The Returned: Six months under occupation — from the first day to the last

Prologue

“It’s hard to bring yourself to leave your home.” 

Nikolayevo-Daryino is a tiny village in the Sudzha district of Russia’s Kursk region. Fewer than a hundred houses line the banks of the Snagost River, right on the border with Ukraine. The Ukrainian village of Zhuravka lies just half a kilometre away.

Anna Zatolokina was born and raised in Nikolayevo-Daryino and married a local man, Sergei. “We never wanted to leave,” she says. “I worked in the neighbouring village of Daryino, running the local community centre. Sergei was a driver at the collective farm at first. When it collapsed, he began travelling to Moscow for shift work.”

Her elder daughter, Yulia, is 24; her younger daughter, Rita, is eight. “There’s a big age gap between them,” Anna says, with a slight hesitation. “And we had a good life. A vegetable garden, poultry, a few piglets. Everything was fine. Just like everyone else.”

Olga Skvortsova lived at the other end of the village. She is six years younger, but her story was much the same. She was born in a settlement in the neighbouring Belovsky district, worked there “at a fuel station for an agricultural enterprise,” and in 2006 met a tractor driver named Vladimir. 

“We dated and dated — four years of dating, and it was time to decide,” she recalls. “I moved in with him in Nikolayevo-Daryino, we got married, and I found work as an accountant at a local agricultural company.” A couple of years later, Vladimir quit from his job. “The pay wasn’t much,” she says. “He started working in Moscow as a slinger.”

I admit to Olga that I don’t even know what that job is. “A slinger? You work with loads — hooking and unhooking them. It’s hard work,” she explains. “Most of the men in our village work like that, on rotation — two weeks on, two weeks off. He lived here for twelve years and worked in Moscow the whole time. So many times he said, ‘I’m tired of going there. I can’t do it any more.’ Vova (Vladimir -- Kommersant) was a country man. He loved the land.”

In 2015, Olga and Vladimir Skvortsov had a daughter, Natasha. As she grew older, she became friends with Rita Zatolokina. The girls often played together and especially enjoyed making beadwork. Everything was fine. Just like everyone else.

But in 2022, war came to the borderland village.

“We were very frightened on February 24. There was noise everywhere — military vehicles moving, planes flying overhead… My husband came back from Moscow right away,” Anna says. “On television, of course, they said it was our forces going there… on the offensive... But it was still terrifying — we had never experienced anything like this before. Later on, after a while, we got used to it.”

Before long, trenches appeared near Nikolayevo-Daryino. There were occasional strikes from the Ukrainian side, but the village itself was largely spared.

“What were you thinking at the time?” I ask. “Well, what was there to think?” Olga replies with a sigh. “No one really thought all of this would come back to us. We hoped we were protected, that nothing would happen to us.” According to her, over the two years of war only three families left Nikolayevo-Daryino.

“And besides, there was never anything like the local authorities telling us, ‘It’s dangerous to live here, you should leave,’” she says emphatically. “There wasn’t even any talk of that. So we weren’t especially afraid.”

The situation deteriorated sharply at the start of 2024. Strikes began landing in people’s gardens, and Ukrainian drones could be heard buzzing overhead more and more often. The military stationed at the border positions initially “pushed back” the drones, Anna says, but in April they were “redeployed to another sector.” They were replaced by conscripts. “These boys didn’t push back at all,” she says. “They didn’t fire artillery or do anything like that — they just dug trenches. They were simply stationed at the border, and that was how they were meant to protect us.” Many villagers would cook food for the conscripts, Olga adds. “We felt very sorry for those boys.”

By summer, the danger had become routine. Shelling from the Ukrainian side intensified, and the residents of Nikolayevo-Daryino grew accustomed to taking shelter in their cellars at the first whistle overhead. “Do you remember when we went out to weed the vegetable patch in June?” Yulia asks her mother. “A shell flew right over our heads and exploded in the bushes.”

Anna nods. “We were terrified. We ran to the cellar, hearts pounding… And then two more blasts behind us.”

The Zatolokin family even bought walkie-talkies to stay in contact with Anna’s elderly parents. They lived some 500 metres from their house, but the mobile signal was unreliable in that area. “We’d check in over the radio: ‘Are you all right?’ — ‘Yes, we’re all right.’ It meant we didn’t have to run to each other’s houses to check after every strike.”

Ukrainian drones began circling the road to the district centre, Sudzha, the women say. “They went after cars, hit a gas station.” Olga witnessed one such attack herself. The company where she worked as an accountant would take employees from their villages to the head office every morning, with drivers making a long detour to avoid Sudzha. It didn’t help. Right in front of Olga, a Ukrainian drone dropped a munition on an ordinary passenger car carrying her colleagues. 

“After the explosion, they rushed us at full speed to Novoivanovka village. Then they brought in the men from that car. They were standing outside, still full of adrenaline, talking about how lucky they were to have survived,” Olga recalls. “We came out to listen — and then we heard the buzzing of drones again. We ran back into the building as fast as we could, and they started dropping explosives on the vehicles.”

A fuel tanker used to refuel combine harvesters was parked next to the building; one of the munitions exploded very close by. Risking his life, one of Olga’s coworkers ran outside, climbed into the tanker, and drove it farther away from the building where people were sheltering.

“They were attacking the office building all day,” Olga says. “One man was badly hurt — he had multiple shrapnel wounds. Another was hit in the arm. Even after that, we somehow just kept living our lives. Even though it was frightening. I’d be shaking the whole way to work, and on the way back. It was very scary.” 

I try, sincerely, to understand why Olga’s family did not leave the borderlands even after such a nightmare. She tries just as sincerely to explain it to me. “These are our homes, our own houses — you don’t want to abandon them. Our whole life is here. And it’s not clear where we would go, or who would be waiting for us there,” she says. “One woman had a plane-type drone explode right in her garden — and even after that she couldn’t bring herself to leave. No one expected this, honestly. No one at all expected things to turn out this way.”

August

The incursion

On the night of August 5–6, the residents of Nikolayevo-Daryino woke to the roar of artillery. “The substation had been hit the day before, so there was no electricity. We put on our warm things by flashlight, grabbed pillows and chairs, and ran down to the cellar,” Olga recalls. “The four of us stayed there together — my husband and I, my mother-in-law Vera Mikhailovna, and little Natasha. At first we thought it would all stop soon. But the hours passed, and it didn’t grow any quieter. We thought: that’s it, this is the end of our village. And the drones were buzzing too, like a swarm of bees. Natasha was terribly frightened, shaking all over. We were all afraid.”

At the other end of the village, the Zatolokin family was sitting out the night in their cellar as well. The shelling only died down at dawn. Sergei, Anna’s husband, got on his bicycle and rode over to the conscripts’ positions to ask for advice.

“They told him, ‘We don’t know either what you should do. Maybe try leaving through the fields?’” Anna recounts.

The Zatolokins quickly talked it over with their neighbours and decided to take the risk. “We got into three cars and drove along the dirt road toward the neighbouring village of Daryino, planning to cut across the fields to Obukhovka. But as we were leaving the village, someone shouted, ‘Hey, you — stop!’ Sergei slammed on the brakes. Soldiers with rifles came out of the bushes and said, ‘If you want to stay alive, turn back and keep your heads down.’ I looked and saw blue armbands. So what was this — were there really Ukrainians in our village? We turned around and drove back. As we passed our conscripts, we asked, ‘Those soldiers with blue armbands — are they Ukrainians?’ The boys started scrambling, shouting into the radio: ‘They’ve broken through, they’ve broken through!’ And we went home — to talk over what to do next.”

At first, the Zatolokin family thought about trying to leave the village on foot, crossing the river and the fields. But they decided it was too dangerous. “The grain had already been harvested — there were no tall crops left, no corn, nothing,” Anna explains. “And out in an open field there’s nowhere to hide from a drone. So we were afraid and stayed home. There were the four of us — and then my parents, Ivan Petrovich and Valentina Sergeyevna, my husband’s sister Lyuda and her husband Kolya — eight people in one cellar.”

Not long after, Vladimir Skvortsov came by to see what was happening. They told him about the encounter with the Ukrainian soldiers. Stunned, he went back to his family with the news.

“That’s when we decided not to go anywhere,” Olga says. “We never imagined it would last long. And besides, there was constant booming and buzzing — it felt like absolutely everything was being hit and destroyed. It never even crossed our minds to try to make our way through the fields with a child in conditions like that.”

The village’s gas supply had already been cut off, so they had to cook over an open fire. They spent the night in the basement. In the morning, Vladimir climbed onto the roof of the house and managed to catch a mobile signal there.

“I got through to my mother in the neighbouring district,” Olga says. “She told me: ‘Olya, don’t worry — they said on television that it’s just a small breakthrough, our military will stop them soon, and everything will settle down.’ That was somewhat reassuring.”

But then Vladimir called their close family friends in the neighbouring village of Daryino — and learned that everyone there had fled the day before.

“They had mobile service, they had Telegram messenger,” Olga recounts. “They saw reports that an offensive was underway all along the border, that the Ukrainian Armed Forces were already entering Sudzha. They realized it was serious, grabbed the children, and left. The Ukrainians let them through. They barely made it out — they drove through the fields under fire — but they survived. And in our village, the Ukrainians barred people from leaving — and so many ended up dying because of that...”

