The Prisoners in a Cellar in the Ukrainian Village of Novyi Bykiv (The New Yorker)

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-prisoners-in-a-cellar-in-the-ukrainian-village-of-novyi-bykiv

No paywall
https://archive.ph/9sWJt

In Novyi Bykiv, a village sixty miles east of Kyiv, I was led to a cellar. For a month, Russian soldiers had taken up residence in the town’s Soviet-era house of culture, laying mattresses on the floors and positioning anti-aircraft missiles outside. During that time, they used the boiler room in the basement of an outbuilding to hold as many as twenty-two prisoners. Within the boiler room, there was a deeper chamber, a stone-walled crawl space the size of a refrigerator turned on its side.
Maxim Didyk, a twenty-one-year-old mechanic, told me that he spent eight days inside it. The interior was barely long enough to lie down, and only high enough for Didyk and a few other captives to squat on their knees. At one point, he said, the space held seven people.

Around noon on Saturday, March 19th, Didyk and his grandfather had walked down the road from their house to feed the family’s cows, chickens, and pigs. By then, Novyi Bykiv had been occupied for several weeks. As Didyk and his grandfather passed a Russian checkpoint, soldiers told them that they had twenty minutes to return, and they had better hurry up. By the time they came back, a different group of soldiers was manning the checkpoint. They separated Didyk from his grandfather and interrogated him: Who in town has gold? Who has weapons? Who is a member of the local Territorial Defense Forces?

As Didyk recalled, soldiers put a bag over his head, and eventually took him to the cellar, where he was severely beaten, with his hands tied. At one point, a soldier struck each of his knees with a hammer. The questions continued. His captors asked for the locations of nearby Ukrainian military positions. Didyk often knew the answers, but “stayed quiet to the last,” he said. “All I told them was where the closest Ukrainian checkpoint was, but they knew that anyway.”

A number of other local men from the village soon ended up in the cellar. Igor Zanko had gone out to buy a pack of cigarettes when Russian troops stopped him. “You have been detained by the Russian Federation under the rules of martial law,” a soldier told him. Another man, Vasily Tirpak, told me that he had been approached by Russian soldiers and forced to his knees at gunpoint. He was asked where weapons were hidden in the village. One soldier drew his pistol and fitted it with a silencer. He pointed the barrel at Tirpak’s head and then hit him with the gun. “If you don’t want to tell us,” the soldier said, “we’ll put you in the cellar for a few days and see if your memory comes back.”

*snip*

[Crunchy Frog]

1. Kick.