The Russian army has been besieging the city of Izyum in the Kharkiv region, which is called the key to Donbass, for a month. Now raisins are almost wiped off the ground. While the fighting was going on, people were leaving the city – through minefields, swimming, tying children to a boat, on foot, write BBC correspondents Olesya Gerasimenko, Anastasia Lotaryova and Elizaveta Vocht.

“A plane, and we know it’s two bombs. If there was one, there will be another. After the first one, you fall, cover your head with your hands, wait and think – where, where will he drop it? Yes, during the first week of the war we learned to distinguish all these sounds – here the mortar hits, here “hail”. But the worst – it’s a plane. It’s an animal horror, everything inside is shaking, you can not move an arm or a leg, just waiting for the second bomb – and it will be. ”

Maria, 42, a resident of the city of Izyum in the Kharkiv region, is constantly bursting into tears.

(All heroes’ names have been changed at their request and for security reasons)

Amnesty International described the situation in the city as a humanitarian catastrophe. There is currently no water, electricity, gas or medicine in Izyum.

Mostly women, children and the elderly remained in the basements of the houses. Food is prepared in the yards by the fires. The hospital is closed. The remaining doctors go to the basements, where, among other things, give birth. Unexploded shells protrude in front of the houses. The city continues to be shelled.

Locals say that until April, it was difficult to find a street in Izyum where corpses were not lying. BBC interlocutors have not heard of the mass shootings and have not seen them themselves. Residents interviewed said most had died from shrapnel wounds.

Many were killed in the first weeks of the siege, when Ukrainian and Russian artillery fought for the crossing of the Seversky Donets River, which divides the city into two parts.

At first, they tried to bury people, in particular in the yards of houses, “like in Mariupol,” said one of the BBC’s interlocutors. Then the townspeople became afraid to go outside – and the dead began to rot.

Now you can’t leave the basements without a mask, says one of the people from Izyum, “the smell hits your nose.”

On the morning of February 24, Maria’s nephew called and said, “War.” They went to withdraw money (there were already queues at ATMs) – to buy medicine, food and look at the list of bomb shelters. The closest to them was a twenty-minute walk, and it seemed completely unsatisfied, “neither sit down nor lie down.”

At first, the family hoped that there would be no active hostilities in the city.

“Who needs us? We are a depressed city of pensioners and state employees, we are not Kharkiv or even Slavyansk,” says Maria, a schoolteacher. Mount Kremenets “. We realized that we are the key to Donbass.” (Raisins were on the front line twice for a long time during the Second World War. In 1943, heavy fighting took place around Kremenets – Soviet and German troops fought for supremacy. – Ed. ).

Less than 50,000 people lived in Izyum. From him to the border of the Donetsk region, the complete capture of which the Russian military called one of the goals of the “special operation” – only 20 kilometers.

Despite its modest size, Raisin is an important railway junction. The road connecting Kharkiv with Donbass passes through the city. That is why the town has become one of the key targets for the Russian military, military analysts explain to the BBC.

“Raisins lie on the route from Kharkiv to Slovyansk and Kramatorsk. Without control over it, it is impossible to capture and hold new territories for the so-called Luhansk and Donetsk people’s republics,” said Pavlo Luzin, a political scientist and international security expert.

“The first days were quiet – and we tried to withdraw money, shops were still open, there were queues,” says Maria. She and her family lived in the southern part of the city, far from the impending front line.

The war approached Izium on February 27. On Orlova Street, a five-minute walk from Maria’s house, a shell hit a five-story building. A bomb got stuck in the asphalt on Moskovskaya Street, it did not explode. The next day, two more bombs were dropped on the city, one of which hit a five-story building.

The bombing did not stop at night. Maria’s acquaintances died in a house on Ukrainska Street under the rubble. She persuaded her husband to leave – she said she could not hear the endless shelling and air raids, panicking and losing her mind.

“But my husband is like that – whatever happens. He didn’t want to leave his city, he didn’t want to and couldn’t leave his mother, he said we would hold out,” Maria cries.

She and her husband and his 84-year-old mother still lived in a five-story apartment. First, water and gas disappeared, food was cooked in a multicooker, and electricity was the last to disappear. “Then they gave water for literally one day, the man says, collect it faster – but how much and where will you collect it in the apartment?”