The next day, Olga recalls, something strange happened.

A young man they didn’t know knocked at their gate. “He was dressed kind of strange — track pants, a T-shirt, and a woman’s coat thrown on top. He says, ‘I’m a Russian soldier, our brigade was wiped out, I’m the only one left alive, I’m looking for my own. Can I have some water?’ And all the while he’s looking the yard over,” the woman remembers. “My husband went to get the water, and he followed him right into the house. He started asking us how many people were sitting in the basement. I noticed he had a tattoo on his arm — a star, I thought…”

“No, not a star,” little Natasha interrupts her mother. “A coat of arms and two swords. I looked closely and remembered it.”

The stranger drank the water, thanked them, and left. Half an hour later, the neighbours came by — shaken. It turned out the young man had stopped at every house along the street: each time he introduced himself as a soldier, asked for a drink of water, and asked how many people were there. And at the last house…

“At the last house, he told the woman, ‘Get out of here quickly, all of you. The Ukrainians will be here soon — they’ll shoot you’,” Olga says. “She ran straight to the neighbours. And the whole street decided to run. We threw our backpacks together in a hurry, stuffed in warm clothes, a small blanket… My husband called the dog, our German shepherd — ‘I’m not leaving Grom behind,’ he said. And we ran through the gardens toward the river. Our neighbours were with us too — the Durnev family: mother, father, and a baby in their arms, only six months old.”

They didn’t get far — stopped by the river. Vladimir went to look for a place where it would be easier to cross, while the others waited under a tree.

“Bang! A cluster round went off not far from us. Bang! Another one burst on the other bank,” the woman recalls. “We dropped to the ground, I covered Natasha with my body. I’m lying there, listening to the explosions, and thinking: I’ve got a backpack on my back — maybe it won’t pierce through…”

After that, the families decided to return to the village. The Skvortsovs made it back to their house — and immediately “a terrible barrage began.” They hid in the basement and spent several hours listening as Ukrainian heavy military vehicles rumbled past along the road.

“Up until then there was still hope that there weren’t many of Ukrainians them, that ours would defeat them quickly and we’d be free,” Olga sighs. “But it turned out there were a lot of them. Reinforcements kept coming, and coming, and coming, and coming… Several times we heard shooting — bursts of automatic or machine-gun fire. We prayed to God — we thought they were shooting our neighbours, just like that man had said. We were praying and shaking with fear. ”

The Zatolokins, in their own basement, also heard shooting — from the direction of the conscripts’ positions.

“No one believed the Ukrainians had come for long” 

For the next several days, the Skvortsovs tried to stay in the basement. Then neighbours came by and said that Ukrainian soldiers had begun going from house to house, taking cars and “picking on people” over camouflage clothing (it is cheap and therefore popular with villagers in Russia -- Kommersant).

“And Vova wore nothing but camouflage — winter and summer,” Olga recalls. “I was scared, of course. We started shoving it all into bags, carried them out to the garden, hid them in the bushes. My husband hid his army photos from Chechnya. We also deleted from our phones every picture where he was in military-style clothing. And it turned out that Natasha and her dad hardly had any photos together left at all…” She sighs and looks at her daughter for a long moment; the girl is focused on her drawing.

The Ukrainians came the next day. They called Vladimir out into the yard. “We’re looking out the window — there are three armed men there. One is talking to Vova, and the other two are watching from the sides,” Olga recalls. “They kept talking and talking — and we were sitting there shaking. Who knows what they might do? But they didn’t touch us. My husband came back and said they spoke calmly, checked his phone, and gave it back.”

The Ukrainian soldiers also asked residents to mark every house where civilians were living. They wrote on their fence: “Children.” And, just in case, added: “Pensioners” — since Vera Mikhailovna was with them. “After a few days, the shooting seemed to quiet down,” Olga says. “And we just went on living.”

Ukrainian soldiers came to the Zatolokins’ house on August 8. They checked phones, took SIM cards, and photographed documents. “We hid Yulia’s passport and phone. We said she was only fourteen,” Anna says, nodding toward petite 24-year-old Yulia. “The thing is, her husband is in the army — an officer, deployed on the SMO. Of course we were afraid of the consequences. But they believed us. I asked, ‘So what are we supposed to do now?’ They said, ‘We don’t know what you should do.’ And they left. And we started setting things up. Because somehow you still have to live, and you have to feed the children.”

The Zatolokins moved into the basement. It had been dug in the yard behind the house and wasn’t visible from the street. “Sergei laid down boards, we spread out old blankets. All of it quickly became damp,” Anna says. “Then my husband took apart the sofa and set up a bed in the basement, lined the wall with insulation. But the damp kept coming anyway, of course.” They did manage to set up lighting — Sergei had a generator and a large canister of gasoline for it.

Many people in the village had no shelter at all.

“People went from house to house, from basement to basement, looking for some place safer,” Olga says. “They’d ask, ‘Can we stay with you for a couple of days, until it’s all over?’ Back then, no one really believed the Ukrainians had come for long.”

Anna and Sergei Zatolokin took in relatives and neighbours. In the end, eleven adults and two children — eight-year-old Rita and seven-year-old Makar — were living in the cellar. They had to sleep “stacked together” but somehow they managed to fit everyone in.

“At first, we were able to eat normally — we set up a kind of mess hall in a former pigsty. We put a gas stove in there; we had a gas cylinder. We set up a canopy in the yard — a table and benches. You could sit there during the day if it was quiet,” Anna says. “As soon as shelling started, everyone ran to the basement. When it was over, we came back out. We even started getting used to it, I guess. Though it was a bad habit, of course”.

They cooked together and for everyone, and even managed to feed neighbours from other basements. “A man from our street would come by — his mother was ninety-four, and he’d take the food to her. Another woman came too — she was sixty, her mother was eighty-eight, and her mother-in-law the same age. The three of them were living together; our men built them a canopy in the yard, chopped firewood for them. Everyone tried to help one another.” 

I ask what they were eating, with no shops around.

“In August and September, the strikes weren’t that frequent yet, so we’d go out to the garden to work,” Anna says. “We dug potatoes, picked cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers. Everyone brought in whatever preserves they had. Water was the real problem — once the electricity went out, the water supply stopped too. It was a good thing there was an old well not far from the house. My husband climbed down and spent five hours cleaning it out, all the way to the bottom. About a week later, water started coming in — at first it had sand in it, then it cleared. And as for food… well, the Ukrainians brought supplies too.”

“Maybe you’ve seen photos online of them handing out humanitarian aid,” her daughter Yulia explains. “It was the same for us. People from the military commandant's office came — they had armbands marked ‘MC.’ They told people to come to them if anyone tried to harass them. And they handed out the first rations — packaged food, flour, vegetable oil, wet wipes. That helped us a lot. We baked balabushki with the flour — mixed it with water, made little round flatbreads. And we ate them instead of bread.”

“And then we started sneaking some food from them,” Anna laughs. “Supplies were brought to the Ukrainian positions — sacks were dropped right on the road. They’d take some of it and leave the rest. Sergei would go over and take those leftovers — bottled water, bread, canned meat. Maybe they didn’t notice, or maybe they didn’t mind, I don’t know.” 

“How do you feel about the SMO?” 

In the first days of the occupation, the Skvortsovs were still not afraid to stay in their house. “When it got loud, we’d jump up in the middle of the night and run to the basement. When it got quieter, we’d go back into the house to sleep. During the day we went around the yard, but as soon as something flew overhead, we’d run for the basement,” Olga says. “We started fixing it up little by little. We dragged down a big old mattress, laid out some runners and a blanket. But for the time being we still tried to spend the nights in the house.”

They kept cooking over an open fire — Vladimir had chopped firewood long ago for the winter, not knowing it would come in handy already in August. 

The Ukrainians set up positions in the garden, “set up some kind of long-range weapon,” but they allowed the Skvortsovs to dig up the potatoes and gather the tomatoes. At first the family took water from the river, later from a spring about three hundred meters from the house.

“Natasha would get very worried every time her dad went to fetch water. Then she’d be happy: ‘Dad, you came back alive!’ And he… he’d say: ‘What would happen to me?’” Olga sniffles and strokes Natasha’s head. The girl stares at her phone — as if she doesn’t hear her mother talking about her.

Before long, Ukrainian soldiers dug trenches near the freshwater spring and barred local residents from going there. After that, Vladimir — like Sergei Zatolokin — cleared out an old well. “The water didn’t taste very good, but there were no other options.”

From time to time, the soldiers shared food with us, Olga says. “Their attitude toward us was kind of friendly, I guess. There was a child, after all. They brought us candy, food — bread, for example. We shared it with the neighbours. Once they gave Natasha some chips.”

“Not once,” the girl corrects her mother sternly. “Twice. And the second time they brought a big bag.”

It turns out she is listening after all.

Men from the commandant’s office came to the Skvortsovs as well — “six people in helmets, military goggles, balaclavas, with automatic rifles.” They questioned them on camera: “How do you feel about the SMO (special military operation – Kommersant)? Do you have relatives in Ukraine? Any acquaintances or relatives who work at the Kurchatov Nuclear Power Plant? Any acquaintances who were mobilized?”

They photographed everyone, telling them to hold their passports up next to their faces. Then they took phones. “I asked them to give mine back — I said all of Natasha’s childhood photos were on there, it would be such a shame to lose them,” Olga says. “The soldier answered coldly: ‘No, don’t ask. That’s for what you did.’ And what did we do to them?” she asks. Then she answers herself: “Probably they meant that our people went into Ukraine the same way.”

A couple of hours later, someone from the commandant’s office brought Natasha a box of sweets. “I asked him, ‘Is there any chance I could still get my phone back?’ He said, ‘Let’s do it this way: we’ll check everything, go through it, and then I’ll give it back to you,’” Olga recalls. “For several days I worried that maybe I hadn’t deleted something important. But in the end they did give the phone back.”

September

“You are now citizens of Ukraine”

The military set up in the village. “On our street, Ukrainians moved into two houses — they said they were doctors. One house was empty; the doctors threw out the woman who lived in the other,” Olga says. “They told her, ‘We need your house, we’re taking it.’ So she had to move in with neighbours.”

“In our case, the house next door was empty,” Anna says. “They came into our yard and said, ‘We’ll be living there.’ Sergei said, ‘All right, live there.’ Then we looked through the gaps in the fence and saw they’d brought up a tractor with a trailer. And it was packed full of someone’s belongings! There was a washing machine, a water heater, a freezer, microwaves, kettles — even pillows.”

“We were surprised — they even grabbed pitchforks and shovels,” Yulia laughs.

“Later they loaded some of the things into a civilian car and drove off with them,” Anna continues. “In the evening, military vehicles arrived, hitched that trailer up, and hauled it away. The only thing left by the house was a mirror — maybe it didn’t fit. And a bicycle — very, very old.”

“Come on, the bike is not a problem,” Yulia laughs. “They were hauling off farm equipment en masse, straight into Ukraine. Right past our house, along the asphalt road. We saw with our own eyes how they were taking KamAZ trucks, tractors, combine harvesters, walk-behind tractors, regular cars…”

The women start listing examples: “From the neighbours, the Ukrainians took an Oka car and a UAZ jeep; from Uncle Misha, an old Chevrolet.”

Around that time, Anna’s father went from the basement back to his house to feed the chickens — and saw Ukrainian soldiers trying to break into his garage. “He walked up and said, ‘Hello. Am I in your way?’ And they silently gathered up their tools and left,” Anna says. After a pause, she adds: “A couple of months later, that garage was hit. There was a Niva car with a trailer inside — everything burned.”

The Zatolokins had their car taken as well. “They asked politely, you could say,” Anna says with a smirk. “We had a dvenashka (a VAZ-2112 car -- Kommersant) and a Solaris car. The Ukrainians came and said, ‘We need a car. Which one will you give us?’ My husband answered, ‘I worked my whole life to buy the Solaris.’ They nodded: ‘All right, we’ll take the dvenashka.’ After that we hid the Solaris — covered it with a blanket, slate sheets, boards.”

“They brought us food in return for that dvenashka — a whole trunkful,” Yulia is quick to point out. “True, it was food from a shop in the neighbouring village — we could tell by the price tags. But still, it helped a lot.”

Two camping stoves and a canister of gasoline also helped a lot — Sergei found them in a Ukrainian dugout abandoned after shelling.

Both families tried to avoid any contact with Ukrainian soldiers — they stayed in their own yards and hardly ever went beyond the fence. Some soldiers were openly tense when they ran into locals on the street, Olga says. “Those ones were rude to us: ‘What are you standing around staring at? Go home!’”

Anna also remembers an unpleasant incident that really shook them. “Two Ukrainian soldiers drove up to our house on someone else’s walk-behind tractor. One guy with a rifle runs into the yard and shouts, ‘Line up!’ We were all terrified, we didn’t understand anything… And he points the rifle again: ‘Line up!’ Everyone came out and stood in a row. Then suddenly the Ukrainian starts laughing and asks, ‘Where's the water here?’ There’s the well – we point to it. He laughs again. Then another one comes up and says to him, ‘What are you doing, can’t you see the well?’ So he slung the rifle over his shoulder and left.”

I ask what the Ukrainians told them about the war.

“We didn’t have much contact with them,” Yulia answers. “We always spoke strictly about practical things — briefly, to the point. We didn’t chat about life. There was one incident later on, in the fall. We were sitting outside, having breakfast, and a Ukrainian soldier was walking past from his positions, through our garden. He stopped and started telling us, ‘You are now citizens of Ukraine, bla-bla-bla, we’ve liberated you.’ He didn’t ask anything, just said his piece and left.”

“What kind of ‘citizens’ does he think we are…” Anna says irritably. “Some liberators they are. Your people came onto our territory. And we came onto…—” she breaks off for a moment, then mimics him: “‘We’ve liberated you.’ Liberated us from what, exactly? We lived just fine — we had electricity and gas, we worked, earned money, our children went to school… What was there to liberate us from? What kind of Ukrainians are we…”

We all fall silent for a long time.

“Later on, those bushes were hit hard — where his position was,” Yulia finally says.

Then she remembers another conversation. “A Ukrainian soldier ran into our yard and asked for water. He drank it and said, ‘Damn, I’ve got to go dig trenches. Do I even need this?’ I mean, not everyone on their side wanted to fight.”

Birthday

At the beginning of September, one of the Skvortsovs’ neighbours died. “There was an elderly woman living on our street,” Olga recalls. “We’d go over to her, and she’d be sitting there, lamenting: ‘When will they finally liberate us…’ Then she broke her hip and couldn’t get up any more. And after that, she stopped eating.”

“She said, ‘I won’t eat any more,’” little Natasha explains, looking up from her drawing.

The words sound especially chilling when spoken in a child’s voice.

“She died on September 7,” Olga continues. “The Ukrainians allowed us to bury her in the cemetery. The men made a coffin out of planks and took it to the graveyard on a walk-behind tractor. We held a proper memorial for her. And it turned out that she was the only one, the whole time, who was buried properly.”

That same day, a huge shell landed in the Skvortsovs’ yard. It slammed into a tractor — and for some reason didn’t explode. “We asked the Ukrainians to take it away, but they laughed: ‘Why would we need it?’ They even took pictures of it. And they warned us: ‘Be careful walking around — it could still go off.’”

Under those circumstances, they celebrated Natasha’s birthday — she turned nine on September 20. “We cooked something over the fire, and a neighbour even managed to make a small cake,” Olga says with a smile. “Aunt Sveta gave her a whole bag of candy. We even put up some balloons — we found them in the house. Natasha really loves balloons; we used to order her helium ones for every birthday. We always celebrated her birthdays in a big way — all our friends would come with their kids. And now we had to do it next to a shell.”

The parents also made their daughter a birthday card — and glued a photograph of their house onto it. A house that would soon be gone.

The shell never did explode. Gradually, the Skvortsovs stopped noticing it.

“It’s going to be very, very hot here”

Both women asked staff from the Ukrainian commandant’s office how they could evacuate to somewhere safe. Each time, they heard the same thing.

“They’d ask us: where do you want to go — to Ukraine or back home?” Olga says. “Obviously, the only place we were willing to go was home, to Kursk city. About Kursk they said: ‘You can try, but we give no guarantees. There’s a fifty-fifty chance your own side will kill you on the way.’ Of course we weren’t going to cross the front line — we understood that would mean death. Especially since the Ukrainians had laid so many mines around us — by the river, out in the fields. We kept thinking maybe there was some kind of humanitarian corridor, maybe the Red Cross would take us out. But there was nothing like that.”

“And they told us the Red Cross was trying to negotiate, but that ‘your Russia doesn’t want to,’” Anna says. “A few times they even drew up lists of people who wanted to evacuate through a humanitarian corridor. And that was it — nothing ever came of it.”

Instead of Kursk, the Ukrainians suggested going to Sumy (city in Ukraine – Kommersant), and from there to Belarus. “They tried to persuade us: ‘At least think of the child — go to Ukraine. It’s going to be very, very hot here,’” Olga says. “Of course we were afraid to go,” she explains her flat refusal. “Many people from our village had relatives in Sumy. We knew they were very angry about everything that was happening — some had even stopped speaking to their own brothers and sisters. We’d arrive there, and the locals would kill us — how could we go?”

At one point there was also talk of taking the family to Sudzha, but that raised doubts too. “There was no telling what they’d do with us there, or where they’d put us. At least here we had our own basement, our own food, everything familiar around us.”

Olga worried constantly that her relatives had no idea what had become of her. “I kept thinking,” she says, “we are alive — existing, surviving somehow. And yet our family is convinced that everyone here has been killed, raped or carved up for organs.”

Then a Ukrainian soldier offered to carry a message across the lines. Vladimir, ever cautious, gave him the number of an aunt in Kharkiv. Only months later did Olga discover that the soldier had in fact made the call. The aunt, from Ukraine, contacted Olga’s sister in Yaroslavl to pass on the simplest and most precious news: Olga was alive.

October

“That whole street burned down completely”

In October, as people in Nikolayevo-Daryino put it, “little by little, destruction set in.” Fighting resumed around the village. “Our troops would regularly come in from the Korenyevo side, across the river,” Olga says. “We’d hear bursts of automatic fire, explosions… They’d fight for a couple of hours, and then everything would go quiet. Either they went back, or maybe they were shot there — we don’t know. We didn’t see it, we only heard it.”

