And then it started. A soldier twisted the handle, turning it faster and faster. This sent a torturous pulse through Maximov’s body. “I collapsed. They pulled me to my feet. There was a hood on my head. I couldn’t see anything. My legs went numb. I couldn’t hear in my left ear,” he recalls. “Then they did it again. I passed out. I returned 40 minutes later back to my cell.” The Russian military seized the police station in April. This followed a fierce month-long battle with Ukrainian forces based on a hill next to the Izium Soviet war memorial. According to Maksimov, a 50-year-old publisher, the soldiers arrested anyone they suspected of having pro-Ukrainian views. He had stayed behind to look after his elderly mother. They sought out military veterans, home guard volunteers and city hall officials. The Russians showed up with a list of names. Some local politicians seem to have cooperated. They included several city council members and a retired police chief Vladislav Sokolov, who became the new pro-Vladimir Putin “mayor” of Izium. Residents were unable to say how many people disappeared during Russia’s five-month occupation of the city. An answer could be found on Saturday in a sunny pine forest on the outskirts of the city, near a Russian checkpoint. Under orange trees, Ukrainian coroners conducted a gruesome process of exhumation and truth-telling. A Russian battalion had stationed its tanks next to a cemetery, cutting branches and building underground bunkers with neat log roofs. Izium’s war dead – 443 since February – joined them on nearby sandy plots. They included 17 Ukrainian soldiers. They were dug up on Friday from a tank pit, which was used as a mass grave. Ukraine’s armed forces discovered the horrific site when they stormed Izium a week ago, as part of a stunning counter-offensive that saw them recapture almost the entire northeastern region of Kharkiv. On Friday, the first 40 bodies were removed. Some had their hands tied together. on one woman’s rotting arm was a bracelet in Ukrainian blue and yellow colors. On Saturday, specialists in white boiler suits continued digging. Graves were marked with wooden crosses. Watched by the police, they scraped, removed bodies and carefully placed them in a clearing. The first was a soldier, identified by his camouflage pants and boots. Then two civilians – one possibly a woman – and another soldier. Everything was zip-locked in white bags. “Sometimes we find identity cards and passports. But we don’t have names for many of them here. Or cause of death,” Roman Kasyanenko, the deputy general prosecutor for Kharkiv, told the Observer. “There are some signs of torture. We found people with hands tied together and limbs broken.” However, he stressed: “It is too early to say whether this is another Bucha.” The site smelled strongly of human rot and pine resin. Relatives said Russian missiles killed their loved ones. Oxsana Gruzodub had come to report the deaths of her daughter-in-law’s family, Anatoly, Galina and their son Artyom, 14. They died on March 9 when a Russian warplane bombed their apartment building, he said. Another relative, Feyodor, was searching for the spot where his wife Svetlana was buried in grave number 333. A cluster bomb killed her on May 16 on the road, he explained. Feyodor and his nephew, Nikolai, went through the police tape and finally located the spot. He was in tears. Svetlana – like the others – would be exhumed next week and sent to a laboratory in Kharkiv. Showing the Observer around the ruined center of Izium, Maksimov admitted that he was lucky. A group of young Russian conscripts arrested him in March immediately after they took up positions on the edge of town by the reed-lined Siverskyi Donets River. He was grabbed as he crossed the city’s footbridge. The soldiers told him they had come from Belarus. Later that night, the Ukrainians bombed the building by the river where he was. The Russians hid in another room. Maximov ran out into the street, grabbed his bicycle and escaped. Publisher Maksim Maksimov, 50, shows the room in a police station where he was tortured during the Russian occupation of Izium. Photo: Daniel Carde/The Observer He was arrested a second time on September 3 by soldiers who accused him of being a Ukrainian spy. The police station’s torture chamber, he later discovered, was a closed firing range, its walls soundless. The guards were from the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR). These separatist helpers brought the prisoners cold soup twice a day. Their toilet was a bucket. Three rats lived on a ledge by a window. Maximov shared a cell with two other local men. On the sixth day, the guards said that the Ukrainians would come and threatened to throw a grenade into their ward. The next day, other LNR guards showed up and told them to run. About a quarter of Izium’s 60,000 inhabitants lived under Russian rule. A third of them sympathized with the occupiers, Maximov said. “It’s Stockholm syndrome,” he suggested. The Russians swapped diesel for homemade vodka. The city lived on little food and no electricity. The publisher said he did not expect the Russian army to leave Izium without a fight. They made a chaotic exodus last week, abandoning T-80 tanks, BMP infantry fighting vehicles and mortar rows. On Saturday, Ukrainian troops rolled around Izium in these ex-Russian war machines, hastily painted with a plus symbol and the Ukrainian flag. In the space of a few days, Ukrainian forces liberated an area the size of half of Wales, recapturing more than 300 settlements and pushing the enemy back to a new defensive line about 10 miles east of Izium, which was key to the Kremlin’s plan to seize Donbass. His loss means there is now little prospect of that happening anytime soon, if ever. As the Russians retreat, however, the price civilians are paying becomes clearer. Russian soldiers rounded up and executed hundreds of civilians in February and March in Bukha and other satellite towns in the Kiev region. The last mass grave at Izium suggests that this was not an anomaly. Instead, it’s part of a wild pattern seen in every area Moscow occupies. Ukrainian officials say they found at least 10 torture chambers in other recently liberated towns, including Vovchansk, right on the border with Russia, Kupiansk and Balakliia. “The Russians wore masks and tortured civilians with bare electric wires,” said Andriy Nebitov, head of the main directorate of the national police in the Kyiv region. The Kremlin claims its forces are “rebuilding” and has responded to military setbacks by ordering attacks on vital civilian infrastructure. Last week, Russian warplanes fired missiles at a dam and reservoir in Kryvyi Rih, the hometown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, causing widespread flooding. They also target Kharkiv’s power station, plunging the city into darkness. Most of Izium has been destroyed. The main avenue is full of broken apartment buildings and walls sealed with bullets. The administration building is an eerie sandbagged ruin. A bomb tore a piece off the dome of a church. The town’s road bridge has been destroyed, with residents getting around on bicycles. But life is already returning. Locals line up for aid packages, delivered in the central square once used for celebrations. Women’s shopping trolley next to a mural of John Lennon. The town’s brewery remains closed, but a cafe reopened on Saturday. “You look at all this and you think we have no future,” Maximoff said. “But I think we do. We can rebuild.”
