There is a junkyard in Oleksandrivka in the Kherson region. But getting there is not easy. Anyone coming from Mykolayiv has to pass through more than a dozen Ukrainian defense checkpoints. The road bears the marks of the war: it is bumpy and muddy. On the sides, abandoned military vehicles mark the battles of a time when the lines were uncertain.
Mine warnings are increasing in the surrounding fields. There are not a few remnants of missiles, missiles, that can be seen. The path takes you through several villages, always along the coast. There are 50 kilometers that take almost two hours.
For those who don’t want to get stuck in the mud, the entrance to the village is through a narrow road that separates Lake Solonets from the Dnieper Gulf. Soon after, we finally entered Oleksandrivka, but not before stopping at yet another checkpoint.
Ahead is a Ukrainian flag on a van carrying war casualties and the remains of a Russian T-90 tank that failed to escape the trench and faces the road, that road. We went up a bit and reached the center of the village.
It’s not easy to get there, but there were times when it was impossible to get out or get there. On the narrow strip of land we have just crossed, between bodies of water, are more than a dozen civilian cars and a few trucks, one of which is still loaded with the garlic produced nearby: some looking at Kherson, others wise to Mykolayiv. They have in common that they have a dangerous proximity to water.
Russian ambush
At just over a hundred meters it is impossible to say how many people have died on this stretch of road. In almost all of them, the traces of pistol shots are clearly visible. Some vehicles are completely charred, others have traces of rust and still others don’t even have major traces of time. The steep banks suggest that some cars may have already been swallowed by the water.
There are different versions of this story, like any other, but they agree on some basic points: they were civilian cars, they were there because the Russian authorities announced the opening of a humanitarian corridor, they were attacked from Russian positions and the number of dead has yet to be determined.
“It was the Russians who broke up the caravan when people tried to leave for the Ukrainian area,” said Ivan Zayets, one of 16 people who lived in the village with the Moscow army.
The man gives more details: “Some even tried to go back and take more people, then they crushed them”. That is, after Russian authorities announced the creation of a humanitarian corridor to allow refugees to leave for the Ukrainian side.
Several cars came together and when they already reached no man’s land, the first one was shot down. This caused a long traffic jam on a road surrounded by water. There are no alternatives.
One by one, the cars that drove them and those that followed them fell into the Russian trap one by one. All in the same order and in the same order in which they had trusted Moscow to flee from there.
The matter is still under investigation and therefore, questioned by TSF and JN, the chairman of the board did not want to go back on it. But at the beginning of the month he told the radio “Svoboda”: “Volunteers who wanted to bring us humanitarian aid and civilians who were trying to pick up relatives, or possibly from Kherson, came here. They came here. [os russos] they fired at the first car. Then there was a traffic jam and they… Well, they just shot.”
The case will have taken place on March 31 last year. But there are those who guarantee that the episode was not an isolated fact. There is still fear here. The war is not over yet and some are still waiting for the return of the Russian forces.
Ivan remembers well the fortified positions of the invaders: “On the hill, outside the village, there is a row of houses. Then there is a field.” It was in this field, he claims, that the Russians parked tanks and armored personnel carriers. “There is a farm there that produces vegetables, garlic, onions, etc. … From there they constantly shot to the center,” he assures without blinking. The man now refers to attacks against a small resistance group of Ukrainian soldiers in the school building.
The Ukrainian army acknowledged a few months ago that it was carrying out an operation to rescue the wounded from the school and deliver weapons to the resistance fighters. The fate of these soldiers is still treated as confidential information by the Ukrainian authorities.
In the neighboring village it was the occupier who took over the school, says Ivan. They occupied that property and the library and “essentially interrogated people or took them to the basement. My two sons were taken there, but were later released.”
In Oleksandrivka, 21 people died during the occupation and four are still missing.
Source: DN
