Viktoria Kovalenko witnessed the deaths of her husband and older daughter when their car was hit by a shell in northern Ukraine. When her loved ones got a proper funeral, she was about 300 miles away and was only able to see the funeral on cellphone video sent to her by relatives.
Even in relatively peaceful Lviv, a city little touched by violence in the war with Russia, it was an ordeal she could not endure.
“Tears won’t let me watch to the end,” she said as she played the video in a wooded area pushing her 1-year-old daughter Varvara in a stroller.
In early March, Kovalenko and her family fled in their car from the city of Chernihiv, one of the most heavily besieged areas of the war.
A shell exploded at a Russian checkpoint near the village of Yahidne. The car’s windows shattered, she said, and she and her 12-year-old daughter Veronika were injured by the broken glass.
The next thing she remembers is her husband’s voice yelling at her to get out of the car.
“Veronika started screaming, her hands were shaking, so I tried to calm her down. She got out of the car and I followed her. As I got out, I saw them fall. When I looked her head was gone,” she told the BBC last week.
Mother from Ukraine: I saw my daughter get killed then she was held captive in the basement https://t.co/OAQzBJB9Yh
– BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) April 9, 2022
In these shocking moments, Viktoria’s husband also died.
Viktoria and her younger daughter Varvara escaped, only to be captured by Russian troops and taken to the basement of a school in Yahidne.
Locals said more than 300 villagers were forced into the basement. Then, during weeks of stress and deprivation, some began to die.
The BBC has visited the basement and spoken to other people being held there. Prisoners describe the bodies that went unclaimed for hours, sometimes days.
Kovalenko and Varvara spent weeks in the school’s basement, doing their best to stay alive.
Yahidne residents told The Associated Press that they had to stay in the basement day and night, except on the rare occasions when they were allowed to cook outside on an open fire or use the toilet.
Since the people in the basement died one by one, neighbors were allowed to bury the bodies in a mass grave in a nearby cemetery from time to time.
Kovalenko’s husband Petro and Veronika were first buried in the forest, but later reburied in Yahidne Cemetery, carried there in coffins up a bumpy path while friends and relatives wept and laid some flowers in the grave and shoveled handfuls of earth.
The reburials came after Russian troops left Yahidne in early April, as forces retreated to focus their fight on the eastern part of Ukraine.
Kovalenko’s burning memories are entangled in the twisted wreckage of her car.
And on a concrete block at a village checkpoint, someone has spray-painted a macabre joke: the words “polite people,” the term Russian authorities gave to the forces that annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.
The BBC asked Viktoria what she would say to the people who did this to her family.
“If I had the opportunity to shoot Putin, I would do it,” she said. “My hand didn’t want to tremble.”
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