Day 212. Lyptsi.
"And then the rain started and we had water."
Hey everyone.
Please share this story as widely as you can, and translate it into other languages.
Original thread by @monosulfate:
“My relatives left Lyptsi and told briefly about what was happening there according to their perspective:
- When we woke up on February 24 from the explosions, we were already under occupation, the russians were already here at night while we were sleeping. At five in the morning, they were no longer allowed to go to Kharkiv. Those who tried to leave through the forest were shot.
That same morning, the mayor sided with the russians and urged everyone to leave for russia, saying that they were saving us from the Nazis. The russians turned off all communications, saying that Ukraine was doing it. At first, prices in the shops were both in hryvnias and in rubles, although the exchange rate was 1:1.
Then they began to run out of food, and what was imported from russia began to be sold only in rubles. Several of our neighbors left in advance, for others it was a house for the summer (I don’t understand this part, do you mean that they left to go to a summer house? Or that the houses they were staying in were a summer house?) Therefore, we managed to find some products in their houses, mostly cereals, flour, etc., and hide them in different places.
We were relatively lucky in that we live far away from the highway and it was relatively calm until the beginning of April, and then the russians came to our house. They took away all the devices, telephones, and searched for food. We said there was no food, but they found one of our grain caches.
And they shot the dog... now they came all the time and ransacked the house. We were only happy because ten years ago, when making repairs, we left the old stove in the house and now we could at least warm up and cook food, although there was almost nothing to eat. And then the rain started and we had water.
In May, the front line shifted away from our village and there were more russians, mang more. And it became noisy, half of the russian shells were returned. They lived in our neighbors’ house, we were afraid even at night to dig some leftover food in the garden, so we ate everything we found: some herbs, berries
The russians got fucked up at the front and were taking it out on us. They tortured me with electric shocks for several days in a row, asking for some information about what was happening in Ukraine, about Mr. Zelenskyy.
Having achieved nothing, they beat me and threw me in the basement for about week. Then I returned to my wife, who no longer expected to see me.
And it became constant in the summer.
In August, Ukrainian communication began to appear on the hill, some neighbors found an old phone, we had an old SIM card. Now we could call our relatives. Sometimes. Just to tell them we were alive, for now. We were scared that the russians would see.
It was possible to call for only a minute. After that the russians intercepted the call.
Once they intercepted a 2 minute call, came immediately and took all the people out of the building (16 apartments) at night. Some people were shot on the spot. Some returned after torture. Some did not return.
Among my acquaintances and friends, there were many people who were also taken "to the basement" and did not return. One day, my wife and I were walking to the other side of the village to get milk. russians who told us to “fuck off back home” and started shooting at us. Miraculously we survived.
When it became clear that they would soon be kicked out, Kamaz vehicles began to come every day from Belgorod (the border with the orks 14 km away) and loot as much as possible. Moreover, some of them were also civilians. They were looting absolutely everything, even the concrete was looted in pieces, sand was collected on the streets, tiles were knocked down in the houses.. Just absolutely fucking everything.
At the beginning of September, they (ЗСУ) began to liberate Kharkiv Oblast. We never stopped believing that we would live, that we would live in Ukraine. That's what happened, but before that, the russians actively deported people, burned corpses that had been lying in the streets for months. Those were also terrible days. And then it went quiet.
This silence was scary only until the arrival of the Armed Forces, then we already knew that we were relatively safe there. We’re home, for real now. We are listening to what has been happening for the past six months and it is not at all what the russians were telling us. Fortunately, they did not break us and we survived all of this only because of our will.”
Twitter thread in English:
