The Ukrainian president wanted this Monday to lock Vladimir Putin in a basement without a toilet, after visiting a Ukrainian town liberated a year ago, from which almost the entire population had been kidnapped in a basement by the Russian occupiers.
Eleven people died in this basement of a school of less than 200 m2 where some 367 of the approximately 400 inhabitants of Yagidne, in northern Ukraine, had been locked up for 27 days in March 2022, according to the head of state Volodymyr Zelensky. .
“All these people lived in complete darkness, waiting for the return of the Ukrainians. They wrote (on the walls) the names of those who died and the dates so as not to forget them. And the children marked the words of the Ukrainian anthem, he said during a ceremony in his tribute, accompanied by German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck.
“After seeing this, I wish the Russian president would spend the rest of his life in a basement with a bucket instead of a toilet,” Volodymyr Zelensky said in this town in the Cherniguiv region.
Testimony of abuses in Russian-occupied regions
After failing to conquer kyiv, the Russian army withdrew from northern Ukraine at the end of March 2022, about a month after the invasion began.
Accusations, often documented, of summary executions, torture, rape and robbery multiplied in the towns and villages it had occupied. The Kremlin, as always in this type of case, denied it.
Valéri Polguï, a 38-year-old resident of Yaguidné, who was locked up in the basement of the school there, recounts the appalling conditions of detention.
“At first it was cold, but then there were more and more people and there wasn’t enough oxygen” in the basement, he said. “Older people would pass out from lack of oxygen, go crazy, and then die,” she recalls.
Source: BFM TV