Several times, stray bullets flew through the Skvortsovs’ yard — thank God no one was hurt. Drones buzzed constantly overhead, spotting for artillery and dropping explosives themselves. Shells started coming in again — “it wasn’t clear from which side.” I try to clarify, but Olga waves it off: “Our troops were firing at the Ukrainians, and they were firing back — and we ended up in between.”

Olga encountered a drone again — this time in her own yard. “I went out to the outdoor toilet, and there’s a drone flying, really low. Bang — and it drops right next to me, onto the shed. I was stunned a bit, covered in dirt,” she recalls. “Natasha was standing in the hallway of the house at that moment — she was very scared.”

“With Murzik, the cat, were standing” Natasha clarifies.

Vladimir patched the hole in the shed roof and found fragments of the drone — with blue electrical tape on the propellers. That’s why Olga is sure the drone was Ukrainian.

At one point, there was heavy shelling — “cluster munitions were exploding constantly.” The Skvortsovs hid in the basement — and felt relieved. “We thought: that’s it, our troops are coming to liberate us. We were waiting for it — thinking we’d be free any minute,” Olga sighs. “It felt like everything was about to end. But that time, our troops didn’t get that far.”

I ask, as carefully as I can, whether she thought then that their basement could also be hit by Russian shells. “Of course I did,” Olga answers. “But how else are they supposed to liberate us? Of course we weren’t expecting liberation to be this harsh. We were hoping all along they’d set up a corridor and take us out. But since that didn’t happen… it’s still liberation — even if some of it is flying in our direction too.”

Ukrainian soldiers began pulling back from the village into dugouts and trenches. Some left their food behind for civilians. Others, Olga says, set houses on fire. “We’re standing in the yard and we see smoke in the sky. We go out — and houses are burning on the far street. One, then another, then a third. Our neighbours had a brother living down that way — they ran off to try to save that house. They said they saw Ukrainian soldiers leaving and setting houses on fire. And that whole street burned down completely.”

After the fire, the Skvortsovs moved everything essential down into the basement — warm clothes, food, water. Vladimir stocked about thirty litres just in case. And on October 20, the family woke up to what Olga calls “an enormous blast.”

“Everything shook, the basement doors flew open from the shock wave, and dust immediately settled inside,” Olga recalls. “We went outside — and the yard was turned upside down. There was a huge crater in the garden. Half of the brick shed was destroyed, the garage was damaged too, and the outdoor toilet was simply blown away. The roof of our house was shredded, all the slate torn off, every window blown out. Well, you can’t exactly sit around by the ruins… We stood there for a bit and went back down to the basement to sleep.”

“The shells were closing in.” 

At the other end of the village there was less shelling, but drones buzzed constantly overhead. “We once counted twelve drones hitting a neighbour's house in a single day,” Yulia says. “It was like something strange was going on there.”

I ask whether it was possible to tell whose drones they were. “They came in differently,” she shrugs. “Sometimes it felt like they were from our side, sometimes from the Ukrainian side. But most of the time we only saw them right before the strike — when they were already diving down.”

Around that time, little Makar’s father decided it would be safer for them to move in with relatives — they lived next door to the Skvortsovs. After they left, eleven people remained in the Zatolokins’ basement.

On October 21, drones attacked their yard.

The first one fell onto the children’s swing set and caught fire. People ran out to put it out — and right then a second drone exploded near the gate. The third struck the roof of the house directly.

“Our windows blew out, the little fence was knocked around a bit, and under the canopy by the summer kitchen everything fell over, everything came loose. And of course we were dazed,” Yulia says.

Three days later, the damage turned out to be far more serious. “We were sitting under the canopy, drinking tea — there were nine of us there,” Yulia recalls. “And a shell landed very close by. Everything came crashing down, a beam behind me collapsed. In the chaos we ran for the basement — then there was another strike, and then another — they came down in a tight cluster.”

There were no serious injuries — several people were nicked by small fragments. The very same Solaris car that the Ukrainian soldiers hadn’t taken was destroyed. And most importantly, the summer kitchen under the canopy was beyond repair.

“After that, we almost stopped going outside altogether. We’d just dart out quickly and go straight back in. Because the shells were falling more often and closer,” Yulia says. 

They cooked using what gas they had left — afraid that smoke from an open fire would make them a target for drones or shelling. The gas cylinder was nearly empty, so they tried to cook for several days at once. “We’d make soup in a big pot — first thicker, then for the next few days we’d just add water to it, to make it last longer. We could stretch it for three or four days,” Anna sighs.

Rita Zatolokina and Natasha Skvortsova were staying in basements at opposite ends of the village — but they found a way to keep their friendship going. The girls eagerly exchanged letters.

“There was an elderly woman living in her daughter’s basement on our street. But she often went back to her own house at the other end of the village — to check on her chickens. At that time it was still relatively safe,” Olga says. “So she carried notes from Rita to Natasha and back again. They also passed treats to each other, exchanged beaded bracelets. They were so happy about every note.”

Olga has kept the letters Natasha received from Rita. She carefully lays them out — notebook pages covered in a child’s handwriting.

“Hi! Thank you from Yulia for the coffee. And from me for the bows and hearts. Today I fed Murik dry cat food and pâté. And I also learned how to do beadwork in the ‘loom’ technique.” Next to it is a sticker — a Disney princess.

Rita wrote a letter to Natasha — she wrote that a shell had landed, that her grandfather had been wounded in the knee. But the note was never sent.

“Aunt Anya came to us and said that Natasha’s father had been killed,” Yulia says quietly. “And we decided that a letter like that would be inappropriate.”

“Natasha, dad is gone.” 

Vladimir Skvortsov spent several days dealing with the aftermath of the strike on their house. He hauled away broken slate and bricks in a wheelbarrow and built a new outdoor toilet. Most importantly, he was in a hurry to fix the roof — the rainy season was approaching. neighbours pitched in — two brothers helped him.

“We found slate in people’s yards, hauled it over in a wheelbarrow, laid it up on the roof. There was only a little left to finish…” Olga’s voice begins to tremble.

While the repairs were under way, the Skvortsovs stayed with their neighbour Svetlana. She had a small homemade stove right in her kitchen — what the locals call a grubka. During the day on October 29, Olga was feeding her husband and the brothers who were helping him; Vladimir ate and then went back to finish the roof.

“A few minutes passed — then a massive explosion! A burst of fire came in through the window. We pressed ourselves against the wall by the refrigerator, huddled together — then another blast. Things were flying at us — glass, dirt, bits of wood raining down. Natasha and I were terrified. We barely managed to get out of the house — the passage was blocked, a fire had started. We took Natasha to the neighbours, and then my mother-in-law and I ran to look for Vova.”

Olga begins to cry.

“I’m shouting, ‘Vova, Vova!’ — and no one answers. I see him lying by the house. Covered in dust… The whole street was covered in dust, windows blown out everywhere, siding panels torn off the houses… We came closer — Vova had shrapnel wounds, blood was flowing. That’s how he died — right in front of my eyes, and his mother’s. I wandered back and told my daughter, ‘Natasha, dad is gone.’ Tears were running down her face. She was standing there — the tears just kept running… ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘let’s go see your dad.’”

About two dozen people came to the funeral — everyone who lived on the street. They dug the grave in a garden, under a tree. Vladimir’s body was wrapped in a carpet and lowered into the ground. They nailed together a cross from two planks. On the crossbar, Vera Mikhailovna wrote her son’s name, the years of his life, and the time of his death.

“And in the evening Natasha started crying, ‘Dad, dad…’ My heart just broke. I tried to comfort her, and she was crying. She always used to put him to bed. She would say, ‘Dad, let me tuck you in.’ She kissed him, wrapped him up in a blanket, and only after that did I put her to bed.”

Olga wiped away her tears and took a deep breath.

“On his last evening, Vova said to her, ‘Oh, Natasha, I’m dying for some fruit purée.’ Our daughter brought him the purée, tucked him in, bundled him up. And the next day, Vova was gone… Later Natasha and I took the purée to his grave. We had two jars left — we gave one to a child in another basement, and she put the other one on her dad’s grave…”

After a pause, Olga said that she, Natasha, and Vera Mikhailovna stayed in their basement for another week. But then “the heavy shelling started again,” and they asked acquaintances to take them in. “Nadezhda Komarova took us in — thank God for her. She had a much deeper basement, and it felt sturdier somehow. Not brick, like ours, but made of concrete slabs,” Olga explained.

There were nine of them in that basement — arranged, as Olga puts it, “on different levels.”

“The first level was the floor — two people slept there. The second level was two folding cots, with two more people,” Olga explains. “The third level was a pile of potatoes with blankets spread on top — that’s where the two older women slept. And the three of us settled on the fourth level — another pile of potatoes, just higher up.”

A cat and a dog lived in the basement too. “No one complained — only sometimes we argued over who had to clean up after the cat. And the dog was a good boy. He never went to the toilet in the basement — he always waited until morning.”

Moving there turned out to be the right decision. On November 9, another shell hit the Skvortsovs’ basement directly and completely blocked the entrance.

That was the day Olga turned thirty-nine.

November

“Less and less food, constant explosions” 

The Zatolokins spent the entire month of November in the basement. They managed to make themselves relatively comfortable. neighbours brought over several old car batteries and drained gasoline from the one car that remained into a generator — enough to rig up some lighting.

