the times | Saturday April 9 2022 2GM 11
News
Captives
suffocated
in school
basement
Felix LightRussian troops rounded up residents of
a village and held them for four weeks
in a cramped basement where at least
12 people died, it was claimed yesterday.
Yahidne, 80 miles northeast of Kyiv
and just outside the formerly besieged
city of Chernihiv, was captured by
Russia early in the war.
Soldiers forced 130 adults and child-
ren to leave their homes at gunpoint
and herded them into the basement of
the local school building, a room rough-
ly 65 sq m (700 sq ft), residents claimed.
They were kept there from late Feb-
ruary until last week, and some died in
the suffocating conditions.
One survivor, Mykola Klymchuk, 60,
showed the BBC the basement. “This
was my half a metre of space. I was
sleeping standing up,” he said, indicat-
ing the far corner of the room.
“I tied myself to the railing here with
my scarf so I wouldn’t fall over. I spent
25 nights like this,” he added, with tears
running down his face.
Klymchuk said it was impossible to
move for fear of treading on fellow hos-
tages. He said between 40 and 50 of
those held in the basement were child-
ren, the youngest two months old.
Most of the time those detained were
not allowed to go out to use the
lavatory, instead being made to use
buckets. They were allowed outside to
cook on open fires twice a day.
The windows of the room were
boarded up and there was no ventila-
tion. According to Klymchuk, 12 of his
fellow captives died during their time
there. Most were elderly, and Klym-
chuk believes they died of suffocation.
The Russian soldiers would not allow
them to remove the dead.
“In normal conditions they would
not have died. Putin is a war criminal,”
Klymchuk said.
In March, as their offensive stalled,
Russian troops began to dig in around
Chernihiv, laying siege to the city. They
destroyed a bridge linking the regional
centre to Kyiv, preventing supplies
from being shipped to Chernihiv and
refugees from being evacuated.
On April 3, after more than a month
of occupation, the Russians left
Yahidne, having failed to take either
Chernihiv or the capital.Odesa imposes curfew
over missile strike threat
The southern city of Odesa has
imposed a weekend curfew over a
“missile strike threat” from Russia
after the shelling of a train station
that killed dozens of people in the
eastern city of Kramatorsk. “A curfew
will be introduced in Odesa and
Odesa region from 9pm on April 9 to
6am, April 11,” Odesa’s regional
military administration said on
Facebook yesterday. The decision was
taken “given events in Kramatorsk”
and “threat of a strike on Odesa”, it
said. Ukraine has warned that Russia
is regrouping to launch an offensive
in the south and east after retreating
from the Kyiv region. Last Sunday
Odesa was targeted by Russian strikes
for the first time in two weeks. The
Black Sea port has so far been spared
the destruction seen in other cities.
The nearby city of Mykolaiv has
suffered worse Russian attacks,
with a heavy civilian death toll.
ukraine in brief
Soldiers ‘raped young boy
and left girl, 14, pregnant’
Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman
has accused Russian soldiers of
further atrocities and called for both
the UN and the Organisation for
Security and Cooperation in Europe
to investigate. “The level of brutality
of the army of terrorists and
executioners of the Russian
Federation knows no bounds,”
Lyudmyla Denisova, 61, said. “A 14-
year-old girl [in Bucha] was raped by
five occupying men. She is pregnant
now. An 11-year-old boy was raped in
front of his mother, she was tied to a
chair to watch.” She detailed another
attack on a 20-year-old woman who
was raped by three “occupiers” in
nearby Irpin. She added: “There is no
place on earth or in hell where racist
criminals can hide from retribution.”
Denisova said that the crimes
contravened article 27 of the Geneva
Convention relating to the protection
of civilians during war.President Putin was pictured with the
Russian “nuclear football” as he attend-
ed the funeral of an ultranationalist
politician in a Moscow cathedral
yesterday.
The president was accompanied at a
ceremony for Vladimir Zhirinovsky by
a man carrying the briefcase that
contains the codes needed to launch an
atomic strike remotely.
Putin, 69, held a bunch of red roses
and placed them at the foot of the
opposition leader’s coffin before
making the sign of the cross.
Mourners including Zhirinovsky’s
relatives exited the Christ the Saviour
Cathedral before Putin entered,
because of the president’s aversion to
being in close proximity to others,
including his own ministers.
Russia’s nuclear briefcase is known as
the cheget. It is on hand for the presi-
dent wherever he goes. A cheget is also
thought to accompany the minister ofdefence and chief of general staff. There
are similar arrangements in place for
the US president.
Zhirinovsky, a veteran ultranational-
ist and showman of Russian politics
who predicted the invasion of UkrainePutin takes nuclear football to funeral
Tom Ball almost to the day, died of Covid-19 this
week. He was 75.
Zhirinovsky, who led the right-wing
Liberal Democratic Party for 30 years,
had been known as Russia’s Trump by
some owing to his ideological views,
which included demands for the recon-
quest of former Soviet republics, and
for countries including Japan and
Britain to be hit with nuclear weapons.
In one of his last public appearances
in late December Zhirinovsky ap-
peared to predict the date of the inva-
sion of Ukraine almost exactly, saying
“at 4am on February 22 you’ll feel our
new policy”. The invasion took place
early on the morning of February 24.
In an address to the lower house of
parliament he said: “I’d like for 2022 to
be a peaceful year but I love the truth.
I’ve been telling the truth for 70 years.
This will not be a peaceful year. This
will be a year when Russia once again
becomes a great country.”
Putin has already decided his victory
day, Ben Macintyre, page 33Putin and, circled, the cheget, holding
the codes to authorise a nuclear attackNews
RODRIGO ABD APF
ive days before the start of
Russia’s invasion Marina
Naumets wrote her
six-year-old son a poem for
his birthday. It read:
“Happy birthday my little son,/ My
dear and lovely angelic one!/ My
golden ray of sunshine,/ May you be
happy all your life!” Six weeks later
she was among the hundreds of
civilians found dead in Bucha
(Tom Ball writes).
Vladislav, her son, was
photographed as he stood by her
makeshift grave, fashioned in the
garden of their house by family and
neighbours using bricks and two
strips of wood for a cross. He had
placed cartons of juice and tins of
food — his most precious items —
next to the cross. Naumets, a
nursery teacher, is also survived by
her husband Ivor, daughter Sofia, 13,
and son Volodymyr, 10.
Neighbours said the family had
been hiding from the Russian
soldiers in the basement of their
home, next to Vokzalnaya Street,
the site of some of the worst
violence. Olena Zhezhera-
Shaposhnikova said Naumets,
originally from Luhansk in eastern
Ukraine, had had a heart attack.
She told The Times: “She became
unwell because of the situation, the
explosions, and that they were
sitting there trapped. The mother
felt pains in her heart and died of a
heart attack.”
The date of her death is unclear.
The family could not bury her
immediately because of the shelling.
Naumets posted the poem forVladislav on Facebook on February
19 with photos of the pair together.
Other photos, posted weeks before
her death, show the happy family
life that she enjoyed before the
invasion. On February 13 she had
posted a picture of Vladislav
making a Valentine’s Day card, with
the caption: “Oh, this is love.”
Photographs from last Christmas
show the family together at home
enjoying a lunch of chicken,
beetroot salad and champagne.
Vladislav is seen playing with a new
remote-control car.
Russian forces captured Bucha, a
suburb on the northwest outskirts
of Kyiv, on March 12. When they
withdrew at the start of this month
the horror of what had happened
became known, as scores of
civilians were found dead in the
streets and in their homes.
Many of the victims had had their
hands bound and had been shot in
the head or chest. Ukrainian
officials accused Russian troops of
raping women and trying to burn
their naked bodies. More than 300
civilians are estimated to have been
massacred in the town.
The Kremlin has denied that its
forces were responsible for the
deaths, claiming that the allegations
were a “monstrous forgery”.
However, accusations that
Ukrainian forces had placed bodies
in the town in “staged provocation”
have been contradicted by satellite
images showing bodies strewn in
the streets in the middle of last
month, when it was still held by
Russian forces.Mother wrote poem to her
son before dying in Bucha
h
Vladislav, six, next to
his mother Marina’s
makeshift grave at
their home in
Bucha, where she
died of a suspected
heart attack during
the Russian
depredations.
Photographs show
mother and son
enjoying a carefree
life before the war