The Russians, fleeing the Kharkiv front, once again left a grim portrait of their mentality. Some of them did their business where they ate and slept. In the village of Volokhiv Yar, they killed relatively few people, mainly just snatched phones, looted a bit, and shot over people’ heads to scare them. They occasionally brought a modest shipment of food, but not all residents received their rations - some were afraid to leave their homes. Now, when asked about the occupation, they mainly cry. „Will they come back? Please tell me if they will come back?”. The mentalities of the local population are totally broken. „We are living like the stone age - no electricity, no running water, no gas, no signal, some people are living in ruins,” - the women tell us. Most of the liberated villages in the Kharkiv region had been under occupation for more than 5 months; previously already poor, today they are turned to ruins, filthy, and neglected.

The cemetery in Izium, where the Russians anonymously buried the victims of their crimes, is already well known, but few people realise that the location where the bodies were buried was actually in… a military base. Russian soldiers lived in the air that was rotten from the decaying bodies for months. Even today - after the exhumation, in the chill of early autumn - one can still smell that horrific odour of rotten flesh; the temperature in July and August exceeded 30 degrees Celsius. How could they have lived like this, next door to the victims of their colleagues? For more on this, read Monday’s issue of the Weekly Sieci.

Yet a journey through eastern Kharkiv is a journey through another circle of hell. Destroyed bridges, massive rocket pits on the roads, people grim and devoid of the will to live, densely scattered, abandoned outposts of the Russian occupiers, and everyone you meet telling tales of crimes, crimes and yet more crimes.

What is striking about Russian bestiality is the form, the aesthetics, the lack of morality. The disgusting stench, the filth, the traces of torture and play, the traces of blood or corpses that nobody bothered to clean up. Stories of rape, of people being shot for fun, of people being kept in cellars. But in one village in eastern Ukraine, the content was particularly shocking.

Against the wall of the school which housed the military base, the occupier wrote on the wall: ‘We the Russians, God is with us’.

If this is what a world blessed by God looks like for Russians, what is their reality without Him?

Tłum. K.J.