A resident of the city of Trostyanets, Ukraine, April 1, 2022. (Tyler Hicks/The New York Times)
TROSTJANETS, Ukraine — The last three Russian soldiers in this Ukrainian city lie in the morgue, their uniforms bloodied and torn. The face of the first is frozen with pain. The second has his wooden pipe in his lap. The third is stuffed into his sleeping bag.
Those dead aren’t all that have been left behind in Trostyanets, a strategically located city in the north-east of the country where Russian troops fled a few days ago in the face of an orchestrated Ukrainian attack. A month-long Russian occupation reduced much of the city to rubble, a decimated landscape of mangled tank wrecks, downed trees, and shattered but resilient survivors.
There are also stories that are impossible to verify, that highlight the kind of hate left behind by an occupation and that share a common thread of brutality: children being held by knife point; an old woman forced to drink while her occupiers looked on and laughed; whispers of rape and forced disappearances; and an old man found toothless, beaten and defecated in a ditch.
Sign up for the New York Times morning newsletter
“Oh god, how I wanted to spit on her or hit her,” Yevdokiya Koneva, 57, said in a steely voice as she pushed her aging bicycle towards the city center on Friday.
Ukrainian forces are gaining ground as Russian forces withdraw from their positions north of the capital Kyiv after more than a month of war starting, while Ukrainian soldiers make advances here in the northeast. This area was to be little more than a speed bump for a sweeping military campaign that would quickly seize the country’s capital and leave the east in Russian hands.
Instead, a combination of logistical problems, low morale, and poor planning among Russian forces allowed an emboldened Ukrainian military to go on the offensive on multiple axes, crushing the occupying forces and splintering their front.
The Ukrainian victory at Trostyanets came on March 26 – what locals call “Liberation Day” – and is an example of how disadvantaged and smaller Ukrainian units launched successful counterattacks.
The story goes on
It also shows how the Russian military’s inability to achieve a quick victory – in which it would “liberate” a friendly populace – put its soldiers in a position they were completely unprepared for: an occupied city with an unwelcoming local populace to keep.
“We didn’t want this terrible ‘liberation,'” said Nina Ivanivna Panchenko, 64, who was walking in the rain after picking up a humanitarian aid package. “Just don’t ever let them come here again.”
Interviews with more than a dozen residents of Trostyanets, a modest town of about 19,000 located in a bowl of rolling hills about 20 miles from the Russian border, paint a stark picture of the struggle and fear during the Russian occupation. The relentless violence of both Ukrainian and Russian forces fighting to retake and hold the city raged for weeks, driving people into basements or anywhere they could find shelter.
Dazed residents walked through what was left of their town sorting the rubble on Friday as some power was restored for the first time in weeks. Viktor Panov, a railroad worker, helped clear the shrapnel-devastated station of duds, grenades, and other scattered explosives. Other men cannibalized destroyed Russian armored vehicles for parts or work machines.
“I can’t imagine how this war with tanks and missiles is possible,” said Olena Volkova, 57, the hospital’s chief physician and deputy chairwoman of the city council. “Against whom? The peaceful civilians?
“This is true barbarism,” she said.
The war began in Trostianets on February 24, the day the Russians launched their invasion of Ukraine. The city quickly became a thoroughfare for advancing Russian tank columns as they pushed further west, part of their northeastern offensive towards Kyiv. Thousands of armored vehicles rolled through, smashing freeway crash barriers and chewing up streets.
“When the Russians came in, our guys put up a good fight for the first two days as long as they had heavy guns,” said Panov, 37. “Once they ran out of those, they were left with rifles.”
Further west, the offensive on Kyiv soon met stiff Ukrainian resistance, which held the Russians short of the capital, meaning soldiers had to occupy Trostyanets rather than just move through them. About 800 soldiers fanned out and set up about a dozen checkpoints, dividing the city into a grid of isolated neighborhoods.
Local residents say they rarely attempted to navigate the Russian positions, although they described the occupying soldiers in the early days of the occupation as amiable enough and more confused than anything else.
“The first brigade of Russian forces that arrived was more or less tolerable,” Volkova said. “They said, ‘Okay, we’re going to help you.’ ”
That help, Volkova explained, consisted simply of allowing them to collect bodies from the streets. She added that around 20 people were killed during the occupation and the ensuing fighting – 10 suffered gunshot wounds.
