The Ukrainian president on Monday wanted Vladimir Putin to be locked up in a cellar without a toilet, after visiting a Ukrainian village liberated a year ago, of which almost the entire population had been sequestered in a cellar by the Russian occupiers.
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Eleven people died in this basement of a school of less than 200m2 where around 367 of the approximately 400 inhabitants of Yagidné, in northern Ukraine, had been locked up for 27 days in March 2022, according to the head of the State Volodymyr Zelensky.
“All these people were living in total darkness, waiting for the Ukrainians to return. They wrote [sur les murs] the names of those who died and the dates so as not to forget them. And the children marked the words of the Ukrainian anthem,” he said during a ceremony in their homage, accompanied by German Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck.
“After seeing this, I wish the Russian president would spend the rest of his life in a cellar with a bucket instead of a toilet,” hammered Mr. Zelensky in this village in the Cherniguiv region.
After failing to conquer Kyiv, the Russian army retreated from northern Ukraine in late March 2022, about a month after the invasion began.
In the towns and villages it had occupied, accusations, often documented, of summary executions, torture, rape and theft multiplied. The Kremlin, as always in this kind of case, denied everything.
Valéri Polguï, a 38-year-old resident of Yaguidné who was locked up in the basement of the school there, recounts the terrible conditions of detention.
“At first it was cold, but then there were more and more people and there was not enough oxygen” in the basement, he said.
“Older people would pass out from lack of oxygen, go crazy, and then die,” he recalls.