By Mari Saito and Herbert Villarraga
LUBIANKA, Ukraine (Reuters) – Residents in Lubianka, a village northwest of Kyiv, are trying to rebuild their lives all while Ukrainian soldiers remove mines from a nearby forest where Russian troops had set up camp.
The village, which has less than 3,000 residents, was occupied as soon as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began.
Thousands of Russian soldiers occupied the pine forest, digging trenches and carving out positions from which, residents say, they shelled towns near Ukraine’s capital.
Residents gathered at the medical clinic in the village centre said it was dangerous for them to stray from their homes during the occupation. Russian soldiers ordered them all to stay inside, but even from basements residents could hear the sound of missiles flying above them.
“They were shooting, shelling…we were saved by the forest, if not for the forest we would be destroyed,” said 43-year-old Oleh Onopriienko, who listed off the names of devastated towns surrounding Kyiv such as Irpin and Hostomel.
Inside the forest, local members of the Territorial Defense Force and Ukraine’s military cleared the fields of mines and other unexplored ordnance.
On Wednesday morning, lines of trenches covered in tree branches and plastic sheets were visible. One trench, which a local Territorial Defense member said was used as a field hospital by Russian troops, still had bloodied canvas stretchers leaning against its entrance.
Electricity and gas services have not yet been restored in Lubianka.
Every day, residents queue outside the small medical clinic to charge their mobile phones using a noisy generator.
As soon as the invasion began, Viktor Shaposhnikov, 41, heard that Russian soldiers were looking for retired soldiers and police officers. Shaposhnikov, a veteran of Ukraine’s national police, fled at the beginning of March.
“No-one expected this, it was scary and we were afraid to go outside,” said Shaposhnikov, who described how residents tried but failed to get news about what was happening outside the village.
Russian soldiers took over his neighbour’s houses and looted all of their valuables when they began to retreat at the end of March, Shaposhnikov said.
Discarded ration packs littered the inside of one damaged summer house where Russian soldiers lived, with insults against Ukrainians spray painted on the wall. Next to one of the graffiti, someone had written an apology to local Ukrainians: “We did not want this…forgive us,” it read.
Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 in what President Vladimir Putin called a “special operation” to demilitarise and “denazify” its neighbour. Ukraine and its allies say this is a baseless pretext for war.
Shaposhnikov said Russian soldiers told residents that they had come to “liberate” them.
“To liberate us from what? We’re peaceful … we’re Ukrainians,” he said as his neighbours waited patiently for aid by the clinic.
“I feel proud to be Ukrainian,” he said.
(Reporting by Mari Saito and Herbert Villaraga, Editing by Angus MacSwan)