“Three tiny LED bulbs for the whole basement. But that was priceless — at least you weren’t sitting in total darkness,” Yulia says. “As long as there was gasoline, we charged Rita’s phone so she could play games. It’s very hard for children to sit all day — they want to run and jump. And in the basement we didn’t even have room to walk, everything was taken up by sleeping spaces. Not every adult could handle that — and she’s very active, always fidgeting. The phone helped keep her occupied, at least for a while.”

Rita also did beadwork, and Yulia crocheted. “I unravelled old sweaters and knitted six pairs of socks.” They played cards. And everyone was reading.

“We read a lot of books — really a lot,” Anna laughs. “Just imagine it: day after day sitting in a basement, day after day. It all drags on and on, and you really want something to occupy yourself with. We had a bundle of children’s magazines — Neposeda and The Thrice-Ninth Kingdom — and we practically read them to shreds. The whole basement would solve the puzzles together. Grandma and grandpa would put on their glasses, turn on flashlights, and read children’s fairy tales.”

A neighbour brought over an old DVD player with a tiny screen and a stack of discs. That’s how movies appeared in the basement — an hour or two before bedtime. “I think we watched every NTV series there is,” Yulia laughs.

Strange as it may sound, drones turned out to be a big help to the Zatolokins. Many of them simply fell to the ground — without exploding. Sergei took them apart, pulled out the batteries, hooked up lightbulbs or LEDs — and ended up with decent little reading lights.

“At first we were scared, of course. When the first drone fell in the garden, we didn’t even go near it,” Anna recalls. “But then Sergei gradually started figuring them out. You know those big forty-litre metal milk canisters? He filled one almost to the top with dismantled drones. That’s how many there were.”

Expert commentary

Vladislav “Hussar” Yefremov, advisor to the Association of SMO Veterans and former commander of the UAV unit “Eskadron” of the “Espanola” brigade: 

It’s important to understand that in this war, drones are just as lethal as shells and mines were in the Second World War. We’ve all heard stories about people who tried to cut open or take apart an old unexploded round they happened to find. It very often ends fatally. Downed drones are just as dangerous.

If you don’t have proper sapper or engineering training, you shouldn’t go anywhere near UAVs you find on the ground. They can be dangerous even for specialists. A drone that didn’t explode may not have failed by accident — the enemy often deliberately rigs UAVs to kill whoever tries to pick them up. That can include the use of chemical agents. The fact that Sergei survived can only be described as a miracle.

Gradually, Sergei even figured out how to deal with unexploded shells — he would unscrew the munition and carry it off into the bushes.

“We were scared every time he picked one up,” Anna recalls. “And he’d joke that he’d become a sapper when all this was over. But the upside was that we had lots of flashlights — we even gave them to our neighbours. Because in a basement, the most important thing is light. We couldn’t even imagine how the neighbours were living in complete darkness.”

The lighting situation in Olga's basement was much worse, which affected people's mental conditions. Gradually, the basement dwellers became more introverted, she says:

“We sat in silence almost all the time. You’d think — nine people together, there must be something to talk about. But in a situation like that, you don’t feel like talking. Some evenings, yes, we’d find a topic. Sometimes we’d even laugh a little. But mostly we lived in despair, in gloom — so we kept quiet. We simply couldn’t find the words, being in a situation like that. And with each day it got harder, harder, harder…”

The only channel to the outside world was a small pocket radio. They turned it on once a day — to save the batteries.

“We listened to the Kursk news to hear what was being reported about the situation. I remember we heard that our forces were controlling the Sudzha–Rylsk highway — and that’s our road! We were so overjoyed. Then they announced: ‘Novoivanovka has been liberated’, ‘Kazachya Loknya has been liberated.’ So that meant we would be liberated soon as well. But then, a few days later, we heard: ‘Fighting is under way for Novoivanovka’, ‘Fighting is under way for Kazachya Loknya.’ Good Lord, how can that be, we thought. Then it seemed they were liberated again, then fighting started once more,” the woman recalls. 

“But you know, not once did we hear anything on the radio along the lines of: ‘There are still civilians in the villages; something must be done about it; a corridor is needed.’ We kept waiting for an announcement like that — but it never came.” 

In this bleak atmosphere, people were already going to bed at six in the evening. “My sides would ache afterward,” Olga says with a faint smile. “But you couldn’t really sleep. At night you wake up to explosions, to the whistle of shells. The ‘Baba Yaga’ (large Ukrainian military drone named after the evil witch from Russian and Ukrainian folk tales – Kommersant) — roaring like a tractor, little drones buzzing… You sort of fall into sleep, but you’re not really asleep.”

She thought constantly of her dead husband and worried for her young daughter. But grief had to be contained: “You cry at night, quietly, when everyone is asleep. By day you hold yourself together. Tears were not encouraged. The people around you are strangers; each has grief enough. Nobody wants your tears.”

Olga falls silent. I glance at her daughter, absorbed in a game on her phone. It is hard to picture this small girl spending weeks in a dark basement, surrounded by silent, despairing adults. “While Vova was alive, he kept her spirits up. After her father was gone, it was harder. No light. Nothing to do. No father. Food running low. Explosions without end,” Olga sighs. “Natasha prayed a lot. When something would bang — she’d sit there whispering the ‘Our Father.’ She was afraid, of course. It helped that the animals were nearby — the kitten and the doggie. She was constantly busy with them. I think the animals are what saved her in that situation.”

I remember that the Skvortsovs had their own dog — a German shepherd. Without thinking, I ask what happened to him.

“Grom went off with our soldiers later,” Natasha says proudly. “He helps them. Grandma said they took him into reconnaissance.”

“Yes, Grom was taken into reconnaissance,” Olga sighs, stroking her daughter’s head. “Our Grom is alive — he just went off with the soldiers.”

Then she looks me straight in the eyes — and I understand everything. It was a question I shouldn’t have asked in front of a child.

“What do I need school for when there’s a war?” 

On one of their visits, the Ukrainian commandant’s staff suggested that the Zatolokins record a video message from the basement to Vladimir Putin. “Tell him that people are living here,” they said. Everyone refused — “it wasn’t clear where that would end up or what it was even for.”

The soldiers handed out food anyway, and in the evening they brought school textbooks: first-grade books for Makar, third-grade books for Rita. “They said they’d taken them from nearby Lebedevka — the school there was still intact. Let the children at least study this way,” Anna says. Then she smiles, a little embarrassed. “We didn’t study for long — you can’t really study in a basement. And the situation became such that textbooks were the least of it.”

The Ukrainians brought textbooks to the Skvortsovs as well. “At first we tried doing some math, writing, memorizing poems. But Natasha doesn’t really like studying,” Olga admits. “She started getting upset: ‘What do I need school for when there’s a war?’ I told her, ‘We’ll get out of this, there will be peace. You need to be able to count, read, write properly.’ But then they started slowly destroying our yard — sometimes a shell would come in, sometimes there was shooting, and on top of that it was cold and dark in the basement. So in the end, we gave up on studying altogether.”

December

“Half a cup of water per person per day”

On the evening of November 30, the people in the basement heard a gunshot. Everyone tensed up: nobody knew what to expect. A few minutes later their neighbour Nadya came running in and said her husband had been killed.

“They’d been living in someone else’s basement for a long time. Anatoly was the only man there. He decided to step out into his yard — maybe to fetch some water or to look for a chicken. Nadya was waiting for him — and then she heard a shot. She ran over — and her husband was lying there dead,” Olga says. “It was a gunshot wound to the back. He was shot in the back, do you understand?”

She emphasizes that it happened very close to the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ trenches — and that there were no Russian soldiers in the village at that time.

Anatoly Glinnikov was buried in a vegetable garden.

On December 3, the woman whose basement Olga was staying in received a visit from her brother, Sergei Tretyakov. “He insisted on living in his own house, but he would come by to check on us. That time he stayed a long while, telling stories — and left after dark,” Olga recalls. “In the morning his wife got up and went to see him — and he was lying in the kitchen, covered in blood. That night, two drones attacked him on the road; shrapnel wounded him in the groin and the neck. He crawled home, lay there suffering, waiting for help. They dragged him to us, and his wife and sister nursed him day and night. He couldn’t eat anything, only drank water — and even that came back up. He tried to hold it in, but he still moaned in pain. Natasha, of course, was very frightened to see all that.”

Sergei Tretyakov died six days later. His body, too, was buried in a vegetable garden.

One week later, a shell landed directly in the yard and destroyed the kitchen where their food was stored. That was only the beginning. In the days that followed, artillery thundered without pause and deadly drones buzzed overhead.

“For two weeks we didn’t leave the basement at all. In the morning we’d dash out to empty the toilet bucket — and that was it. As for food and water, we lived only on what we had stored up. Canned goods, last year’s preserves, the last of the rations,” Olga says. “But there are nine of us here — it ran out quickly. We set a limit: two spoonfuls of porridge, a spoonful of salad, and half a cup of water per person per day. We didn’t ration Natasha — she drank as much as she wanted — and some people began to complain. But what could we do? A child is a child…”

“He’s going to die — we have to do something.”

In those same days, misfortune struck the Zatolokins. On December 11th Sergei stepped out of the cellar into their yard and a shell exploded about three metres away. In such circumstances survival is unlikely. Sergei was fortunate — though shrapnel shattered his left shin.

