Mariya, a resident of the liberated Balakliia: “When I saw the Ukrainian soldiers enter, I did not stop crying”

After six months of Russian occupation, emotion invades the residents of Balakliia, one of the last towns in the Kharkov region liberated by Ukrainian troops during their counteroffensive in the east of the country. Mariya Tymofiyeva remembers the hell she experienced. “They (the Russians) stripped my husband down to his underwear. Here, on the street, you had to undress completely. They look at you, they turn you around. They look for scars, tattoos. If it works for them, they take them away. It was a horror, “he says between sobs. Ukrainian troops have recaptured dozens of cities in a surprising turn on the battlefield. Now the center of the town is taken over by trucks delivering humanitarian aid. Mariya says that when she saw the first Ukrainian soldiers enter, “my heart sank and I couldn’t stop crying.” “I couldn’t believe my eyes. We knew it was very difficult to get our village back: there are bridges everywhere, you can’t get close. We were all stressed. I look in the mirror and realize we’ve grown older,” she recalls. Shots fired at the population when leaving the city The Kharkov authorities have also denounced that the Russian troops have organized “torture camps” in Balakliia. “During the occupation, the Russians always kept at least 40 people captive, feeding them twice a day and with nothing else. They were looking through local collaborators for those who served or had relatives in the Ukrainian secret services,” he detailed. head of the Investigative Department of the Ukrainian National Police in Kharkov. Sergei BolvinovAccording to the police, the Russian Army would have fired at Balakliia citizens from checkpoints during their last day in the city, before Ukrainian troops regained control of part of Kharkov. “All the details of the dispute are still being clarified,” he said after accessing the town after his release.