Ukrainian survivor tells Blinken of horrors of Russian occupation
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited a school in Yahidne, Ukraine, on Thursday where Russian soldiers held local Ukrainians prisoner, tortured them, and left several to die, CNN reports.
Valeri Polhui, a survivor, told Blinken that 127 people were held in a small, cold, and damp basement room for almost a month. Ten people died in that room, he said, and they were forced to pull the bodies out "over the heads of children."
Polhui said that if a person died before noon, the Russians "allowed the body to be taken out of the room." "If a person died in the afternoon, in the evening, they did not allow the body to be taken out," he said.
Everyone except the elderly was forced to stand or sit, but they could not lie down because the room was so crowded, he described. The youngest child held prisoner there was one and a half months old.
The Ukrainian prisoners asked the Russians to let the children get some air "and the children started fainting," but the Russians "replied: what do you want? It's war." Even when they begged that a person was on the verge of death, "they would say: ok, leave him or let him die."
"At first, it was very cold in here," Polhui said, but as the room filled with Ukrainian detainees, "there was no air to breathe." "The first ones were the elderly - they started to lose their minds. Then they died," he related.
When the Russians finally allowed mothers to take their children outside for air, "the children wouldn't open their eyes because they had become so used to the darkness," he described.
Blinken said after seeing the school: "This is just a building in a village, in a community in Ukraine, and this is a story that we've seen again and again and again."
Translation by Iurie Tataru
