SIVERSK, Ukraine - Tamara Yarontseva brought apples from her garden to thank the Ukrainian soldiers for freeing Siversk town, located on the border of Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts. She had spent nearly two weeks in a cellar hiding from crossfire shelling that destroyed her kitchen.
Despite all this, she was happy on July 10 to see Ukrainian soldiers who freed the 10,000-person city from hundreds of Kremlin-backed “gangster” who terrorized residents for two months. “It was scary to even go out to the garden,” Yarontseva remembers.
Siversk played an important strategic role as a transit hub for weapons and fighters to Sloviansk and Lysychansk.
The Ukrainian army surrounded the city in armored vehicles and used cannons and aviation to defeat the well-trained Russian-backed insurgents that also included many Russians. The occupiers were called the Ghost Battalion, organized by Aleksey Mozgovoy, a separatist commander in Luhansk.
Interviews with townspeople and documents revealed details about life under separatist rule.
A pastoral life in Siversk wasn’t shaken by political tension until early May, when dozens of armed and masked men came in there. The rebels created their headquarters in a local café and forced the town’s deputies to vote for holding of separatist referendum on May 11. After the referendum, the insurgents started construction of a checkpoint on the road to Yampil.
Yarontseva said most of Siversk’s residents didn’t take the newcomers seriously. Others supported them, hoping that Russian troops would annex the territory, just like Crimea.
In early July, a woman who fit the description of Olga Kulygina, a journalist who is suspected of being a Russian Federal Security Service agent, came to Siversk. She claimed to have powers from Kremlin-backed separatist Igor Girkin, who goes by the name of Igor Strelkin and who says he served as a Russian FSB (Federal Security Service) agent. “This woman was huge and scary and the rebels claimed that she acceded in ferocity most of them,” an official in Siversk said, who asked anonymity out of fear of reprisals. In a photo shot by French photographer Pierre Crom in Sloviansk in early May, Kulygina was routinely handling a semi-automatic rifle when patrolling the city. (http://www.pierrecrom.nl/#pic-41). When Kulygina was arrested by Ukrainian forces, the insurgents said they were ready to free 15 people in exchange for her release.
In Siversk, the mysterious woman who may have been Kulygina forced the town’s mayor to let the separatists into the city hall and made the owner of a local club establish a military hospital. She also appointed a local man to take charge. Then she left.
Soon the insurgents recruited locals and started terrorizing residents. They seized expensive cars and then extorted money from local businesspeople. They also forced residents of Siversk to dig ditches. They set a curfew from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., when locals avoided looking out the windows.
Left behind at the insurgent-held hospital was a list of families and the amounts of money taken from them.
The Ukrainian liberators found plenty of evidence of Russian involvement elsewhere.
Oleksandr Nechyporenko, 35, a sergeant who led the storming of the separatist-held police building, said the Ukrainian servicemen found a bunch of Russian dry ration packs, cell phones with Russian SIM cards and “papers of retired Russian officers” there. There was also lots of Russian medication not sold in Ukraine.
The insurgents’ arbitrariness caused discontent among people in Siversk, but they were too afraid to challenge the gunmen. “There were drug addicts, losers and newcomers from Russia,” according to one local businessman too fearful to be identified publicly.
After June 20, when the Ukrainian troops liberated the nearby village of Yampil, where the separatists kept a highly protected checkpoint, Siversk knew it was next.
The sounds of shelling became commonplace. The separatists responded with artillery.
A fierce assault on July 9 led to the liberation of Siversk within 24 hours. The Russian flag from the city hall was removed, burned and replaced by a Ukrainian one.
“People were crying, hugging and thanking us,” said Captain Valery Levchenko, 39, head of 24th infantry brigade from Yavoriv city of Lviv Oblast that liberated Siversk.
Many residents had left by the time of the decisive fight, but one woman was killed in the crossfire and her husband his both legs. Another man was brought to the hospital in a coma after being struck by rubble.
The insurgents escaped Siversk, leaving dozens of land mines on roads and fields as they retreated. On June 11, one of these mines took the lives of three police officers of the special unit that came to re-establish order in the city.
Some insurgents are still hiding out in the woods outside Siversk. But slowly the city is going back to normal, with more and more buses and cars bringing the residents returning home every day. Soldiers now see more civilians in the city even as armored personnel carriers are as frequent on the roads as cars.
A local businessman met his wife arriving from Kharkiv and showed the Kyiv Post a box with big nails he bought to fix a roof of his house damaged by shelling.
“I will fix it all, no problem,” he said. “The most important is that we’ve got peace back.”
Editor’s Note: This article has
been produced with travel support from www.mymedia.org.ua, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark and implemented
by a joint venture between NIRAS and BBC Media Action, as well as Ukraine Media
Project, managed by Internews and funded by the United States Agency for
International Development. The content is independent of these organizations
and is solely the responsibility of the Kyiv Post.
