In the village of Loukachivka, in the north of the country, the Horbonos family shared their daily life for three weeks with five Russian soldiers who had come to take refuge in their cellar. At the sound of shell explosions and artillery fire, they managed to establish a dialogue. The American magazine “The Atlantic” collected their testimonies.
When the Russian army began to shell Loukachivka, a village located in the north of Ukraine, dozens of inhabitants came to take refuge in the cellar of Horbonos, hidden under the peach trees and the vegetable garden of the family. Children, pregnant women, bedridden pensioners and the Horbonos themselves took shelter there, and they waited.
For ten days, they listened to the shells whistling and falling above them, several times an hour. The shots left huge craters in the garden, incinerated the Horbonos’ car and destroyed the roof of their house. Finally, on March 9, they heard the sound of heavy weapons and tanks entering the village: the Russians had taken Lukashivka.
“Here is our home”
The soldiers ordered the terrified inhabitants to come out, then they threw a grenade into the cellar, in case Ukrainian fighters were hiding there. The Horbonos – Iryna, 55, Serhiy, 59, and their 25-year-old son Mykyta – spent the following night in a neighbour’s basement, but it was so damp and cold that they were returned to theirs. When they arrived, they found five Russian soldiers who had settled there.
“And where are we going to live? asked Iryna. This is our home.” The soldiers told the Horbonos they could go home – they could all live there together. So the Horbonos came back.
They spent nearly three weeks with these five Russian soldiers, eating, walking, talking together. Russian soldiers gave them nonsensical statements about their mission, and asked them startlingly simple questions about Ukraine, all the while teaching them more about their motivation and morale. The Horbonos denied their claims, vehemently outraged them, but also drank with them, taking advantage of this relative confidence to seek to understand what these men thought of Vladimir Putin’s war.
A microcosm of propaganda warfare
Over these weeks, which the Horbonos have told us, my colleague Andriy Bachtoviy and myself, the Lukashivka cellar has become a microcosm of the propaganda war.
On one side were the Russians, repeating the litany of lies they had been told about their offensive; on the other, the Ukrainians, who wondered how their homeland could be so ravaged by aggressors driven by a fiction.
After meeting the Horbonos and, that same week, their nation’s leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky, I was struck by the fact that their experience answered precisely the question that haunts so many politicians, of journalists and activists in Ukraine and abroad who are desperately trying to end this war: how to convince Russians who have endured a relentless succession of lies not to support the invasion of Ukraine unleashed by Putin ?
At first, the Horbonos were too scared to talk to their Russian occupiers. The soldiers, on the other hand, never let go of their weapons. They only left the cellar when they were on duty, dreading, like their hosts, the artillery barrages above them, while the Ukrainian and Russian armies clashed for control of the surroundings of the nearby town of Chernihiv.
The ice is breaking
After several days, however, the two groups began to get to know each other better, at first touching on topics of discussion they deemed neutral, such as popular Ukrainian food and recipes.
The Horbonos family discovered that the five men were mechanics. One of them, the youngest of the group, aged 31, held the rank of captain. Three were in their forties – two had served in Syria. One of them had a burnt face from his vehicle hitting a mine on the road to Lukashivka, and he was treating his burns with balm while swearing.
All four came from Siberia. The fifth was a Tatar, also in his forties. He sang Tatar songs all the time, which infuriated the others, who further laughed at his apparent cowardice, as he was always the first to scurry into the basement when the artillery fire started.
In the early days, the captain rehashed fervently the Kremlin’s propaganda: he and his compatriots were in the Ukraine to save the Horbonos, he said; the soldiers were not fighting against Ukrainians, but against Americans; it was not a war, but rather a “special operation”. Once it was over, they could all live happily ever after under Putin, he said.
Iryna retaliated. She didn’t need to be saved, she retorted. There were no US bases or soldiers in Lukashivka or anywhere else in Ukraine. She did not want to live under Putin’s regime. When the captain told her that it had been explained to her that Ukrainians were not allowed to speak Russian, she replied that they could speak in any language they wanted.
“What good is this war?”
Little by little, the captain ended up lowering the flag,