“I heard the explosions, and then my husband screaming. I ran out — he was sitting there covered in blood, his leg twisted to the side,” Anna recalls. “I used to be terrified of blood — a cut finger was enough to make me feel faint. But this time I ran to him and dragged him into the cellar. I cut off his rubber shoe with scissors and saw the blood bubbling; about half a litre had already flowed out. In peacetime I would have fainted long before. My husband was screaming, his leg hanging loose—I gave him smelling salts and inhaled some myself. It was very frightening.”

There was only a single pack of bandages in the cellar; they used it to dress the wound. Then they found some planks, placed them on either side of the leg and secured it in place. A bedsheet was torn into strips and wrapped tightly around the boards, forming a crude splint. “When we continued undressing him, we saw shrapnel wounds all over his body. Blood was running from a hole in his side. There were two wounds in his buttock — a piece of flesh torn away — and another under his leg.”

In the first days of the occupation, neighbors had brought their household medicines down to the basement. They were stored in a plastic bucket to keep them from getting damp. Among the pills for blood pressure and headaches, there was some lidocaine (painkiller – Kommersant). Sergei was given an injection. It eased the pain, at least somewhat.

Anna’s father ran to the Ukrainian positions to ask for help. They told him to come back in two hours. “We’ll request an evacuation,” they said. But when he returned at the appointed time, the soldiers told him they hadn’t been able to reach their command.

“I was beside myself, crying: ‘He’s going to die — we have to do something.’ Dad ran back to the Ukrainians and said: ‘We have a rubber fishing boat — can we carry him across the river to our side?’ They told him to go ahead. ‘Yes, go ahead. Your forces are already not far from there.’”

Now they had to find a stretcher. Two men volunteered to look for one at the village medical point. It’s a ten-minute walk — but they were gone for two hours.

“Then the shelling began — it was really pounding. We thought they were dead. But they’d been hiding in a basement near the clinic the whole time. When they came back, they said there was a dead woman lying in the yard there, without a head. They said they looked around but never found it. Maybe animals dragged the head away.”

They inflated the boat, placed Sergei on the stretcher, and made their way to the river — “everyone carried him, even the children helped.” There were Ukrainian positions along the bank, but the soldiers let them pass. They lowered the boat into the water and began figuring out how best to position the stretcher.

“And then a Ukrainian soldier ran up to us. He said command had forbidden them to ferry my husband across: ‘We’ve been ordered to turn you back — and to destroy the boat.’ I shouted, ‘My God, please let us through — you’re human too, he’s going to die.’ The soldier said, ‘Those are the orders. Go back. When it gets dark, we’ll come for him in a car.’ What could we do? We turned back. I didn’t sleep all night — the car never came. And by morning Sergei said, ‘Anya, lie down, don’t wait. No one needs us.’”

Life in the Zatolokins’ basement changed completely after that. There were no more lights, no more movies — no one but Sergei knew how to handle the generator and the batteries. And Sergei lay there feverish and groaning.

“What saved us was that the neighbours had a syringe and five or six ampoules of some kind of antibiotic. We injected them so an infection wouldn’t set in,” Anna says. “Someone also brought some ointment — I treated the wounds on his body. He was brave, he endured it. I placed a small icon of Saint Matrona beside him and prayed to her. I cried and begged her to help, to keep gangrene from setting in, to let Sergei live. I stayed with him all the time, because he couldn’t do anything on his own. I had to give him water, hand him things, help him with the toilet.”

Because of drones and shelling, people tried not to leave the cellar. “For small needs, we put a bucket on the steps and screened it off with a blanket. For anything more serious, we still had to run out into the yard to the outdoor toilet,” she says. “You run out and you don’t know whether you’ll make it back. It was terrifying. We sit in the basement, my husband groaning. I look at him, then at the children, and realise I have no idea what will become of us. It is unbearably hard. You wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

“We’re Russians — we’re your own people.” 

Meanwhile, Nikolayevo-Daryino was now a gray zone. Russian troops were slipping into the village in small groups from the direction of the Skvortsovs’ garden; the Ukrainians met them with drones and automatic fire from ruined houses. At night, the people in the basement where Olga was staying heard gunfire, grenade blasts and shouting. There were fewer incoming strikes now, though, and they began cautiously venturing out for water.

On December 16, the owner of the basement stepped outside and returned with four soldiers.

“They said, ‘We’re Russians — we’re your own people. Recon.’ My God, how happy we were,” Olga says — she seems to smile for the first time in our conversation. “The whole basement rushed to hug them. They radioed in: ‘We’ve found civilians, including a small child.’ They also asked whether we knew which houses the Ukrainians were in. We explained that we hadn’t been outside for a long time, that we hadn’t seen anyone.”

The soldiers said Nikolayevo-Daryino would be liberated within a week at most. But they were ready to take Olga and Natasha out sooner — they could leave with them when another reconnaissance group came to relieve them.

“The guys were honest: they warned us that anything could happen on the way — a drone, shelling, a mine, a tripwire. I was afraid for my daughter,” Olga says. “I decided to wait for full liberation.”

The soldiers set up in the house next to the basement — “they stayed quiet as mice, only going out at night.” Two days later, a Ukrainian jeep pulled up and soldiers jumped out.

“We hear gunfire, shouting and swearing — it went on for about fifteen minutes. We thought our soldiers had been killed. We all huddled in a corner and started screaming from there: ‘We’re civilians, don’t shoot!’ Some were praying, Natasha was crying, we were all shaking. We heard someone stomping near the entrance to our basement — and then he threw a grenade inside. It exploded.”

The design of the entrance saved them. There was a second door installed below, to keep in the heat. It absorbed the blast and the shrapnel — they were left deafened and covered in splinters, but alive.

“You can’t imagine how terrified we were. And then the Ukrainians were shouting outside: ‘Legs, legs!’ I thought they’d taken our men prisoner and were tying their legs. It turned out they were getting ready to run,” Olga says. “The shooting died down. A neighbour and her brother went up to the house to see what had happened. Our guys were all alive, thank God. Two Ukrainian bodies were lying near the house, and another one out in the street.”

— What did you do with them?

— Nothing. They’re probably still lying there.

A week later, the reconnaissance unit left and another group replaced them. Liberation never came. Snow was falling. Olga sat in the cold basement, holding her freezing daughter, and deeply regretted not leaving with the soldiers.

New Year

“They’re about to shoot us!” 

The Zatolokins’ basement was closer to the Ukrainian positions. In mid-December, a neighbour came by and warned them that she had spotted two mines on the roadside not far away.

“That night a Ukrainian armoured personnel carrier blew up on those mines,” Yulia recalls. “The next day she came back and said, ‘The APC is burning, there’s a dead Ukrainian soldier lying there — and the mines have appeared again, a little farther down the road.’ And she gave us a sly little smile. But it didn’t even occur to us that it might have been our side slipping in and planting them.”

On December 25, two of the men sheltering in the basement — Sergei Pugachev and his son Alexander — decided to run home to fetch some jars of homemade fruit drink and preserves.

“Time passed, and they still hadn’t come back,” Anna says. “Nadya, Sergei Pugachev’s wife, was waiting for them on the basement steps. Suddenly she came down pale as a sheet, terrified. She said, ‘There was some kind of popping sound, like gunfire. They’ve probably been killed. I’m going to look for them.’ I told her, ‘Nadya, calm down. Maybe it wasn’t gunfire. Just wait.’ But she kept saying, ‘No, no, no — they’ve shot them. They may as well shoot me too.’ 

She ran outside and headed straight for their house. Lyuda, my husband’s sister, and I went up as well. We stood by the basement entrance. A minute later we heard Nadya asking someone, ‘Where are my men?’ A man’s voice answered, ‘They went across the street. And where are you from?’ She said, ‘From the basement next door.’ — ‘How many of you are there?’ — ‘Eleven.’ And right after that, there was a burst of automatic fire.”

Anna and Lyuda immediately ran into the basement. “Lyuda had a hysterical fit — she grabbed a kitchen knife and started stabbing it into the wall, shouting, ‘They’re about to shoot us! They’re about to shoot us!’ Rita burst into tears: ‘Mom, I’m scared!’ I snatched the knife out of Lyuda’s hands and clamped my hand over her mouth — and we all just sat there in silence, staring at one another. We thought they would come into the basement any minute and gun us all down. And there was no running — my husband was lying there wounded, how could we leave him? And there was nowhere to run anyway.”

I ask what became of the neighbours’ bodies. Anna shakes her head. “I don’t know. We were all too afraid to go there.”

The frightened people stayed in the basement for a full day. Then Anna and her sister-in-law finally went outside to cook some soup and saw two soldiers.

“Lyuda started trembling — she thought they’d come to shoot us. But I saw they had red armbands and realized they were ours. I just froze — could it be that liberation had finally come?” Anna says. “They came over and tried to calm Lyuda down: ‘We’re Russians, we’re your own.’ She started kissing and hugging them.”

The soldiers said they had entered the village the day before — crossing the river. They had spent the night in the Zatolokins’ house and apologized for taking a pair of dry sneakers. The people in the basement told them about the neighbours who had been killed and asked them to evacuate at least the wounded Sergei and the children. The soldiers said they would try later and asked them not to tell anyone they were there.

That evening one of them returned to the basement and said, “The ones who shot your neighbours were hiding in a basement nearby. I killed them.”

