Ukraine is living a nightmare
This story by Danny Gold in Vanity Fair is absolutely terrifying. Imagine yourself in this situation. In 2022. In a city where you just go about our business, uninvolved in politics beyond reading a newspaper once in a while.
Anyone who makes excuses for this or says it’s all propaganda has something wrong with them. These stories are real, told by legit journalists who are relaying the truth back to us.
This is just the beginning of the nightmare odyssey of one woman:
When the Russian soldier placed the bag over Olena’s head and started to tape it around her neck, her training as a doctor told her she only had 40 seconds before she would start to lose consciousness as asphyxiation set in. All she could think to do was start counting the seconds. Her son, sitting next to her, whispered that he was running out of air. She counted to 10. Her husband, Oleh, was locked in a nearby walk-in refrigerator, bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds. She counted to 15.
Russian soldiers had snatched the family that morning as they went block to block through Hostomel, a suburb of Kyiv, 24 days after the war began. “For me, I thought, This is the end,” Olena said. When her count reached 20, a soldier started cutting tiny slits in the bag, and she was able to regain her breath. But that was just the beginning. What followed were nearly two days of detention and interrogations, separated from her family. Olena would only be released so she could return to her home and keep treating patients.
While Russia occupied this city for 35 days, on its failed warpath to Kyiv, Olena ran a one-woman clinic treating all manner of her war-wounded neighbors—gunshots and shrapnel wounds, contusions and concussions from explosions, and sick children—under constant gunfire and shelling. That morning of March 20 would prove a horrific turning point for Olena and her family. It would be weeks before she would see her husband again, as he was taken first to a filtration camp in Belarus and then held in a Russian prison for weeks before being freed during a prisoner exchange. Her son, last seen in the filtration camp, is still missing.
Hostomel is a small city north of Kyiv, the kind of place where city dwellers keep summer homes. It forms a trio of satellite suburbs along with Bucha and Irpin, places now synonymous with an array of war crimes perpetrated by Russia on Ukrainian civilians, from executions to torture. Their names will go down in history with the likes of Srebrenica and Babi Yar.
Today, Hostomel’s buildings still lay destroyed, with the occasional burned-out tank tucked away in an alley. But the roads have been cleared, the demining teams have worked through the area, and the bodies have been removed. Spring is in full bloom. The dog walkers and bicycle riders have returned.
It’s almost impossible to imagine that for five weeks, this same city was hell on earth, that war came here in the most needlessly cruel fashion, that the people here were terrorized in ways those lucky enough to survive will be left processing for the rest of their lives. Many are still asking how this could happen. And why. How could their perfectly normal lives be upended in such a brutal way, so quickly, from one day to the next? But for Olena and Oleh, only one question haunts every minute of every day: What has happened to their son?
When the bombing and occupations started in her town there was no civil authority doing anything so, as a doctor, she started treating the wounded and organizing food drives. It got worse and worse day after day. Russian soldiers started coming to their doors and rousting them out under threat of death.
On the morning of March 20, Olena was in the backyard cooking food over the woodfire stove when she heard screaming coming from the front yard. She ran through the house to the front porch and saw Oleh lying on the ground. He had been shot in the hip and knee. There were 15 fully armed soldiers. One held a gun to his head, screaming, “Traitor! Traitor!”
Dima, who had been in the house, ran to the front yard and dropped to his knees, begging the men not to kill his father. “Dima, my son, was hysterical,” Oleh said.
Oleh yelled for Olena, hoping her arrival would distract the soldiers and calm tensions. Russian soldiers had visited their house a couple of times before, but never like this. “I was not afraid for my life, I was not scared that they would kill me, but I understood that we need to calm everybody down somehow,” said Oleh.
