"We drank urine so as not to faint." Torture school in Kherson Oblast

Broken roads, unexploded shells on the side of the road, the remains of dead cats and dogs, broken power lines – settings reminiscent of horror movies open to us from the car window. We are driving through the recently liberated Kherson Oblast. Sappers are working behind Vysokopillya. They leave behind marks and signs "Beware of mines". The deeper we advance into Kherson Oblast, the fewer such marks there are – sappers have not yet got there.

Since the beginning of October, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have liberated dozens of settlements in Kherson Oblast from Russian occupation. Most of them had been under occupation for more than six months. While the offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the south continues, locals in the liberated villages are slowly recovering from life alongside Russians.

"They were some kind of subhumans"

When we enter the village of Biliayivka, the sun is hiding behind the clouds and the wind is rising. Against this background, the broken and empty houses look even eerier, as do the burnt-out cars painted with the letters Z.

In the yard of one house, we see a chair with a basin and scattered bottles of water. We enter the yard hoping to meet someone, but no one responds to our "Good afternoon". The wind sways the tulle on the broken windows. I start telling myself: "It looks like there is not a soul here, we came in vain". Suddenly, we notice an elderly woman walking across the field from the other side of the street.

Her name is Tetiana. She stayed in the village for all seven months of the occupation. A Russian projectile fell right into her garden. She recalls that shelling with horror: "For four days they were shelling us non-stop, all the windows in the houses were blown out. They did it deliberately to make people flee the village".

Russians entered the houses with dogs, the woman recalls, seized people's phones, and checked their documents. On the religious holiday of the Annunciation, Russians killed a boy on her street: "He was walking down the street, and the Russians shot him". The woman herself was wounded in the chest by a fragment during one of the shellings.

"They were barbarians, some kind of subhumans. Probably, starving people, who had nothing in life, flew in and turned everything upside down in our houses," says Tetiana, barely holding back tears.

"They checked my kidneys"

We walk further down the street. Behind the red fence, cut like a sieve, we see a man. He is tidying up near his house. Hryhoriy Oleksandrovych has just returned home: he lived almost the whole occupation at his sister's place in the neighboring village. Russians were living in his house at that time. The man invites us to the yard, where there is a dark green car with the letters Z.

"This is a Katsap (derogatory for Russian – ed.) car," Hryhoriy Oleksandrovych explains to us at once. "They left it here." 

"What will you do with it now?"

"Let our military take it for spare parts, I do not need it."

Hryhoriy's car stands smashed and without an engine in the garage nearby. Russians also painted it with "Zs". There is a pile of mattresses near the garage: "These are their pissed mattresses. God knows where they got them from," Hryhoriy says.

Before leaving for his sister's, he recalls the time an unknown man came to his house. He warned that Russians would be looking for relatives of Anti-Terrorist Operation participants, so Hryhoriy Oleksandrovych should leave because his son was fighting in the east of Ukraine.

"Do you know how scary it is when your ribs are broken? I do not want to know. I am 70 years old, I could not survive it," Hryhoriy Oleksandrovych says.

His neighbor, a former ATO soldier, was searched by Russians seven times. Then they kept Volodymyr Anatoliyovych in a local school for half a day. The man says he survived only because the occupiers made a mistake.

"They checked how my kidneys 'fared', shot above my head, but I did not die – I am alive. They killed my namesake, exactly the same as me. We only had different patronymic names".

"They poured a bucket of water on the floor and said: 'Drink'."

The occupiers detained and tortured people in the local school. They were brought from neighboring villages: Osokorivka, Petrivka, Mykhailivka and Lyubymivka - and could be held for weeks and sometimes months. Volodymyr used to be the village elder in Biliayivka. The occupiers learned this and captured him. The man spent three months in captivity.

"They brought me to school and hit me in the stomach, I lost consciousness, but I heard someone saying: 'Breathe, breathe'. And then I do not remember. They tied my hands, feet and blindfolded me, so I could not see anything. I woke up after some time, I heard a man lying next to me. I asked him: 'Where are we, what's wrong with me?' Suddenly, from the other corner of the room, a male voice said: 'Don't touch him, he's dead'," Volodymyr recalls.

There were 12 other captured men with Volodymyr. According to him, all of them were beaten on the ribs with a wooden hammer, not allowed to eat and drink.

"We started drinking urine because we kept fainting. And then the Russians came and asked: 'Are you thirsty?' We nodded in agreement, then they took a bucket of water, poured it on the floor and said: 'Drink'," Volodymyr recollects his experience.

The prisoners were forced to read prepared texts on camera: they were fed and kept well, but the Ukrainian authorities abandoned them. Later, Volodymyr and three of his fellow villagers were taken to a field, shown the direction of Biliayivka and told to walk back. It took the men eight hours to get back to their native village. But even despite these horrors, they did not lose faith that Biliayivka would be free.

When I ask how the Ukrainian military were greeted in the village, Tetiana sobs and says – with tears. She pauses for a minute and then adds: "We helped them as much as we could, cooked them food. Our people were hardworking in the village, they kept a farm, and now they come back – and there is nothing."