The next day, an incendiary drone struck the Zatolokins’ house. “It went up so fast we couldn’t put it out,” Anna recalls. “Lyuda had another breakdown. She was crying, ‘The house was protecting us, shielding us — we couldn’t be seen from the street. Now they’ll see us and kill us.’ We barely managed to calm her down.”

There was nowhere else for the soldiers to stay, so they moved into the basement. “And then things got even harder for us,” Anna says. “The ‘Baba Yagas’ started coming in — they’d drop two charges, then four. The shed in the yard was completely destroyed. There were days when we had no water at all — even though the well was right there. We couldn’t go out; there were so many drones overhead, big ones and small ones.”

Despite the danger, the soldiers went out on missions and kept returning to the basement. “They had some food — a small piece of bread, thin as blockade rations. And a bit of sausage on top. They gave it all to Rita. They gave her their Snickers bars. Over the radio they asked for bread ‘for the civilians,’ and other soldiers ran in and brought some.”

Starved for conversation, the people in the basement eagerly questioned their new acquaintances. “One of them was from Moscow — Andryushka («Little Andrew» -- Kommersant). A young guy, thirty-one. He had a wife, no children,” Anna recalls. “The other was Uncle Vova — he was forty-two. From Pskov. He’d been on the Zaporizhzhia front at first, then they transferred him here. It was his second marriage, he had two daughters, eight and nine years old. He showed us their photos on his phone. I invited them both to visit — I said, after the war we’ll build a new house, come see us.”

A chocolate bar dropped from a drone

In the Zatolokins’ basement, civilians and soldiers welcomed the New Year together. “We had one jar of canned pineapple stored away. We opened it and took turns eating the pieces. Uncle Vova had some music saved on his phone — he turned it on. Rita was so happy, she started dancing,” Yulia says. “Other soldiers sent over a bag of sweets for her — nuts, chocolate bars, candy. ‘This is for you,’ they said, ‘from Father Frost for the New Year.’ She was overjoyed.”

Exactly at midnight, a Grad rocket salvo struck somewhere nearby.

In another basement, Natasha Skvortsova was also waiting for a gift from Father Frost. “First we wrote him a letter asking for treats. Then I said, let’s ask for something more serious. So she wrote a letter asking for the war to end and for us to stay alive. We left the letter near the basement so he could take it at night,” Olga says. The adults had a New Year’s wish as well — that they would finally be liberated or evacuated.

On December 31, their neighbour Svetlana somehow managed to catch and slaughter a piglet that had gone feral. She shared the meat with the whole street, so they fried meat patties in the basement. The lady of the house took out a small jar of caviar she had been saving for the holiday. The delicacy, Olga says, was spread on stale, expired hardtack — which they had been eating instead of bread. “Each of us put a spoonful of caviar on a cracker — that’s how we celebrated the New Year.”

But it didn’t feel like a celebration, she admits. “No one felt any joy. There was sadness in our eyes and in our hearts. Our troops came two weeks ago — and still no one had saved us, no one had taken us out. The soldiers said the situation didn’t allow it — drones were in the air around the clock, it was impossible to move into the village in large groups. They said we had to wait.”

In the morning, Natasha went outside and saw that Father Frost had not taken her letter. The girl was upset, and her mother explained, “How could he fly in such terrible conditions? He’d be afraid.”

A few hours later, Russian soldiers dropped a packet of candy and a chocolate bar into the yard from a drone.

January

“We walked, and walked, and walked” 

For Anna and her daughters, the occupation ended on January 9. “Nothing at all suggested it was coming — we went to bed as usual that evening. At two in the morning a soldier with the call sign Kesha (Little Innokenty – Kommersant) woke me up and said they’d received permission over the radio to evacuate two people, children first. I was afraid to let Rita and Yulia go alone, so I asked him — could I go too? I’ll lose my mind here without them. He spoke over the radio again, and they agreed to take three.”

They dressed quickly. Anna packed documents, icons and a prayer book into a bag. They put together a small backpack for Rita — she tucked in her beads and Natasha’s letters. They said goodbye to the wounded Sergei and asked everyone to take care of him. Then they stepped out of the basement.

“A soldier about forty was leading us — his call sign was Tsyganenok (Little Gypsy man – Kommersant). He acted as a guide, constantly leading our soldiers into the village and back out again. This time he was escorting Kesha out as part of a rotation,” Anna says. “We walked down the street, then through the gardens, then across a swamp to the river. Kesha had brought a piece of foam plastic with him. He set it on the water and sat Rita on it. The rest of us were up to our necks in the water, and she floated on the foam like on a little boat.”

Beyond the river there was more swamp. An enemy “Baba Yaga” flew overhead — like something out of a grim Russian fairy tale.

“We crouched down and didn’t move… I don’t know by what miracle, but it didn’t spot us — it flew past. A mortar was firing too, and that didn’t hit us either. Most likely God saved us that day.”

Beyond the swamp lay an open field.

“We walked, and walked, and walked — soaked, freezing, exhausted. We’d spent so many months sitting in a basement, we’d forgotten how to walk. And now three kilometers through terrible mud. It sucks at your boots, clings to your legs — it’s so hard to move,” Anna says. “Rita was a brave girl, she didn’t complain. But Yulia completely broke down — she was crying: ‘Mom, I don’t have the strength. Leave me here. Just leave me.’ I grabbed her by the hand and dragged her, dragged her…”

In the middle of the field, Tsyganenok handed them over to a soldier with a quad bike and turned back. Kesha stayed behind. Anna, Yulia and Rita were somehow seated on the quad bike, and they sped off through the same mud. “We were going so fast, it was shaking so badly — I was afraid the girls would fall off and hurt themselves. But we made it. Only Rita’s little backpack flew off in the wind and was lost.”

The quad bike didn’t stop until Obukhovka, where the Zatolokins were taken to the soldiers’ raspologha (quarters – Kommersant). There they were given dry clothes and food. They waited for Kesha to arrive, and then rode with the soldiers in a bukhanka (UAZ van – Kommersant) to the hospital in Rylsk. From there, relatives took them to Kursk.

Anna and her daughters spent five months under occupation. The road to freedom took about eight hours.

But this story has no happy ending. The following night, the soldiers tried to evacuate Anna’s parents. In the field they were attacked by a Ukrainian “Baba Yaga.” Ivan Petrovich and Valentina Sergeievna were killed. Uncle Vova from Pskov was killed as well — the same soldier to whose music Rita had danced on New Year’s Eve. Only Andryushka-soldier survived; his hand was shattered. He called Anna from the hospital — that is how she learned what had happened to her loved ones.

Their bodies are still lying in the field.

“The Ukrainians were just a few meters away.” 

After this tragedy, the command decided to put the evacuation from Nikolaevo-Darino on pause. So nothing changed for Olga and Natasha — they continued to hide in the basement. “It turned out that both our side and the Ukrainians were in the village, all mixed together. Some were in houses, some in basements. You couldn’t tell who was where — there was constant gunfire,” the woman recalls. “The ‘Baba Yaga’ flew over often, dropping munitions into our yard. One strike set the animal shed on fire — it burned all night. The drone also hit the house where our soldiers were holed up. Or rather, what was left of the house. Ukrainian armoured vehicles drove past several times — after that grenade incident, we were terrified of them. One woman decided to run back to her house. When she returned, she said everything had been destroyed, and there were more than a dozen Ukrainian bodies lying in the yard.” 

One day, the residents of the basement had to provide medical care to a wounded soldier. “In the morning we heard two very powerful blasts,” Olga recalls. “Then a soldier crawled in, covered in blood, with shrapnel wounds. Natasha was terrified — I kept telling her, ‘He’s one of ours, one of ours.’ We laid him on a mattress, cut off his clothes and tried to bandage him as best we could. He was groaning, saying, ‘Run to the basement next door — we have tourniquets there, painkillers.’ We ran — even though it was frightening, there was a drone in the sky — but what could we do? The man was dying. We came back, gave him an injection and put on a tourniquet. He was conscious, lying there, groaning. Only three hours later were his comrades able to take him away.”

On Orthodox Christmas, January 7, Natasha fell ill — her temperature rose sharply. In ordinary life, with pediatricians and ambulances, it would have been routine. In a basement under shelling, it was an emergency.

“She kept running a fever of 39.7°C. It even reached 40°C. We had some fever reducers — children’s Nurofen — we’d give it to her, the fever would come down, and then it would rise again. At first we thought it was a virus, but after a couple of days we looked in her mouth — it was stomatitis. It’s not surprising: since mid-November we hadn’t bathed or even washed properly — we were saving water,” Olga says. “One soldier, Yura, brought us an expired throat spray from another house — we used it. We brewed chamomile from little sachets. It got a bit better, and after five days the fever finally broke. But those were very anxious days.”

In mid-January, for the first time in a long while, a neighbour from the basement across the street came by. She brought startling news: “There are Ukrainian soldiers living in our house. One is from Kharkiv, the other from Mykolaiv. They asked us for water, heated up canned food.”

“And that was when we really lost heart,” Olga recalls. “We were happy our troops were here. We thought our whole street was under their control, that they would take us out soon. But the Ukrainians were just a few meters away. And who knows what they might do.”

She went outside and saw them herself. “They were in that yard gathering splinters for kindling, walking around openly, not hiding.”

A couple of days later the neighbour came again and said that “someone had shot one of the Ukrainians, and the other had run off.” He later returned and lived alone in the ruins of the house.

