Yahidne. A Village in Captivity
When Russian troops occupied the village of Yahidne in the Chernihiv region in March 2022, residents — including dozens of children and older people — were forcibly herded into the school basement and held there as a human shield for nearly a month. The Russians set up their headquarters in the school. Ten people died in the unbearable conditions in the basement. Another 15 people were killed nearby.
This page brings together materials that reflect our team’s work to preserve the memory of the war crime committed by Russian forces in Yahidne. All of them were created with respect and in collaboration with the village’s residents — witnesses and survivors who lived through these events firsthand.
Residents of Yahidny whose voices are heard in the podcast: Valeriy Polhuy, Valentina Danilova, Yevheniya Fesiun, Olga Menyailo, Tamara Klymchuk, and Igor Mamonov.
Screenwriter: Svitlana Oslavska
Sound engineer: Lyubov Guk
Cover design: Dasha Podoltseva
Editor: Natalia Gumenyuk
Text voiced by: Natalia Gumenyuk
The English text was narrated by Timothy Snyder, and the voices of the residents were provided by Peter Pomerantsev, Khrystya Freeland, Marcy Shore, Anne Applebaum, Sabra Ayres, and Jonathan Littell.
This audio guide is a documentary walk through the site of a war crime — the school grounds and its basement, which has remained almost unchanged since 2022. You will hear the voices of Yahidne residents who speak about the first days of the invasion and the conditions they endured in the basement. It is about people who, in inhuman circumstances, managed to hold on to their dignity. What did the people of Yahidne feel during the most terrifying days of their lives? And what helped them survive?
A Horrific Month of Russian Captivity: The Story of One Basement in a Ukrainian Village
Seven days after the invasion of Ukraine, Russian troops entered the village of Yahidne. They forced the residents out of their homes and into the basement of the local school, which they had turned into their headquarters.
Until they withdrew on March 30, 2022, the Russians kept almost the entire population of Yahidne—more than 360 people, including children and the elderly—in that basement for nearly a month.
It was so cramped, people had to sleep sitting up. Instead of a toilet, there were buckets. Food had to be foraged. There was no ventilation, so the oldest went crazy and died. The Russians did not allow the dead to be buried immediately, and when they finally did, they fired on the funeral.
“People jumped into the pit with the bodies,” says one six months later, recalling the ordeal, at a feast for those who emerged alive. Many had not.
In the intervening months, the survivors repeated their experience to one another, and to investigators working for justice. Their confinement in the basement may serve, one year after Vladimir Putin invaded on Feb. 24, as a microcosm of the sadism that arrived with the invaders. But to more than one survivor, what comes to mind is a concentration camp.
“What day,” one of them asks, “did people start going crazy?”
The book "The Scariest Days of My Life"
In 2023, the book The Scariest Days of My Life was published, featuring reportage by journalists from The Reckoning Project — an initiative of Ukrainian and international journalists, analysts, and lawyers documenting war crimes, which the Public Interest Journalism Lab co-founded at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. The collection also includes the story of Yahidne’s residents, which gave the book its title — a quote from Svitlana Baranova, a volunteer from Slavutych who spent a month in the school basement together with the people of Yahidne.
The book also covers other major crimes from the first year of the full-scale war: the shelling of the railway station in Kramatorsk and the shopping center in Kremenchuk; the bombing of central Chernihiv and the maternity hospital in Mariupol; the forced transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia; persecution, torture chambers, and detention sites in Kherson and Kharkiv regions; the occupation of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant; and the occupation of a hospital in Mykolaiv region.
The voices of witnesses and survivors captured in these reports have already undermined Russia’s attempts to hide its crimes and bury their memory under a tide of lies. Despite the concentrated pain, the texts in this collection turn traumatic memories into evidence that can be used in court proceedings, point toward accountability, and hold space for hope that justice is possible.
The book presentation became a space for an open conversation between survivors and direct witnesses of war crimes, and investigators and representatives of law-enforcement bodies, including the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine. These conversations showed how important a safe environment is for speaking about traumatic experiences — especially for those who are waiting for justice through long and complex court proceedings. It was during this event that the idea was born to hold facilitated meetings with communities that have lived through war crimes.
Community Meeting
After the village was liberated, it was announced that the school in Yahidne would be turned into a memorial complex. Ukrainian authorities began building one of the country’s first museums dedicated to war crimes.
In the summer of 2024, we organized a facilitated town-hall meeting with village residents to learn how survivors themselves envision preserving the memory of these terrible events. What do people want to remember, what do they want to leave for the future, and in what form? This meeting became an opportunity for neighbors to talk and share thoughts and feelings — because the village no longer had a place where they could gather together.
"Remember that we made it out of the basement"
One idea voiced at the community meeting was that the memory of Yahidne should be shaped not only — and not so much — around the grief the residents endured during the occupation, but also around their capacity to survive it. Solidarity, self-organization, and humanity should become one of the core pillars of the village’s story and of how we make sense of Russia’s invasion.
When talking about what should be documented and preserved, Yahidne residents return again and again not to the behavior of their tormentors, but to their own actions and feelings. “We survived. We made it out of that basement. That is what they should remember,” one participant says. “Freedom is something to be celebrated,” another adds.
The book "From the Fog of War"
Natalia Gumenyuk’s essay “After the Occupation” about the occupation of Yahidne was included in the book “Im Nebel des Krieges. Die Gegenwart der Ukraine” (2023), published by Suhrkamp Verlag. Edited by Kateryna Mishchenko and Katharina Raabe, the volume brings together seventeen Ukrainian authors reflecting on how Russia’s full-scale invasion reshaped their lives and ways of thinking.
Project producers:
Iryna Yehiazarova
Liuba Knorozok
Olha Andrieieva
Project communications manager:
Zarina Mykytenko
The village of Yahidne, together with nearby Lukashivka, became part of a single nationwide memory route dedicated to the events of the Russia–Ukraine war. In Chernihiv region, the route also includes Novoselivka, and in the regional center itself — Chornovil Street and the Tarnovskyi Chernihiv Historical Museum.
This project was prepared with the support of the “Partnership for a Strong Ukraine” Programme. The contents are the sole responsibility of the NGO “Public Interest Journalism Lab” and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Programme and/or its financial partners.