"My son and I were put in different cells and told we were both killed" life under Russian occupation in Kharkiv Oblast

"Oh, they brought a Mariupol defender! Let's cut his balls off!"

Russians broke into the yard of the Verblyanskyi family, Mykola and Tetiana, on June 28. They ran into the house swearing and threatening to shoot the woman in the knee. The phones of the whole family were on the nightstand in the room.

"We only kept them there because they strictly forbade us to use them, we couldn't even call our parents. They quickly inspected them and took them away. Then they began to search the whole house, shouting: 'Where did your son serve?', looking for his documents. He was in fact a soldier in Mariupol, but six months ago he terminated his contract and returned home to Hrakove," says Tetiana.

The Russians suspected the Verblyanskyis of collaborating with the Ukrainian army. Mykola, according to their version, detected Russian positions, and his 22-year-old son passed them on to the military.

They grabbed both men, put bags over their heads, tied their hands, put them in their Niva car and drove away. Four more soldiers remained near the house to "guard" Tetiana.

"We were brought to the territory of a former collective farm near the village of Chkalovske. As soon as we had entered, the military there immediately started shouting: "Oh, they brought a Mariupol defender! Now let's cut his balls off!" Mykola recalls.

"Have you already done the identification?"

Tetiana was in bits. She went to the Russians, asked where her relatives were taken. She even found the "main" occupier in the village.

"We do not know anything, they are not our lot," she heard in response.

Fellow villagers also put forward their versions of what could have happened.

"I was walking through the village, and they said to me: 'Have you already been to the identification?' Like, they found two bodies in the landing — hanged, with bags over their heads. And allegedly it was my husband and son. I did not believe them. The same people published information about the death of my relatives on the Internet. They wrote condolences on my page on social media, "God rest their souls". And I had no phone to write an answer that it was not true".

At that time, the Russians had moved the Verblyanskyis to a prison in Balakliya.

"We were taken there in the body of a truck. There was no glass in the body, so they just pointed their weapons and fired machine guns. Hot shells were flying between us".

In prison, the men were stripped of their bags and their hands were untied. The father was thrown into the third cell, while the son was put into the fourth.

After an hour and a half, the elder Verblyanskyi was taken to a small room where there were already seven soldiers and ordered to "testify". As soon as he sat down, a burly man hit him in the face and broke his nose.

"Then they all started beating me with large police rubber truncheons. They used a taser. They also hit my joints, fingers, and clicked a gun above my ear.

'Tell me!' - What is there to tell? 'You went to see the positions, passed information to the Ukrainians!'

I said that it was not true. I tried to convince them that I was a tractor driver. How could it be otherwise? I would have been shot at once. It happened once, twice, three times. Then they took me by the arms, put me in a cell and dropped me there".

A waffle for the son

Interrogations with beatings were repeated almost every day. Once after another torture, Verblyanskyi returned exhausted to his cell. The wife of the neighbor had just brought him food, and the man shared one waffle with Mykola.

"I took this waffle and asked the warden to give it to my son. I knew that he was in the next-door cell, although we had never seen each other. He took it, but later returned with it."

"What is it, why are you returning it to me? — 'But your son was shot yesterday'.

And so I lived for 9 days with the realization that my son was dead," the man recalls and once again fills his pipe with tobacco.

Around July 11-12, Mykola was taken out of the cell. He was preparing for the military to interrogate him again.

"But no — they just talked. They said if I catch their eyes again, they will shoot me. I leave the prison, and my son is standing on the street".

Mykola could not contain his joy, not could the lad. He was also interrogated, beaten and tortured with stun guns, and meanwhile convinced that his father had already been shot.

"Imagine how they put pressure on both of us. They wanted us to break down because of this".

36 kilometers from prison to home

The men walked 36 kilometers from Balakliya to Hrakove. On the way, the Russians stopped them again, at the same place — near Chkalovske.

"We had no documents, nothing. They again pulled bags over our heads, tied our hands and brought us to the same place where we were held for almost three days. They said they would deal with us in the morning.

We spent the night. Their 'senior' talked to me. They did not touch my son, he was sitting in the car. They said to go home and not to turn anywhere, because there are mines everywhere".

Mykola walked to Hrakove practically barefoot — the old rubber slippers, which he was wearing when taken from the garden, had numerous holes from the long walk. After lunch, father and son opened the gate of the house.

"I did not even know that they were released. I came with my daughter from the garden, we were sitting in the yard. Suddenly someone came in. I thought it was Russian soldiers again. But no. My husband came in first, followed by my son. They were emaciated, exhausted. My son was bruised, his back was covered with brown spots from the electric shocker. I was crying, almost fainted. My son told me how he asked the soldier in prison: if he was killed, to send his body to us, his parents, and bury him properly. He told him: 'You will rot here'," says Tetiana.

Shelter-turned-torture chamber

After that, the Verblyanskyis tried not to go anywhere outside the yard. The house, garden, cellar — and not a single step further. They knew firsthand that not everyone returns from prison.

"Before the occupation, about 1,000 of us lived here. Then 48 people remained. Many left. But also people were taken from the streets, they disappeared. We were allowed to walk only with white bandages on our arms. Several people were killed, I found out about it after the village was liberated. We still do not know the fate of four of our men who were taken by the Russians," says Anatoliy Vasylovych, a local resident. He is now the head of the village: he distributes humanitarian aid, keeps a list of those who return to the village, charges people's phones from his generator.

He says Russians did not raise their flags in the village, but immediately established order. They could anyone for anything: talking on the phone in the street, helping local people with food or medicine, violating the curfew, or refusing to hand something over.

"Every month and a half they had a rotation. And they were looking for cars from locals to fill them with stuff and go home. Our neighbor, a farmer, was shot because he refused to give his van. They first took him away, beat him, and then came to the house, shot him in the side, the bullet went through his shoulder. They put a knife in his hand — as if it was he himself. And in Chkalovske we were sitting with a volunteer who was detained at a checkpoint for carrying medicines for people. He was held for four days," says Mykola Verblyanskyi.

From the first days of the occupation, the Russians arranged a torture chamber in the shelter of the Hrakove village council, where they kept and interrogated people. Now it is a ruined building, around which there are St. George ribbons, boxes of dry rations and five-liter bottles with yellow liquid on the ground and among the ruins. Obviously, with urine. This was the only way the occupiers allowed the people they held to relieve themselves.

"As soon as they entered, they immediately captured 12 people and threw them all into the basement of the village council building. One guy was kept there for a week, they shot his finger. Another man just disappeared. They came to him, took him away — and we never saw him again. They said they killed him and buried him in manure. His son dug everywhere, but did not find his father's body," Anatoliy Vasylovych recalls.

"The cellar of the Russians was never empty: some came in, others went out"

62-year-old Viktor Morayev was taken away by Russians on April 5.

"They came and said: 'You, pop, are here looking for something, sniffing, reporting to the Nazis'. And I went on my motorcycle to Stara Hnylytsia, to Chuhuyiv — there were no Russians there. They did not even set up a checkpoint, just planted mines in two rows on the road. People ordered food, and I went there to buy it".

The man was thrown into a cellar, as well as his fellow villagers. He was taken for interrogation to a pit that had been dug for a future swimming pool. Viktor was beaten with a rifle butt and interrogated — they demanded to testify that he was actually a spy.

"During the interrogation, they inserted a gun barrel into my throat. It was their punishment. I thought they would shoot me. But they pulled it out. I could neither eat nor drink — everything was torn," Viktor says.

After that, they interrogated him several more times, but did not beat him again. However, the man constantly felt that his life could end at any moment. Before his eyes, the occupiers shot a guy who was riding a bicycle from Alchevsk to Kharkiv.

"It seemed that I had to be next. Probably, I was saved by my age and the fact that they went to my neighbors to ask who I was".

On the eve of his release, Viktor heard someone shouting into the cellar: "How are you, grandpa, are you alive?"

"I started pretending, saying that I could hardly breathe, that my arm grew numb. In short, I pressed for pity. 'Okay, you haven't got long left'. For some reason, I was sure that they were talking about my release".

And so it happened: the next day, as soon as it dawned, Viktor was told to leave. "They let me go and brought me home. They told me not to go anywhere... But the cellar was never empty: some people came in, others went out."