In Ukraine, there is no option but to feel South African shame at our war stance

At 5.48am, my first night’s sleep in Kyiv is punctured by the eerie wail of the air raid alarm, accompanied by a robotic voice over the hotel intercom instructing us to proceed to the hotel’s bomb shelter.

Our Ukrainian handler, Yulia, tells us it indicates an incoming drone strike and suggests that we get dressed.

“No rush,” she writes on WhatsApp. “You have about 7 min in case it reaches central part [of Kyiv].”

These statements - “no rush” and “you have about 7 min” - are decidedly contradictory in my view, but then again I have not been living under this threat for more than three years, as has been the experience of Yulia and all other Ukrainians.  

During that period, many have developed a kind of defiant indifference to the alarms. Some now even sleep through them. 

“If you spend your whole life hiding, you will not live,” Yulia tells us later.

Read more: Inside Ukraine: How to instantly kill a would-be war correspondent’s appetite

At the foot of our hulking Soviet-era hotel lies the fabled Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square, the stage for revolutionary activities for centuries. In the warren of shops below it, you can buy rolls of toilet paper printed with the face of Vladimir Putin.

Independence Square is now home to a sea of planted flags. Each one represents a life lost since the beginning of what Ukrainians call “the full-scale invasion” - to make the point that the origins of this war date back eight years earlier, to the annexation of Crimea in 2014 - by Russian soldiers in February 2022.

Amid the flags is a sculpture that reads: I love Ukraine.

On the side, someone has scrawled in Ukrainian: “Is it worth living?”  

***

Ivan Polhui lived the quietest possible life in Yahidne, a forested village about two hours outside of Kyiv, where he worked as a janitor at the small local school.

Yahidne was home to 200 houses and about 300 inhabitants on 5 March 2022, when the Russians arrived.

Its residents, Polhui told us through an interpreter this week, “were so apolitical that they didn’t even know what was going on in their own village”.

But they had heard, of course, that the Russians had invaded and were trying to seize Kyiv.

Nobody in their right minds thought the Russians would bother themselves with this rural backwater. In fact, some Kyiv residents with family back home in Yahidne moved back there after the invasion, on the grounds that it was hard to imagine a safer place.

Then the Russian soldiers arrived - and for reasons known only to them, decided that Yahidne would make a perfect base. 

At gunpoint, they rounded up the village’s 300 residents, took their phones from them and herded them into the school’s basement. There was no light, says Polhui. There, in the dark, the people of Yahidne, including at least 60 children, would be held captive by Russian soldiers with almost no food or drink for 27 days.

What happened in Yahidne is now considered one of the worst war crimes of the Russian invasion.

The youngest villager was a month-and-a-half-old baby. The oldest was 93. 

The villagers were split between three underground rooms, normally used for storage. In one of the rooms, in which 19 adults and nine children were kept captive, space was so tight that there was room only to stand.

Visiting that room now, in spring, it is still cold and damp. But Polhui says that in March 2022, when the weather outside would have been significantly colder, the heat in that room coming off so many bodies cramped together was so intense that people had to strip off their clothes. He points to a makeshift clothes line.

Polhui was kept in the main basement room with his family. When they begged the Russians for food, they were given pasta contaminated with petrol. At one stage, he says, the village kids came across some old discarded bread, crusted with mould, and were so hungry that they tried to swallow it down without chewing.

The Russian soldiers laughed at the spectacle of the ravenous kids and recorded videos on their phones, Polhui claims.   

The bodies of the elderly began to give out. At least 16 villagers would die in total.

Through the interpreter, Polhui describes how the Russians would not always permit the dead bodies to be removed from the basement immediately.

“Sometimes, the dead body would stay here with people for days. And after that, even when they were allowed to take the body out, there was no place … so they would have to carry the body over the heads of the people,” says the interpreter. Briefly overwhelmed with emotion, she turns away.

Today, a list of the dead scrawled on the basement wall is still visible.

Polhui shows us a newspaper. It appears to be the well-known Russian publication Pravda and on its front page is a picture of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky hugging a Russian soldier.

The Russians gave the villagers this newspaper and claimed that Zelensky had surrendered. Ukraine was Russia’s. 

The newspaper was fake, a mock-up. And though the villagers might have been politically naive, they didn’t believe the news of Ukrainian surrender - mainly because they could still hear the muffled sounds of shelling through the forest. 

Yet still, says Polhui today, “We thought there was no hope.”

When the Russian soldiers eventually withdrew from Yahidne, villagers finally exiting their basement prison grew dizzy from the sunlight, with some fainting.

Others could not leave the basement. They had nowhere else to go. The Russian soldiers had looted the village down to women’s underwear on their way out, with many houses burnt to the ground.

Asked how he feels about the Russian soldiers today, Polhui speaks at length in Ukrainian.

The interpreter pauses, and then responds: “He would like the families of the Russians to go through the same thing [that the villagers of Yahidne did] and for their children to suffer as [Yahidne children] have.”

Read more: War in Ukraine

***

The Ukrainian victims of this war are some of the most frustrating interviewees I have ever encountered.

We journalists, vultures of tragedy, prod and pry: But how did you feel?

We ask this to a man in Irpin who was in his flat when it was bombed; to a 23-year-old who looks no older than 16, whose father died in the Bucha massacre; to the villagers of Moshchun who dug trenches and made Molotov cocktails to defend a battle in which 118 Ukrainian lives would be lost; and to a young woman with a thick blonde plait who was captured at Mariupol, kept in a Russian prison for a year, and had her teeth punched out when she made a sarcastic joke to her Russian captors.

How did you feel?

Their stoicism, their refusal to express self-pity, or simply the emotional armour they have been wearing since February 2022, shames our attempt to harvest their trauma. They will not emote on cue.

At a dinner with Ukrainian journalists, they ask, with real intensity, whether our home countries understand what is happening here. That there is no “grey area”; that this is a black-and-white moral catastrophe; oppressor and victim.

I think of the fact that South Africa’s Defence Minister Angie Motshekga was one of the foreign politicians who dutifully jetted out to sit on Putin’s diplomatic platform in Moscow and applaud Russia’s Victory Day parade, just a few days earlier, and I wonder how the hell we will explain this. To these Ukrainian journalists, but mainly: to history. DM

Rebecca Davis is in Ukraine at the invitation of Internews Ukraine and the International Renaissance Foundation.