“The Russians had made the school their local command post”, explains Pavlo Ulesco, 62, while showing the premises to AFP. Trenches had been dug along a building, and huge holes dug to conceal armor.
The Moscow troops were therefore solidly entrenched when the Ukrainian soldiers came to retake Krestchenivka. This explains the damage inflicted on the school complex when they arrived there on Sunday.
50 meters from the gymnasium, a small elementary school has lost part of its walls, reduced to a pile of bricks. “At first, they were bombing the Russians from a distance,” says Ulesco. “The street fight lasted two or three days.”
This is also the estimate made by Vassil Khomitch, 65, who claims to have returned from “hell”.
“The last days, ours were targeting (the Russians) from the East and the West,” said this one-eyed man. “It exploded so much. The sky lit up like lightning,” sometimes it “turned red” and “the ground shook.”
His friend Maria Jeleznyak, 62, who walks very difficult and whose arm is visibly inert, recounts extremely tense moments on October 2, the day Krestchenivka was liberated.
– ‘Our dear soldiers’ –
Around 7:15 a.m., “our dear soldiers arrived”, and from 9:00 a.m., “the massacre began.” The Ukrainians “were shelling, shooting. It was horrific.” “We heard cars, tanks, trucks driving like crazy.” “But we survived.”
When she saw the “yellow stripes”, a sign of recognition worn by kyiv troops on their uniforms, “we cried so much, we kissed everyone”, she recalls, in tears.
Despite the intensity of the fighting, the two sexagenarians nevertheless claim to have seen no Russian corpse in Krestchenivka. Six days after this defeat of the Moscow troops, nothing or almost nothing remains of their presence, except for the destruction they have sown.
Wherever it wins in the South, and more particularly in the Kherson region, where kyiv claimed on Thursday to have taken back 400 km2 of territory from the “occupiers” in less than a week, the Ukrainian army is working to erase the faster any trace of their passage.
In Krestchenivka, AFP saw only two burnt Russian armored vehicles inside the school grounds. But they shouldn’t stay there long. Near the entrance to the village, another Russian tank had recently been taken away, according to resident Pavlo Ulesco.
On the main road leading to Krestchenivka, several destroyed armored vehicles, which AFP had seen on Friday morning, had already been towed in the afternoon.
Near a large sculpture in the shape of a watermelon, one of the emblems of the Kherson region, a major producer of this fruit, the Russian corpses visible a few days earlier on social networks had also disappeared.
– ‘They escaped’ –
While kyiv regularly promises enemy soldiers to return home “in body bags”, the Ukrainian army, which had invited AFP, as well as two other international media, to visit the “liberated” territories of the South, did not wish surprisingly not show the damage inflicted on the Russian forces.
It is also forbidden to speak to the soldiers or to film them.
Far from these considerations, the inhabitants of Krestchenivka, as well as those of Ukraïnka, Biliaïvka and Chevtchenkivka, three villages largely spared by the fighting, were only praise for their hero… and mockery towards the Russians, who according to them left in on the sly after having them “locked up” for seven months at home, without however torturing them, they say.
“When the battle started in Krestchenivka, they all left on foot or on bicycles (…). And half an hour later, a (Ukrainian) helicopter shot at them”, killing them all, narrates Galina Dejtyouk , 55, a resident of the neighboring village of Shevchenkivka.
Since the Ukrainians took control, “I feel like I have changed my skin,” she rejoices.
In Bilyaïvka, as in all the rural south occupied by Moscow, the internet has been cut off and the telephone works very badly. No one therefore expected the Ukrainian liberators, nor the Russian debacle.
“We didn’t even see how they left, but we were so happy,” said Irina Chatchovska, 41.
Her husband Leonid Tereshchenko, 63, who spent five days detained by the Russians, the time, according to him, that they check that he was not “Nazi”, or pro-Ukrainian, is formal: in Blyaïvka, “There was no fighting. They fled.”
