The first contact between the Russian invaders and Ivankiv's Ukrainian neighbors

On the morning of February 25, 2022, one day after the start of the war, a column of Russian troops stopped in the town of Ivankiv, 85 kilometers south of the Belarusian border, 85 kilometers northwest of their intended destination, the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. They arrived at the main square and were surprised to discover that it was empty, the streets too.

Russian soldiers knocked on the doors of the houses and asked why no one had come out to meet them. The neighbors looked at them perplexed.

“Rather the question is what are you doing here?” they answered.

“We have come to free you,” the Russians explained.

-Whose?

‘From the Nazis.

What Nazis?

-Those who rule in this country.

“Look,” the neighbors replied, “there are no Nazis here. They can return to Russia in peace. We don’t need to be released.

This is how the first contact between invaders and invaded in Ivankiv (population 10,500 inhabitants) took place, according to what the mayor, Tetiana Sviridenko, told me. As she spoke, sitting in her office, I thought she might have been describing the opening scene of a movie about the failure of the Russian assault on Kyiv last year, about Vladimir Putin’s colossal mistake in thinking his troops would conquer the Ukraine in two weeks.

Fifty-year-old, short, short black hair, smiling and, at the same time, tough, Mrs. Sviridenko would be the protagonist and narrator of the film. She would comment, for example, that the absence of flowers and celebrations was not the only thing that perplexed the Russian soldiers.

–“The quality of the roads –he told me– the lighting of the streets at night, the bathrooms inside and not outside the houses and, above all, the air conditioning units in the walls: they could not believe it, the poor , almost all of them youngsters from the most distant and decrepit Russian provinces”.

So bewildered were they that they waited nearly two weeks before cutting off Ivankiv’s access to mobile networks, allowing the creation of a makeshift intelligence service that was extremely useful to the Ukrainian army’s high command. A group of audacious neighbors told them that during the first 48 hours of the invasion, more than 700 Russian military vehicles passed through the highway that passes through their town on the way to the capital.

As we would see in the most dramatic action scene of the hypothetical film, one of the first disasters suffered by the invaders was at a roundabout about eight kilometers south of Ivankiv, where about twenty Russian tanks stopped. The locals gave the enemy’s position to their own, a surprise attack was launched, and the roundabout turned into a graveyard of metal and Russian corpses.

The next day, the Russians cut off all communication between the town and the outside world, and began searching for Mrs. Sviridenko. Possibly to retaliate, she told me, but most certainly to make him an offer he’d have a hard time refusing. “They would have pressured me to collaborate. To continue exercising as mayor, but in the name of Russia. So that she went on Moscow television to thank the liberators. I was never going to do that and I was preparing to die. I knew that when I told them no, they would shoot me in the back of the head.”

He fled his home hours before the arrival of three Russian military intelligence agents and went into hiding. Her children in her Kyiv saw a report about her on Ukrainian television spreading a rumor that the Russians had captured or killed her. It was not so. As we would see in the movie in thriller mode, the stubborn Mrs. Sviridenko would manage to evade her Russian pursuers for three weeks, until March 31, the date of the happy ending, the true liberation of Ivankiv by Ukrainian troops and the escape of the Russians. towards the northern border with Belarus, a country allied to Putin. Abandoned mission.

Well, “happy ending” was not for all the inhabitants of Ivankiv. Mrs. Sviridenko showed me that tough side I referred to earlier, an aspect of her personality that she shares with enough of her compatriots to think that Russia will never subjugate her country.

“Fortunately,” he told me, “only 48 people died here at Russian hands.

– Alone ?

–For the size of our population it is not much.

“I guess not…” I replied.

“Well, six other people disappeared.

How did they disappear?

They had collaborated with the Russians.

–And what happened to them?

–One cannot be changing sides. You are with us or against.

Yes, but what happened to them?

They were dogs and they died like dogs.

–How did they die like dogs?

–This is war.

–Yes, but…

The little lady mayor gave me an icy look. Her message: that she was not going to answer my questions anymore, that she stop insisting.