Olena came out of the house with her hands up. She told the soldiers that she was a doctor, that they had no weapons. The soldiers ran into the house and started searching, demanding to know where the phones and weapons were hidden. They found some of Oleh’s medals and awards from his time as a police officer. They yelled again that he was a traitor. Then they took Olena, Oleh, and Dima as prisoners, bringing them to the ad hoc Russian base at the Hostomel airport. Each of them was interrogated by whom they believe to have been intelligence officers, their answers filmed. Oleh was accused of communicating with Ukrainian artillery forces, alerting them to Russian positions.
Olena and Dima were led through a different hallway. That is when the plastic bags were taped over their heads.
“I thought that Olena was with me all the time, but they took her somewhere separately,” Oleh said. “Olena has her story, and Dima and I have separate stories. And all this time, all the days when I was taken away, I thought that she was taken with me and she was somewhere nearby, in the cell near me,” he said.
Olena spent two days being questioned by Russian forces—who was her husband communicating with? How many other doctors were there in Hostomel? She told them she was the only one. What would happen, they asked, if she were no longer there? She said that her patients would likely die.
The Russians decided to test her, getting a military doctor to show her medications and ask her about each one. She passed, and the next day was loaded into a military vehicle and dropped off near the local administration building. The soldiers told her that if she didn’t leave her house, her husband and son would also be released.
Meanwhile, Oleh was still in the ad hoc cell, ignorant to the whereabouts of his son and wife. At 9 p.m. the day he was taken, military doctors placed a hood over his head, led him down a hallway, and laid him down on the floor. It was so dark that they had to use flashlights to examine his wounds. They gave him painkillers, and then asked him to look up and pray. Then they removed the bullets and sterilized and bandaged his wounds, telling him they would stitch him up the following day.
There were a number of other walk-in refrigerators being used as cells in the area, and the men in his cell were able to communicate with those being held next door. He received word that his son was there, and the men told him not to worry, that they would take care of him. “I felt much worse after that because I thought they would let him go,” he said.
Instead, Oleh and other captives were marched, blindfolded with their hands bound behind their backs, into military transport trucks, and delivered to a base in Naroulia, Belarus, which the Russian military was using as a filtration camp to interrogate and divide its prisoners. Once the blindfolds were removed, Oleh was able to see that his son was among the prisoners and felt a wave of relief, but it would not last.
The next day the separations began—Oleh was called to join 13 other men on a large Ilyushin-76 transport plane; Dima was not. He had a brief chance to say goodbye—worried about Dima’s state of mind, he checked to make sure his son remembered his name, address, and phone number—and asked some of the other prisoners to look out for him.
Oleh was blindfolded and bound on his flight, kicked and beaten by Russian soldiers. It was only days later, when he happened upon a library book in his cell, that he realized they had been brought to a prison in the Russian city of Kursk.
Oleh spent the next four weeks there, never going outside. Prisoners were treated awfully. The beatings were so severe that one prisoner later died in the cell. Oleh’s bullet wounds soon grew infected, his leg ballooning to three times its normal size and his temperature reaching nearly 106. Oleh took to urinating on his wounds in the hopes of sterilizing them. When he could no longer stand up at the morning check-ins, they finally took him to receive some treatment, including multiple shots of antibiotics.
He was summoned twice for questioning by Russia’s Federal Security Service and Investigative Committee. They asked if he was a member of far-right Ukrainian organizations, if he was a Nazi, if he knew details of Ukraine’s air defense systems, and if he was in contact with Ukrainian intelligence and the military. Eventually, they realized he was old and not in contact, and mostly left him alone, focusing their ire instead on the Ukrainian soldiers detained alongside him. “They were very cruel to them,” said Oleh.
Read the whole thing if you can. It’s so harrowing it will take your breath away. And it’s just one story out of tens of thousands.
I can’t help but think about the 57 House Republicans and 11 Senate Republicans who voted against aid for Ukraine this week. Do you think they would have balked at some tax cuts for their rich friends? No, I don’t either. They are nihilists and I truly think that considering their history, they are now affirmatively pro-Russia. Sadistic white nationalists gotta stick together, I guess.