Nobody answers the phone in Archanhelske anymore.

Before the Russians came in mid-March, there were more than two thousand in the village, now there are maybe two dozen.

And they don't take off anymore.

Either they're scared or the Russians took their phone away from them.

Konrad Schuller

Political correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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The others are now everywhere where there are no Russians.

In Poland, in Germany, with relatives or in the temporary shelters of Krywyj Rih.

Kryvyi Rih is an endless cluster of mines and steel mills in southern Ukraine surrounded by apartment blocks and workers' cottages.

For the refugees from Archanhelske, it is the first large city without Russians that they can reach.

Archanhelske, their village, is now in another galaxy.

You can still zoom in on Google Maps: a few farmhouses with gardens and kennels, a quarry and then fields, nothing but fields.

The largest house in town is the "Lyceum", an agricultural high school in the form of a Soviet concrete box.

At the edge of the village, a river with trees and reeds marks the front.

On this side, in Archanhelske, the Russians are still standing, on the other side is the Ukrainian army.

Olena Kompanez is the village leader.

She's a well-groomed woman in her mid-fifties, a good civil servant type, and now in the heat she's wearing a summer blouse and slippers.

For a month she has also been sitting in Kryvyi Rih – on a folding sofa in a block, and her husband, Viktor, is sitting next to her.

We visit them together with the Ukrainian association "Truth Hounds", which investigates war crimes in Ukraine and forwards its findings to the public prosecutor's office.

The following illustration follows Olena's statement.

Where other witnesses speak, this is noted.

Post against looters

The Russians reached Archanhelske in mid-March, just under three weeks after Vladimir Putin's attack on Ukraine.

In the meantime, the residents had formed a vigilante group.

They posted sentries against looters, they watched vehicles.

Although they had no weapons, they discussed what to do against tanks and prepared Molotov cocktails.

Viktor, Olena's husband, was there.

He considers himself a patriot of Ukraine, and at rallies he shouted: "Russian warship, fuck you!" - a rallying cry from the first days of the war in the Black Sea.

As the front approached, Ukrainian soldiers showed up first for a few days, and Olena organized tea and piroshki for them.

Then they withdrew across the river, and on the same day the Russians moved up: armored personnel carriers, all-terrain vehicles, wheeled tanks.

The infirmary and the culture house took a few hits, then they moved into the lyceum.

The day after, they shot dead the first villager.

Oleksandr Sipko, a man in his late fifties, lost his nerve and ran away.

Witnesses told Olena the story like this: the soldiers shouted “Stop”, but Sipko was beside himself and kept running.

They shot him in the back.

He fell, crawled a little more and died.

The next day, Olena went to the lyceum with her husband to ask permission for the funeral.

She passed a barricade the Russians had built from captured tractors and combine harvesters and she saw the occupiers.

Some with beards appeared to be Chechens, others looked Asian, others looked European.

The first person to whom she raised her request politely replied that he would go in and ask.

Shortly thereafter, another shot out, raged and yelled, "You want to bury someone!?

We don’t bury our dead either!”