The names of the dead are etched on the detached wall of an underground school, where residents say more than 300 people were trapped for weeks by Russian occupiers in Yakhide, a village north of the Ukrainian capital Kiev.
Halyna Tolochina, a village council member, struggled to compose herself as she passed the list, written in black on plaster on either side of a green door, in the dark barrel where she said she was confined to hundreds of others.
To the left of the door were engraved the seven names of the people killed by Russian soldiers.  On the right were the 10 names of people who died due to the harsh conditions in the basement, he said.
“This old man died first,” Tolochina said, pointing to Muzyka D.’s name for Dmytro Muzyka, who died on March 9.  “He died in the big room, in this.”
He said Muzyka’s body was in a boiler room for a few days until, during a bombing break, some people were allowed to carry the dead to be buried in hastily dug graves in the village cemetery.
Reuters spoke to seven Yahweh residents who said a total of at least 20 people had been killed or killed during the Russian occupation.  No official death toll has been released by Ukrainian authorities.
Reuters was unable to independently verify the villagers’ accounts.  Journalists saw a freshly dug grave in a field near the village and two corpses wrapped in white plastic sheets.
The Kremlin has not responded to requests for comment on the events in Yahweh.
Narratives of what happened in the village add to the growing testimony from Ukrainian civilians of the suffering in the cities around Kyiv during the weeks of occupation by Russian forces after the invasion that began on 24 February.
The last victim recorded in the basement walls, Nadiya Budchenko, died on March 28, Tolochina said, two days before Russian troops withdrew from the village when they stopped on their way to the Ukrainian capital.
In addition to those mostly elderly people who died of exhaustion in the suffocating, cramped conditions, Tolokhina named others who she said were killed by Russian soldiers, including Viktor Shevchenko and his brother Anatoly, known as Tolia.
“He was buried in the yard,” he said, pointing to the name Shevchenko V. “And he, they said, is there (buried in the village), somewhere,” he said, pointing to the name Shevchenko T. whose body was not retrieved.
Reuters interviewed six other residents, who confirmed Tolochina’s account and described being held in the basement’s bare concrete rooms, with about 60 children, little food or water, no electricity and no toilets.
Ukrainian authorities have accused Russia of committing war crimes following the discovery of mass graves in cities around Kyiv, such as Bucha and Motyzhyn, and the discovery of corpses with their hands tied and shot in the head.
Russia has denied allegations of extrajudicial killings, torture and ill-treatment of civilians.
The Kremlin has said its forces are not targeting civilians and has accused Ukrainian authorities and the West of fabricating evidence.


RELEASE 
Two of the villagers interviewed by Reuters said that at first some Russian soldiers, who arrived in early March, behaved well, offered to share their share and expressed surprise at the village’s prosperous appearance.  But others immediately began looting.
“They started looting, they took everything they could grab,” said Peter Hleston, 71, who saw the scene.  “There was a light torch, a tablet computer that my son brought from Poland. They got it all.”
On March 5, villagers said they were ordered to enter the basement of the school where they were to spend the next 25 days, with only short breaks to relieve or stretch their legs.
The Russian soldiers told them the restriction was for their own protection, the villagers said.
They described that they shared buckets for a toilet and slept alternately in small, full rooms as there was not enough space for everyone to lie down.
“It was almost impossible for me to breathe,” said Olha Meniaylo, an agronomist who said she was in the basement with her 32-year-old son, his wife and their children – a 4-month-old boy and an 11-year-old girl.
She said the Russian soldiers asked for a list of people in the basement to organize food, and she had calculated 360. Two other villagers said there were more than 300 people.
“For the elderly, it was difficult to stay there in the dark without fresh air, so it was mostly the elderly who died.”
He said the first burial – a man killed by soldiers and four elderly people who died in the basement – took place on March 12.  Russian soldiers allowed some young people to dig shallow graves.
“As soon as they started digging, bombing followed,” Menialo said.  “The people who did the digging had to lie on the corpses in the graves to protect themselves from the bombing. My husband was there.”
A woman who had a cow was escorted one morning to get some milk for the children.  Others were occasionally expelled according to the whims of Russian soldiers.  When they returned to their homes, the villagers found that they had taken everything from televisions to women’s underwear.


BODIES BREED 
As soon as the Russians began their withdrawal on March 30, those trapped in the basement finally got out, said Tamara Klymchuk, 64.
“We opened the door. We came out as if we had been reborn.”
Yahidne, a small rural village with only five streets, was a popular place for locals from nearby Chernihiv to make a holiday vacation.  It is now a dilapidated ruin of burnt houses scattered with discarded military equipment.
An abandoned tank stands hidden opposite the school.  Ukrainian military, police and explosives disposal technicians sift through the wreckage, exhume corpses and retrieve unexploded ordnance.
“We had a very good life,” said Klimtsuk, whose son-in-law was 50-year-old Viktor Shevchenko, one of two brothers whom villagers say were killed by Russian soldiers.  “We never thought we would be so sad.”
Victor, he said, was shot on March 3.  He had stayed behind to guard his house after sending his wife and two children to the school basement.
Russian soldiers had told villagers that Victor was wearing a military uniform and was armed with a shotgun.
Klimtsuk did not see the murder herself, but said she saw Victor’s body after swordsmen removed his body from a mass grave at her request when the city was recaptured by Ukrainian forces.  He was wearing blue jeans and a black jacket, he said.
“They just shot him in the head.”
(Report by James Mackenzie on Yahidne, Silvia Aloisi in Lviv, Additional Report by Vira Labych and Maria Starkova in Lviv; edited by Daniel Flynn) 
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