Marta Hychko15:23, 09/08/24

Ukrainians clearly demonstrate the striking dissimilarity between their occupation and that of Moscow.

In the Russian Kursk region, Ukraine takes on a new role – the occupier. However, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are trying to demonstrate the striking difference between their occupation and that of Moscow, writes The Wall Street Journal.

The new role of the occupier

76-year-old Russian Maria Andreeva became one of those who evacuated to the territory of Ukraine after the Armed Forces occupied the territory of her settlement. She was brought to her sister in Sumy.

During the escape, the Russian occupiers were afraid of local “atrocities” that Ukrainians would commit. But Andreyeva’s daughters, who live in Norway, saw videos of their mother taking a humanitarian kit from Ukrainian soldiers. The daughters contacted the soldiers online and asked for help evacuating her to Ukraine. The soldiers did it.

The story of Andreyeva, who escaped to Ukraine with a packet of pills and a Russian passport, demonstrates how Ukraine is trying out a new role in this war – and that is the role of the occupier.

Kyiv captured more than 100 Russian cities and villages of the Kursk region in a month. Last week, President Volodymyr Zelenskyi told NBC News that Ukraine does not want to hold the territory forever, but said it would be a bargaining chip in any future talks to end the war.

Ukraine says it is making efforts to distance its occupation from Moscow’s well-documented campaign of theft, execution and torture of civilians and the deportation of thousands of children from occupied Ukraine. Zelenskyy appointed a military commandant for the area and declared that his forces comply with humanitarian law.

“It is very important for us not to be like those who brought us war, robbery and rape. This is because we behave like people,” Zelenskyy said at a press conference in Kyiv last week. 

Russian tactics have not changed

However, social networks are spreading fakes about “executions and torture” in the Kursk region. Russian officials and state television share reports of alleged Ukrainian war crimes without providing any evidence.

The only people entering the Ukrainian-occupied parts of Kursk are soldiers and a few journalists. Limited access makes it difficult to assess the situation there.

Ukrainian television broadcast reports from the occupied cities, where volunteers distribute food and water to several thousand people who remained. In Suja, signs warning the Ukrainian military about the presence of civilians were displayed near private houses, and letters with the names of Ukrainian military units and the words “Glory to Ukraine” were scratched on the walls.

On the pedestal of the statue of Lenin in the city square, which was removed by the Ukrainian troops, posters of the Ukrainian cities destroyed by Russia were attached in front of the eyes of the local residents, who for years lived under deep Russian censorship.

At the same time, the Russians are looting even their own. In the villages of the Kursk region on the Russian-controlled side of the front line, Russian soldiers are looting a phone shop and a warehouse.

“To all idiots who wear military uniforms and engage in looting: you are full of scum, and the only punishment for you is death,” wrote a popular blogger, advisor to the governor of the Kursk region, Roman Alyokhin, posting a video of looting by the occupiers.

Tens of thousands of people fled during Kyiv’s offensive, but there were no humanitarian corridors. Relatives of some residents turned to social networks with a request to help Russia and Ukraine evacuate their loved ones.

This week, the Defense Forces of Ukraine published a video in which residents of the occupied cities complain about the lack of water, electricity and cellular communication. Ukrainian troops tell them that Kyiv is ready to open a humanitarian corridor that will allow these people to leave for Russia, but Russia is not doing so.

The Kremlin and the Russian Defense Ministry did not respond to requests for comment. Asked about the situation in Kursk, Russian leader Vladimir Putin said Moscow should think first about the people affected by the fighting and said the Russian military was doing everything it could to push out the Ukrainian occupiers. He did not mention humanitarian corridors.

Ukraine launched a hotline last month for residents of Kursk who want safe passage to Ukraine, but it is unclear how many Russians it has evacuated. Ukrainian mass media reported on the case of an 89-year-old woman who was taken by the Ukrainian military to the neighboring Ukrainian city of Sumy. A Ukrainian military officer reported that another pregnant Russian woman was taken from the Russian village of Lebedivka to Sumy, where she gave birth to a child before returning home.

Rescue through video

For Andreeva, it all started with that viral video in which she took food and water from soldiers of the Armed Forces. A junior sergeant with the call sign “Perchyk” found her in the garden of a house in the border village of Sverdlykovo. The military filmed his brief conversation with Andreeva.

A woman, dressed in a worn apron, rubber boots and a colorful scarf, asks Perchyk for water in Ukrainian. After a few seconds, another soldier hands her several bottles of water.

“Tomorrow we’ll bring you a couple more packs of water and bring you various dishes,” Perchyk says, adding that his group will stop by her house for a quick look before continuing on their way.

The video has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times online. Ukrainians noted how Andreyeva and other residents of Kursk, who filmed the Ukrainian military, spoke in a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian, characteristic of some regions of Ukraine.

At that time, Andreeva’s daughters, Olena and Natalia, began to mourn the apparent murder of their mother. They lost contact with her after August 6, and then a relative who was evacuated deeper into Russia wrote to them that their mother was one of several villagers “executed by Ukrainian forces.”

After days of frustration, they came across the video. The women contacted the Telegram channel that posted it and were advised to make a video for their mother. “Perchyk” showed a clip of Maria during her next visit to Sverdlykovo.

“We didn’t sleep for two weeks,” Olena says in the video, while Natalia cries next to her. “You’re cut off. You’ve been abandoned. You’re in a gray area now. No matter what happens, you have to go.”

Andreyeva has always perceived the Russian-Ukrainian border, which passes just a few hundred meters from her house, as an artificial border. Like thousands of other local residents, she crossed it for decades.

“Once we were all friends, but now we are fighting because of some idiot,” Andreeva, who has dual citizenship of Russia and Ukraine, said in an interview.

Born in Sverdlykovo shortly after the Second World War, she moved to Sumy at the age of 20 and got married, started working at a factory, but every Friday she went with her daughters to her parents in Sverdlykovo. Ukraine and Russia were then republics of the Soviet Union, and there was no border.

“We spent our childhood running barefoot through the fields, which are now crossed by the state border. We did not know where Ukraine ends and where Russia begins,” Olena said in a telephone interview from Norway.

Andreeva returned to Sverdlykovo in 2004, more than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to care for her ailing father. After his death, she issued a Russian passport and began to look after the family farm in the village. When Ukrainian troops entered the Kursk region, she lived alone with domestic animals and ate products from her fields.

She didn’t want to go. For several days, Ukrainian soldiers warned her that her village could soon be destroyed by Russian troops who intend to dislodge them. On August 21, the woman entered Ukraine along the paths to the border, which she had known since childhood.

Andreyeva came to Sumy with loud sobs and met her sister Halyna, who lives in Ukraine. The woman worries about the farm and garden, fearing revenge if she returns to Russia.

“She is a woman of the earth. The village is her life. She does not understand that her village can disappear from the map,” Olena said.

(c)UNIAN 2024