Yuri Kobzar21:35, 30.08.24

Even after seeing the truth, some Russians continue to deny the war crimes of the Russian army.

Russians who were unable to escape the Ukrainian offensive in the Kursk region and remained in Sudzha are now forced to rethink their attitude to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is what The Times writes in a report from the Russian border town.

The head of the Ukrainian military-civil administration, Sudzhi, told journalists that at the time of the establishment of Ukrainian control (August 10), about 600 people remained out of the 5,000-strong population in the town. Mostly elderly or immobile.

“Many people are in basements, cellars, hiding – they are not communicating. Perhaps people are still in some houses. They stayed here because there was no evacuation. This guy here,” the soldier said, pointing to a middle-aged man who was loading humanitarian aid onto his shoulder, “just showed up looking for food. He was in his basement for the last three weeks and just came out.”

Overall, Russians who suddenly found themselves “under occupation” are filled with a sense of shock and betrayal, as they had no idea that Russia’s war against Ukraine would change their lives so dramatically.

Thus, the Ukrainian invasion came as a shock to 42-year-old Andrey. He claims that he allegedly did not even know that there was a war going on in Ukraine, that it was going far beyond the Donbass, which Russian television constantly talks about.

“I didn’t think about the war at all. It was happening many kilometers away in another country. What did it have to do with us?” a Russian woman named Galina admitted to a British journalist.

Now the woman, along with her 17-year-old granddaughter Yuliana, is forced to spend the night in the basement of a boarding school, where other civilians are hiding.

Another manifestation of the new reality for Russians is the photographs of Ukrainian cities destroyed by Russians, which are plastered around the pedestal of the destroyed Lenin monument in the center of Sudzha.

“I don’t understand this war at all. Ukrainians have always been our brothers, we have believed in this all our lives. We have never felt hostility and this war is incomprehensible to us. We did not want this war, we want everything to be like before,” says a middle-aged woman named Elya, whom the journalist met when she was pulling a cart with humanitarian aid from the new Ukrainian authorities here.

Another feature of the Ukrainian “occupation”: a Ukrainian soldier shows residents of a Russian village a film on his laptop about the real face of the Russian “SVO” in Ukraine.

“Do you see this? This is what Ukraine looked like before the war. This is Irpen. This is Bucha. And this is what it looks like now,” says the soldier, commenting on the corresponding scenes on the screen.

However, the middle-aged woman, who is the head of the village, was skeptical about what she saw.

“I didn’t know Russian troops had reached Kyiv. There’s something like that in Belgorod too,” she insisted as images of destruction flickered on the screen.

The screen showed footage of investigators digging up a mass grave in Bucha, and footage of shot-up cars.

“Look, they just shot everyone point-blank, in Makarov, Irpen, and Bucha. These are columns of civilians who were trying to escape. They were shot, look how many cars there were, and they all had these signs saying “civilians”. They killed everyone in a row. You see, half of these people spoke Russian, and you were told that the Russian-speaking population was being oppressed here. And that was not true,” the soldier comments.

Nikolai Nikolaevich, 73, sat and watched silently until the film ended. “There is nothing around but negligence,” he said, shaking his head. “This happened to both Russia and Ukraine and brought them here. What was missing, what were we missing?”

He had been to Ukraine many times, he said, and still had great friends there. “It was only a two-hour drive to Kharkov,” he recalled. “I always felt great in Kharkov. But that was before the war.” He admitted that invading Ukraine had been a terrible idea. “I knew it would be a disaster, that there would be casualties on both sides,” he lamented. “It all depends on the leadership, the leader gives the orders. Putin, the leader. It all rots from the head.”

However, the aforementioned female head of the village continued to insist that the Russians had nothing to do with it.

“We don’t do politics here, we don’t even watch the news,” she said. The village had been experiencing power outages for more than a year. “I think the Ukrainians shelled the power plant,” she added.

At the same time, the woman does not hide the fact that she would like to see a speedy return to the Kremlin’s control.

“This will soon end, and we will return the Soviet Union. But what if Sudzha remained under Ukrainian rule? I will go to Russia,” she said.

(C)UNIAN 2024