A year ago, when Putin began his invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the Russian army was advancing on the capital, Kyiv, convinced that taking it would be a military walk. But on the 25th, about twenty kilometers from the target, a city of 64,000 inhabitants stood in their way: Irpín. Ukrainian soldiers put up a stubborn battle and a month later, on March 28, they managed to repel the invaders and block their way to Kyiv.
During that fight, the Ukrainians blew up a bridge over the Irpin River to contain the enemy’s advance. The images of the evacuation of civilians under the destroyed viaduct – women, children and the elderly in a line with their bundles – went around the world, as did the photo of a family with their suitcases that fell dead in a street from mortar fire.
“Russian war crimes in Ukraine started in Irpin, and then the whole country turned into one huge Irpin; there we saw for the first time in this war that the Russians always attack the civilian population”, says the Ukrainian writer Volodímir Koskin, 67, in Berlin, who lived in that city and witnessed the first days of the Russian occupation before escaping with his wife.
Together they managed to reach Kyiv on March 8, from where they took a train to Lviv, in the west of the country, and later crossed the Polish border. “Since March 25 of last year, we have been living with a Polish Catholic family near Warsaw; We are hopeful, even excited, to return to Ukraine this summer”, Koskin declares in conversation with La Vanguardia. He traveled to Germany for a conference at the Berlin office of the Pilecki Institute, a Polish historical research center that created a special archive to document war crimes in Ukraine.
“From February 24 to March 8, 2022, I took notes of the terrible scenes I saw in Irpín and wrote a diary; it has been partially published in a Ukrainian literary magazine and in two Polish magazines”, says Koskin, who in peacetime published twenty books of detective fiction or melodrama, and works on literature and geography of his region. “I wrote the book Río de memoria Irpín and that knowledge of local geography helped me when we fled on foot through the forest; It is a humid zone and my wife is 81 years old, it was a hard experience, ”she recalls.
“We lived on Severynivska street, it is one of the longest, it measures ten kilometers; now they bring presidents and prime ministers to this street to see the destruction,” Koskin continues. From their nine-story building – they lived on the sixth floor – they observed fire and smoke over the nearby Hostomel airfield on the first day of the invasion, and did not come out. “The second day, my wife told me that we needed bread; I went to the store across the street and there were three corpses in front of it; in another street I counted seven deaths”.
The intensity of the Russian occupation was relatively uneven – “for a few hours they could not be in a neighborhood, but they could return after two hours” – so, with extreme care, Volodimir Koskin made raids to observe and take aim. “The hardest thing psychologically was seeing an excavator digging a hole for a mass grave because there were many dead civilians; They did it in a hurry, taking advantage of the fact that, for some reason, the Russians had disappeared from that sector”.
In other streets, the remaining residents buried the dead where they could: “I remember fresh graves in the flower beds; some with a cardboard with names and surnames, others only with the registration number of the car. Between March 6 and 7, I saw dozens of cars charred by tanks; They were people who were trying to flee and there was nothing left to identify them other than the license plates of the car”.
According to the Irpin City Council, between February 25 and March 28 – the date the Ukrainian army retook control – some 300 civilians were killed by Russian shells or gunfire, many while trying to flee. “For the Russians it doesn’t matter who it is; Whether the church belongs to the Kyiv Patriarchate or to the Moscow Patriarchate, they will bomb both; It doesn’t matter if the kindergarten is Russian-speaking or Ukrainian, they will bomb both; This is how it happened in Irpín and it happens throughout the country.”
The destroyed houses are being rebuilt so that the inhabitants can return – when the Russians withdrew, there were 3,500 residents left – and quite a few are returning. The bridge blown up by the Ukrainians was rebuilt in November. Koskin’s sixth floor lost its windows, but was saved – her daughter went to see it before leaving the country – while the upper floors were bombed. “Miraculously or not, the building is standing there, like a burnt mountain, and everything around it is obliterated.”
