Rubble and relief in recaptured south Ukraine village

A basketball hoop stands in the rubble of a school gym. The roof was blown apart during days of heavy fighting in Kreschenivka, a village recently recaptured from Russian troops in southern Ukraine.

The Russians made the village primary school their command post, said Pavlo Ulesco, 62, who showed AFP around.

With trenches and huge pits to hide weapons, they were firmly dug in when Ukrainian soldiers arrived — and the damage is all the more severe for it.

One of the school buildings has been severely hit, some of its walls dashed to piles of bricks.

“At first they shelled the Russians from a distance,” Ulesco said. “The street fighting lasted two or three days.”

Villager Vasyl Khomych said it was “hell”. The 65-year-old remembers the sky “turning red”, flashing like lightning as the ground trembled.

His friend Maria Zheleznyak, 62, said Ukrainian soldiers had arrived at around 07:15 am on October 2. By around 09:00 am, there was fierce fighting.

Ukrainian troops were “shelling, shooting. It was terrible”.

“We heard cars, tanks, lorries driving like crazy.

“But we survived.”

She was overcome with relief when she recognised the Ukrainian soldiers by the yellow bands on their uniforms.

“We cried so much, we hugged everyone,” she said.

Despite the intensity of the fighting, neither of the villagers remembered seeing any Russian corpses.

The Ukrainian army has been removing traces of Russia’s movement through the south, including the Kherson region where Kyiv on Thursday claimed to have recaptured 400 square kilometres (some 150 square miles) from Moscow’s forces in less than a week.

AFP saw only two burnt-out Russian tanks in the school compound. Another near the entrance to the village had been taken away, Ulesco said.

On the main road to Kreschenivka, several destroyed tanks, which AFP saw on Friday morning, had already been towed away by the afternoon.

The corpses of Russian soldiers, seen a few days earlier on social media in pictures beside the sculpture of a watermelon on the road leading into the village, had also disappeared.

The Ukrainian army, which had invited AFP to visit recaptured southern territories, appeared reluctant to show the damage it had inflicted on Russian forces.

AFP was barred from filming or talking to soldiers.

In Kreschenivka and three villages largely spared the fighting — Ukrainka, Biliaivka and Shevchenkivka — people praised Ukrainian troops, and mocked the Russian soldiers who “confined them” to their homes for seven months.

“When the battle started in Kreschenivka, they all fled on foot or by bike… and half an hour later, a (Ukrainian) helicopter shot” and killed them, said 55-year-old Galyna Dekhtyuk, who lives in Shevchenkivka.

In Biliaivka, the drive to recapture the area came as a surprise. As elsewhere in the rural south occupied by Moscow, internet has been cut off and phone connection is poor.

“We didn’t even see how they left, but we were so happy,” said Iryna Shashovska, 41.

Her husband Leonid Tereshchenko, 63, said he spent five days detained by Russian forces while they checked he wasn’t pro-Ukrainian or a “Nazi”.

He was adamant there was no fighting in Biliaivka.

“They ran away,” he said.