep. It had been partially incinerated after a Ukrainian drone strike hit a pile of weapons next to it.
On Monday, he surveyed the scene of damage outside his office and described how he now keeps his phone on airplane mode, to make it harder to track. He changes locations regularly and sleeps close to three bodyguards tasked with keeping him alive. By March 9, Lukashivka — former population 288 — had come under control of a Russian battalion led by a man known as Titan, who residents said terrorized them with vicious beatings and mock executions.
“We’ve lost 30 men today, so now you will suffer for it,” he remembered hearing Titan say before he lost consciousness. Bohdan Rozhylo, 40, who leads the hospital’s trauma unit, said the past month has been “the hardest of my life.” The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine issued a statement decrying the March 16 attack, accusing Russian forces of killing at least 10 civilians. Russian officials said footage of victims amounted to a “hoax launched by the Ukrainian Security Service.”