“Thank you for not killing us.” A message from a Ukrainian woman to Putin

 About a week ago, a group of Chechen soldiers stormed the gate of a mental health facility in Borodianka, northwest of Kyiv. 

"I can't believe my eyes, it's hard for me to say this, but I really don't believe this could happen," says Natalia Schulhach, a 45-year-old teacher. "I don't understand how this happens in the 21st century."

The New York Times recounts harrowing testimony from Borodianka, a city of about 12,000 people that was almost turned into a ghost town after Russian forces withdrew.

The soldiers jumped out of their jeeps, and ordered 500 patients and employees of the Borodianka Special Care Home into the yard, at gunpoint.

"We thought we were going to be executed," said the sanatorium's director, Marina Hanitska.

Hanitska added that the soldiers took out a camera, and demanded that everyone smile while most of the patients were crying.

"We order you to say to the camera 'Thank you, Vladimir Putin'," the soldiers said to Hanitska. 

Looking at the guns pointed at her, she said, "Thank you for not killing us."

Then she lost consciousness, according to the Al-Hurra website.

In more than a dozen interviews conducted by the New York Times in Borodianka and other towns in the stricken areas around Kyiv, residents described Russian soldiers as brutal, sadistic and undisciplined. 

Their accounts could not be independently verified, but were consistent with other reports and visual evidence about Russian behavior in the region, the newspaper says.

The siege of the mental hospital lasted for weeks, during which the building lost heat, water and electricity, and more than ten patients died.

"The Russian occupation was short but horrific," says the New York Times.

Officials at the mental institution in Borodianka said that Russian soldiers stole alcohol from their pharmacy.

Staff said they saw Russian soldiers writing obscene messages on the walls - in human excrement.

"I vomited when I saw it," Hanitska said. "I don't understand how they were brought up, and who can do it."

Elsewhere, residents said they stole bed sheets and sneakers, and defaced many of the homes they had taken over with childish graffiti. 

Across the Ukrainian regions recently liberated from the month-long Russian occupation, a long line of disturbing stories are emerging of the horror and death inflicted by Russian soldiers on defenseless Ukrainian civilians under their control.

Every day, Ukrainian investigators discover the bodies of civilians who were shot in the head or bear signs of torture.

There are also other accounts of civilians being held as human shields, and some of them dying due to lack of food, water or heat. 

Ukrainian officials said last Friday that Russian forces had killed at least 900 civilians as they withdrew from the Kyiv region.

Much of this misery spread to small towns near Kyiv, where the Russians occupied large areas in the early days of the war, according to what the New York Times reports on the situation.

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