“From the second to the seventh they started bombing specifically,” says Maria, “they hit the bank building, the market – and the people went to smash and take everything out of the shops. There is no information, there is nothing. ”

Several Izyum residents told the BBC that they were trying to find city officials, came to the city administration building on March 3-4, or tried to call utilities – but no one was there. Maria says she has not seen Ukrainian police in the city at all.

Mayor Valery Marchenko told the BBC that the city authorities left Izyum only on March 14 on the instructions of the Kharkiv leadership. It is unclear why the citizens and the authorities could not find each other for ten days.

Marchenko tells the BBC a telephone conversation with a man who identified himself as a Russian officer. He threatened to “create a humanitarian catastrophe in Izyum” and destroy the city if the Supreme Court does not abandon its positions, and the mayor does not contribute to this.

The mayor replied that he was the head of the Ukrainian city, and Izyum would remain so.

On the same day, Ukrainian ombudswoman Lyudmyla Denysova wrote that the fighting for the city was still ongoing, there were no humanitarian corridors, and the city itself was “almost wiped out.”

On March 7, Maria and her husband tried to get to the school where she worked – to pick up an electric kettle and a heater. The school is located next to one of the three raisin bridges – pedestrian.

There she saw the Ukrainian military for the first time: they started shouting: “You’ve run away! Don’t go to the bridge, it’s mined!”

The shelling across the river began immediately – so Maria learned that “the Russians occupied the northern part of the city.”

“We ran home all wet with terror and realized we had to go to the basement.” They almost never left it.

Maria sighs: “[In Russia] they say on TV that we had the” Right Sector “here in Izyum. I have never seen a nationalist in my life, moreover – even in our basement there were people pro-Russian … They whispered that maybe they would capture us, and it would be over, at least we would get out of here … I just shouted in their faces that I didn’t understand how they could say that in this situation. ”

Another BBC interlocutor from Izyum tells how a team of collaborators – several deputies, former police officer and former mayor Oleksandr Bozhkov – walked through the basements where citizens were sitting. They said: “Don’t panic, they are shooting here only as long as there are nationalist groups in the city. In fact, the city is hostage to the Ukrainian army.”

Some listened to them, says the interlocutor of the BBC. According to him, the collaborators collected lists of people who were in the anti-terrorist operation zone, activists and businessmen who somehow helped the army or simply gave money to volunteer – to deliver food and medicine in areas where the war is going on.

After March 7, the Ukrainian military blew up bridges across the Seversky Donets River, which led to the northern part of the city occupied by Russian troops.

The Armed Forces have established themselves in the southern part of the city – in particular, on Mount Kremenets, where the memorial to those killed in World War II is located. Now this memorial is also destroyed.

Protracted fighting broke out on the river bank. To cross the Russian army had to build pontoons. On March 20, the Rosguard announced that it would reward forty soldiers for forcing the river on the outskirts of the city. On the same day, it became known about the death of the Deputy Chief of Engineering Troops of the Western Military District, Colonel Mykola Ovcharenko, who personally helped his subordinates to build the crossing. He is one of the highest-ranking officers in the Russian army killed in this war.

“Green corridors” from the southern part of the city opened in the second week of March, the mayor told the BBC. But few managed to get through them, locals say, due to constant mortar shelling by enemy aircraft and artillery.

The chances were dwindling.

Maria could no longer sleep, eat, lost orientation in space and time. On March 10, coming out of the basement to her porch, she heard the word “evacuation.”

“I was on the border. I realized that there is nothing. There is no communication, no connection. There is no power in the city. You do not know what is happening, you understand that something very bad will happen, it is very bad approaching you. You without water, in the basement … Every second you pull away from the explosions, from these planes that fly constantly and hit anywhere, not in the infrastructure, as they promised, but, indeed, in all living things. ”

She again asked her husband to leave. “And if before that he persuaded me not to go, he was even offended, then he looked at me and said – Masha, go, it will be better. We are not alone, we are with people, I will not leave my mother. Go, Masha!”

Maria and several other people got off at the bus stop. A military bus passed by, and Ukrainian soldiers shouted, “Wait, we’ll refuel and come.” We had to wait for their return for an hour, all this time under fire.

“You fall face down in the snow – and lie down. Then you get up, you look – where there are fires, there were several, we saw. Then you fall again, and so all the time!” she recalls.

Maria went to Slovyansk, from there to the west of Ukraine, then to Europe, to her daughter.

