“I was running away… when I saw an armored personnel carrier coming to the square with a Ukrainian flag: my heart just tightened and I started to bend,” the 43-year-old resident said, her voice shaking with emotion. . On Tuesday, he was among a crowd of residents receiving food parcels from a van in the same square where the Ukrainian flag was dramatically raised last week in one of the first images of Ukraine’s extraordinary north-east counter-offensive. read more Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comSign up The town – which had a population of 27,000 before the war – is one of a chain of key urban outposts that Ukraine has recaptured in the past week after a sudden collapse of one of Russia’s main front lines. On Tuesday, the streets around the central square of Balaklia were eerily quiet. The Ukrainian flag flew over a statue of national poet Taras Shevchenko in front of the regional government building. A short walk away, regional police officers led reporters to the burial site of two people. The bodies had been exhumed and placed on the grass in open sacks. The two men, they said, were civilians who had been shot dead at a checkpoint in the city on September 6, when the city was still under Russian control. The locals had buried them there because they had nowhere else to do it. At the exhumation site, Valentina, the distraught mother of one of the dead, 49-year-old Petro, cursed the war and Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Nobody can give me my son back,” she said. Reuters was unable to independently verify the details of what happened in Balaklia. Russia has denied targeting civilians in what it calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine.

RUBLES AND RUSSIAN SOLDIERS

Timofeeva said it was clear to her that Russia, which invaded Ukraine in February, had planned to annex the city and surrounding territories. Prices in stores were given in both Russian rubles and Ukrainian hryvnia. pensioners were paid in rubles, he said. The city was almost completely cut off from the outside world. There has been no television, Internet or cell phone since late April, he said, except for one place where residents would try to find a faint signal. He said Russian soldiers would stop residents on the street and take their phones to check them for pro-Ukraine slogans or to see if they were subscribed to pro-Ukrainian social media channels. At one point, her husband was forced to strip down to his underwear on the street to make sure he had no pro-Ukrainian tattoos and had not served in the Ukrainian army fighting Russian-backed forces in the Donbass region, she said. Artem Larchenko, 32, said Russian forces searched his apartment in July for weapons. After finding a photo of his brother in military uniform, they took him to a police station where they held him for 46 days, he said. A local resident carries a bag from a car delivering humanitarian aid, as Russia’s offensive on Ukraine continues, in the town of Balakliia, recently liberated by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, in Kharkiv region, Ukraine, September 13, 2022. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich
read more He said he was kept in a tiny cell with six other people. His captors at one point used wires to shock his hands as they interrogated him, asking him where other ex-servicemen were in the city, he said. He sometimes heard screams from his cell, he said. The charges could not be independently verified, but police took reporters to several windowless cells with rudimentary beds strewn with old clothes and other trash. Larchenko said he and other captives were taken to the toilet twice a day with a bag over their heads and fed a diet of tasteless porridge. “Occasionally there was soup – if the soldiers didn’t eat it, it was a kind of feast,” he said.

VILLAGE JOY

The road to Balaklia through the liberated areas was littered with charred vehicles and damaged military equipment. Groups of Ukrainian soldiers smoked, smiled and chatted by the roadside. A soldier was sprawled out on top of a tank as if it were his living room couch. In the nearby village of Verbivka, emotional but cheerful residents, many of them of retirement age, recounted the harrowing lives they led under nearly seven months of Russian occupation. “It was scary: we tried to walk less, so we would be seen less,” said Tetiana Sinovaz. He said they heard from the hideout the fierce fighting to liberate the village and were surprised to find many buildings still standing when they showed up, although the school where the Russians had made their base was destroyed. “We thought there wouldn’t be a village left. We went out and it was all there!” he said. Nadia Khvostok, 76, said she and her fellow villagers in Verbivka had met soldiers who arrived with “tears in our eyes”. “We couldn’t be happier. My grandchildren spent two and a half months in the basement. When the corner of the house was ripped off, the kids started shaking and stuttering.” The children had since left with her daughter, she said, to an unknown destination. At the ruins of the village school, Kharkiv regional governor Oleh Synehubov told reporters they were trying to record and document evidence of war crimes. “We have found some civilian burial sites. We are continuing the exhumation process. So far we know at least five people, but unfortunately this is not the end, believe me,” he said. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comSign up Report by Tom Balmforth. additional reporting by Anna Voitenko, edited by Rosalba O’Brien Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.