“A Russian soldier came by, and we told him all this. He went out, dashed across to that house, threw a grenade through the window and shouted, ‘Surrender, you so-and-so!’ He captured a Ukrainian soldier, well done,” the woman says. “Later that same Russian soldier was seriously wounded and taken away for treatment.”

“We just sat there and cried.”

Days passed. There were more and more Russian soldiers in the village — but the fighting did not subside. If anything, it intensified.

“Our troops were pushing the Ukrainians out and taking over their positions. And we hoped the Ukrainian forces would simply withdraw. But they fought back, held on to the very end. To the very end,” Olga sighs. “And even after our side had dug in here, they kept bringing the Ukrainians in — you could say, like lambs to the slaughter. They were just being killed, that was all. To be honest, we even began to feel sorry for them.”

Olga also worried constantly about the Zatolokins. She did not know that Anna and her daughters had already been evacuated — the last word from that end of the village had come on November 30. “I kept asking the soldiers: how are they? Have they been freed? And they would say there was no information from there. That a different brigade was operating in that area,” Olga says. “And I kept thinking: how is little Rita coping with all this? What if they’ve run out of food? Lord, what the things you imagine in a situation like that.”

She had mixed feelings whenever soldiers came to check on the basement. Of course she was glad to see them — especially since they shared food and brought Natasha candy and chocolate. At the same time, she was terrified that Ukrainian drones would spot men in camouflage and turn their basement into a target.

On January 24, that is exactly what happened to their neighbours.

“There was a basement where Alexander Chaikin lived with his seven-year-old son, Makar. They had stayed with the Zatolokins before, but in the fall they moved to our side of the village. An elderly couple lived there too, but the grandmother died before New Year’s — she had advanced cancer and there was no treatment,” Olga says. “Our soldiers used to stop by there — apparently the Ukrainians spotted that from above. And then they started hammering the basement. From the sound of it, we counted six drones hitting it. And then Alexander shouted, ‘They’ve killed Makar!’ My mother-in-law grabbed some bandages and ran to try to help — that little boy died right in front of her. The grandfather was wounded, his leg shattered — she broke apart some boards, made a splint and tied it up with bandages.”

Seven-year-old Makar Chaikin was buried in the garden.

That evening the soldier Yura came into the basement. The women “pounced on him,” demanding immediate evacuation. As before, he said there was nothing he could do — the decision to evacuate civilians was up to the command. But later that night he returned. “Olya, get ready. You and Natasha. The commander has given the go-ahead. I’m taking you out — at my own risk.”

“My heart started pounding,” Olga says. “There was shelling all the time, drones overhead — it was frightening to leave, and frightening to stay. I couldn’t decide. It was my mother-in-law who said, ‘Olya, what choice do we have? We have to go.’ Then she asked to come with us. She told Yura, ‘I can’t stay here alone — I’ll spend the whole time worrying whether you made it.’”

Yura looked at old Vera Mikhailovna. “Can you run?”

“I’ll run.”

“Then get ready. I’ll be back in half an hour.”

The evacuation bag had been packed back in the summer. Over the months Olga had replaced the clothes inside several times — summer things for autumn, then for winter.

“All our documents were in there — mine and Natasha’s. The keys to the car that no longer existed — maybe as a keepsake, I don’t even know. The photographs of my husband that survived — he’s just a boy in those photos,” Olga says. “We took one of his T-shirts to remember him by. His mug.”

They also took two laptops — the only valuables the family had left. One had been bought shortly before the occupation; it was still brand new. Natasha had used the other for remote classes when in-person schooling in the border area was suspended because of shelling.

“Everyone in the basement was worried about us leaving,” Olga says. “No one complained that others were being evacuated first. We had always agreed that families with children should go before anyone else. People were glad at least someone was getting out. And we were afraid Yura wouldn’t come back.”

He did.

In the yard he gave them clear instructions: “We run the whole way. Keep five meters between you. Step exactly where I step — don’t veer off, there could be mines. Don’t fall behind.”

They ran in short bursts to another house, where a soldier named Grisha was waiting. Then the four of them set off again.

“My mother-in-law fell behind almost immediately, then she actually fell. She had no strength left — after half a year in a basement you forget how to move. But she got up and caught up with us,” Olga says. “We were running through our own village, and I didn’t recognize it. Everything was destroyed, craters everywhere. I couldn’t even tell where we were, as if I were seeing it for the first time.”

On the way, the soldiers had to step away briefly and told the women to wait for them in a nearby basement. “And that’s where we left the laptops,” Olga recalls. “We realized we simply couldn’t carry them any farther. We had barely managed half a kilometre with that weight — and there was still so much ahead.”

Next came the river. Yura ran ahead to look for a boat along the bank, while the women and Grisha stood under a tree. A low rumble sounded — a “Baba Yaga” was approaching. “We pressed ourselves against the tree, my heart pounding. I was praying, ‘Lord, please let it not drop anything.’ It flew straight over us. We could hear it release its load somewhere in the distance.”

Yura returned an hour later. There was no boat.

The soldiers had to cross the icy river four times: first they carried their own packs and weapons across and left them on the far bank; then they brought over the women’s belongings and coats; after that, the two of them carried Natasha across; and finally they helped Olga and Vera Mikhailovna make the crossing.

“We made it across. Of course we were soaked, but we made it. We wrung out our boots, put on dry jackets — and started running again. Yura in front, Grisha bringing up the rear.”

After that, it was the same as for the Zatolokins — the swamp, the endless field, the quad bike, the soldiers’ raspologha, the UAZ van, the hospitals, and finally Kursk.

“When we got out, we just sat there and cried. We are very, very grateful to the soldiers of the Pskov division who got us out. Very grateful to their commander, Ivan,” Olga says. “It was terrifying to leave — but it was even more terrifying to stay.”

February

“Our whole life burned down.”

Kursk was calm and safe, but Anna couldn’t settle. For more than a month she knew nothing about her wounded husband’s fate. “I kept thinking about how Sergei was doing. I thought, what if he’s died? I couldn’t push those thoughts out of my head. When Olya was evacuated, we got in touch — but it turned out she didn’t know anything about our street. It was very hard for me.”

Only on February 13 were the soldiers able to evacuate Lyuda. She called immediately to say that Sergei was alive. She also said that the shelling and drone strikes had never stopped, and that their shelter was now housing people they themselves had fed back in the autumn. First a woman came whose 88-year-old mother had died; the daughter had been forced to leave her body in the basement — it was too dangerous to bury her in the garden. Then a man asked to stay after his own basement collapsed during shelling. He managed to get out in time, but his 95-year-old mother was buried under the rubble. They were unable to recover her body.

Sergei was evacuated on February 15. The soldiers and Kolya carried him the entire way on a stretcher. He is now in a hospital in Moscow, where doctors are trying to save his leg and remove the shrapnel.

By March, the military had evacuated the remaining civilians. Nikolayevo-Daryino is now considered liberated, but it is still extremely dangerous to be there — shelling, drones and mines remain a constant threat. The village has been added to the official list of 120 settlements closed to civilians. But the women themselves are no longer sure they will ever return.

“I don’t want to live on the border any more,” Anna admits. “Before, it was the opposite — I never wanted to leave the village. I was born there, built a house, made a life, raised my children… But now even Kursk is hard for me — I can’t stand the constant air-raid sirens.”

“Our house burned to the ground. Only the brick walls are left. All the outbuildings burned too. Our whole life burned down,” Olga sighs. “Now we have to start over. From nothing.”

They both believe that the state "should give a status" to survivors of the occupation. “In Kursk, officials call us displaced persons,” Olga says, her voice tight. “Displaced persons are the ones who managed to get out in the first days of August. I understand that it’s hard for them too — they lost everything as well. But no one went through what we went through in that hell. We spent half a year in fear, in hunger, in the cold — and now we’re classified as displaced. They should come up with some other status for us. There used to be a category called ‘children of the war’ — but they say there is no war. Then let Natasha and Rita be ‘children of the occupation.’ As it is, they’re nobody.” 

The experience of living under daily mortal danger proved deeply traumatic — and now it stands like a wall of incomprehension between the residents of Nikolayevo-Daryino and the rest of the world. Olga gave me the contact details of a neighbour who had lived through the occupation with his 6-monthes son. “Talk to him — I can’t even imagine what they went through. The baby’s teeth started coming in down there in the basement, he took his first steps in the basement. And a ‘Baba Yaga’ dropped a shell right onto their cellar.”

But the man refused to give an interview.

“I don’t see the point,” he said curtly over the phone. “So people can read over their morning coffee about how we survived — and then go on with their day? Better not.”

Olga isn’t surprised by his refusal.

“I was telling one woman recently about how we lived — she was shocked, of course. But if it had been me, the way I was before all this, listening to a story like that, I wouldn’t really have understood either,” she says. “When you see war on television, you don’t grasp it as it really is. It feels far away. You think it will never touch you. But once you’ve been through it yourself… you start asking how something like that is even possible. And there are ordinary people on the other side, in their villages and cities — they have grief too. They’re just like us. Ordinary people don’t want war.”

“It’s like a horror film — you never think something like that could happen to you. It’s the twenty-first century. It seems impossible,” Anna says quietly. “To be honest, I wouldn’t wish what we lived through over those six months on anyone.”