On a few occasions, Russian troops opened “green corridors” to allow civilians to leave the city, although some people – mostly younger men of military age – were kidnapped at the time.
At the beginning of the occupation, the Trostyanets police officers took off their uniforms and mingled with the population. Those who were in Ukraine’s territorial defense, the equivalent of the National Guard, slipped into the city’s outskirts and worked as partisans – documenting Russian troop movements and reporting them to the Ukrainian military.
Others stayed in town, moving quietly to help residents when they could, even as Russian soldiers chased them. “We have been here throughout the occupation and have worked to the best of our ability,” said police chief Volodymyr Bogachyov, 53.
As the days and weeks passed, food became scarce and the goodwill of the soldiers faded too. The residents boiled snow for water and lived off what they stored in their small gardens. Without a proper logistics pipeline, Russian soldiers began looting the homes, businesses, and even the local chocolate factory. A butcher spray-painted “ALREADY looted” on his shop to keep soldiers from breaking in. On another store, another deterrent: “EVERYTHING IS TAKE, NOTHING REMAINS.”
In mid-March, the Russian soldiers were withdrawn from the city and replaced by Separatist fighters brought in from the south-east.
It was then, local residents said, that atrocities began to escalate.
“They were cheeky and angry,” Volkova said. “We couldn’t negotiate anything with them. They wouldn’t give us green corridors; They ransacked the homes, took the phones, kidnapped people – they took them away, mostly young men, and we still don’t know where those people are.”
As of Friday, the city’s police had received 15 reports of missing persons.
In the morgue, next to the three dead Russian soldiers, Volkova pointed to a body bag in the corner of the room. “This person was tortured to death,” she said. “His hands and legs are bound with duct tape, his teeth are missing and almost his entire face has disappeared. It is not known what they wanted from him.”
Outside the city, Ukraine’s 93rd Mechanized Brigade, a unit made up of seasoned veterans who had seen fighting in the country’s separatist regions for the past seven years, was slowly taking up position. Then, on March 23, they attacked with artillery fire.
The city’s hospital was shelled the next day. It’s not entirely clear who hit the building, but local residents accuse the Russians of shooting into the building. The hospital had been operational during the occupation and treated everyone, including Russian soldiers. During the shelling, only a doctor and a nurse worked there, who moved into the basement with patients.
“In the morning we walked with the last two women who were still in the maternity ward, one pregnant and one who had just given birth,” said Xenia Gritsayenko, 45, a midwife who returned to work on Friday to clean up the station. Tank shells had smashed through the walls, shredding baby posters and setting at least one room on fire. “It was the scream from the bottom of my heart.”
Russian forces fled on the night of the 25th. Their destroyed artillery position in the station square showed signs of undersupply and ad hoc troop. Fortifications included ammunition boxes loaded with sand and thick candy bar wrappers bundled into rolls and used in place of sandbags to support broken windows. Uniforms lay in sodden puddles. Russian delivery documents blew aimlessly in the wind.
A nearby monument commemorating the victory in World War II to retake the city, to which an aging Soviet tank is attached, was damaged but not destroyed. It had survived another fight.
On Friday afternoon, Bogachyov sorted through reports from townspeople who had worked with the former occupiers and tried to crack down on ongoing looting. Yet no one had trouble siphoning fuel from the abandoned Russian tanks that littered the streets.
“The information is like ‘This person spoke to the Russians or drank vodka’ and ‘This person showed them where the wanted person’s home is,'” he said.
“There is no information about collaborations like our citizens taking up arms with the occupiers or treating their own citizens with violence,” Bogachyov said, admitting that it is difficult to say whether he is dealing with Russian spies or just with to do with neighborly grudges.
The morning rain had cleared by the afternoon. The long queues around the humanitarian aid distribution points broke up. A garbage truck snaked past, laden to the brim with war debris and Russian army rations. A few people snapped selfies in front of the last recognizable Russian SPG.
Galyna Mitsaii, 65, an employee at the local seed and garden supply store near the train station, slowly restocked her shelves, pleased with how the day’s weather had turned out.
“We will sow; we will grow; we will live,” she said, crying.
© 2022 The New York Times Company