“I think every day, like mine, I blame myself for leaving,” she says. but you can only understand how a person feels under the bombings if you find yourself under them. ”

The last bus from the southern part of Izyum to Slovyansk left on March 14.

Early in the morning of March 10, 25-year-old Inessa woke up again from the sound of a military plane over her head and realized that she could not. Her children – seven-year-old Anya and three-year-old Mark – were asleep, their plane did not wake them up. It was much quieter in the village near Izyum than in the city from which they had left a few days before.

“And I couldn’t, I couldn’t do it at all,” she repeats into the phone. “It seemed to me that if I heard another plane, at least one more, I just …”

A river flows near Inessa’s parents’ house, where she decided to wait for the fighting. That morning she went to a neighbor’s boat – Uncle Vanya was fishing, had an inflatable boat and a motor, but there was nothing to refuel it, gasoline in the area ran out a week earlier.

The neighbor, not listening to the request, went to the barn. He himself was not going to go anywhere, telling Inessa that he had lived here for sixty years and would lie down here.

Inessa persuaded him to go with her to the Dnieper, to his daughter, but Uncle Vanya said that he was not going to discuss it.

They gathered the children together. Inessa wrote the name, surname and two telephone numbers on separate sheets, one Russian – for her friend from Rostov, one Ukrainian – for her sister from the Dnieper, wrapped them in plastic bags, scotch tape on top and hung on a cross thread.

Mark did not immediately agree, the package scratched his skin, and the boy tried to remove it. They tied the children with a rope to a bench inside the boat. Inessa tried again to persuade Uncle Vanya to swim with them, but he just said goodbye and pushed the boat away.

“It was very cold, very cold,” Inessa repeats. The clothes got wet at once, Mark cried and spun. There were several villages on the shores, but they saw few people. Several times someone shouted from the shore, Inessa always bent the children to the bottom of the boat and bent herself.

One day people in camouflage shouted and fired from a machine gun. “It seemed so to me,” she corrects herself at once. “I lay there and saw nothing. But in the movies the sound is just like that.”

Most of all, Inessa recalls, she was afraid to fall asleep – she kept repeating songs about herself that came to mind. When it seemed to her that she was about to faint, she was able to moor near the next village.

She carried Mark in her arms to the nearest house, Anya followed, but Inessa did not see her, she did not have the strength to turn around.

When the owner opened the door for them, Inessa asked, “Are you under ours or under them?” The owner, seeing the children, said to come. The village to which Inessa sailed with her children was not yet occupied, and there was even a shuttle bus on the nearest route to the Dnieper.

Inessa and her children and sister left for Europe. She asks not to name the village from which she left by boat, and the other, where she sailed – for the safety of those who helped her.

Every day Inessa calls Uncle Vanya. His phone is not available every day.

Sergei, a 60-year-old businessman, and Igor, a 54-year-old shop owner, say Russian troops arrived on March 6 and stopped in the Izyum suburb of Goncharivka, near a high-voltage line and forest on Victory Street.

“And they started watering the city with artillery fire. In response, they started beating the Armed Forces, and all this flew at our homes,” Serhiy and Ihor say.

“They went so far as to set up a ridge ten meters from my house and aimed the nozzles directly at the windows. And they tried to fire.”

Igor remembers how he left the house and “stood on his knees for almost an hour in front of these orcs, begging not to shoot.” “Well, because the answer will come as soon as they start firing,” he explains.

Serhiy and Igor and their neighbors were hiding in basements when the military began to “clean up the local area.” One grenade ignited a fire, people jumped out into the street.

“They killed my dog,” says Igor.

Sergei says he has personally seen shops in the northern part of Izium broken into by Russian soldiers. First one, then another – and then the mass looting began: “After all, they are watching – oh, you can! Their commanders are not punished for it.”

Several other BBC interlocutors confirmed that they had personally seen Russian soldiers search and loot houses and shops.

In a few days of shelling – “they wandered around the city without stopping” – the military from Russia went forward, to lead the crossings, and fighters of the self-proclaimed “LPR” and “DPR” came to the city. There is nothing left of Serhiy’s shop due to constant shelling.

“They stole everything. They looted my house. They broke down the door with an ax, took away elite alcohol from the house, shit in all the rooms, and then cleaned up,” recalls one of the Izyum residents.

According to Igor, those mobilized from the Luhansk People’s Republic and the Democratic People’s Republic of Belarus looted warehouses and shops:

“It got to the point that the windows were taken out of the houses. And the batteries were removed from the walls.”

Other residents also say that the LNR and DNR battalions are behaving “recklessly and aggressively”, looting houses while the owners kneel on the street under the barrel of a pistol. Soldiers justify their behavior by telling how they got to Izyum: they were taken from bus stops or from the queue at the store, thrown into a bus and sent to war.

Recently, the military from the “DPR” went into one of the yards, where people were cooking porridge on the fire, and began firing from machine guns at garage locks. The bullets ricocheted, “miraculously did not hit people.”

“They send everything to their females to their females. They are beggars there, barefoot. They do not neglect anything, from socks and panties, not disgusting even the old ones,” – resents one resident.

They told me that they had suffered something there for eight years, that they had an alley of angels there, that some children had died … That they would take revenge, that’s all. They said that they had come to fire us. I had already been fired from business, from goods, from cars, from tens of millions of hryvnias, from housing, God forbid, if these nits will release me from my relatives as well. ”

They said: “We have been dreaming about this for eight years, and you were sitting here, why didn’t you take weapons from the Nazis?” What fascists? Where to get them, these fascists? “” They were all looking for Nazis, “Igor agrees.

“Their task was the so-called sweep,” Mayor Marchenko told the BBC.

The fighters began searching for and detaining participants in the fighting in Donbass, Izyum’s defense forces, police, officials, businessmen, activists and members of their families.

Entrepreneur Igor is wanted by “LPR” and “DPR” fighters. The fact is that I am a reconstructor, we are reconstructing the Second World War after the Wehrmacht. I have a lot of German things bought in the store – for movies, reconstructions. But you can’t explain to these bulls what it is. He found a helmet – you’re a fascist, found a coat – you’re a fascist, found a belt – you’re a fascist. They found all these things of mine and burned it all. ”

The fact that the military took the reconstructors for the “Nazis” and looked for them all over the city, threatened relatives, said the BBC and the mayor of Izyum. “Some of these people have been detained, and we still don’t know what happened to them,” he said.

Igor fled the city early in the morning. Wounded skinny cows roamed the field. Ten years of enthusiasm for reconstruction helped the man not to explode on mines: “I immediately noticed stretch marks, I walked carefully.”

On March 24, he left the city. On that day, the Russian Defense Ministry said that Russian troops had taken Raisin.

On April 1, Ukrainian authorities announced that Russian troops had driven the Armed Forces out of the southern part of Izyum. Why did it take a month to storm a small town?

“Yes, Raisins are small, but they are still a full-fledged settlement. And the Russians obviously have problems with fighting in urban conditions. It is not possible to quickly establish full control over the cities,” – said military analyst Mathieu Butleg.

Izyum’s authorities believe that collaborators played a significant role in the defeat. According to the mayor, city council deputy Anatoliy Fomichevsky, who is already accused of treason, pointed the way to the Russian occupiers in the southern part of the city through a former brick factory.

And his acquaintance Eugene Bryukhanov, who had a hunting weapons store, showed the military from Russia, where there are fords on the Don, says one of the interlocutors of the BBC.

“Bryukhanov was a member of the pro-Russian OPZZH,” said one of the Izyum residents. “But he always pretended to be pro-Ukrainian. He wore an embroidered shirt and spoke Ukrainian at City Council meetings. That’s why Bryukhanov knew very well the location of the fords on the other bank. And he immediately issued fords where Russian equipment could move. ”

Ukrainian media reported that Bryukhanov had already been detained by Ukrainian special services, he testified. Mayor Marchenko is convinced that if these betrayals had not taken place, “the enemies would still not be able to occupy the city and block the road on which humanitarian aid was delivered to Izyum and people were evacuated.”

After the capture of Izyum, Russian troops will try to attack Slovyansk and unite with Russian units fighting on the side of the so-called “LDNR”, military expert Pavlo Luzin explains to the BBC: “This does not reduce the chances of Ukrainian forces Russia’s offensive needs fresh and motivated troops. But with this offensive, Russia will try to surround Ukrainian troops in the Donbas. It will be impossible to predict whether it will work or not. ”

The Ukrainian government was also waiting for the Russian army to attack the south. Residents were evacuated in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. On the night of April 19, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that the battle for Donbas had begun.

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