DAVID PRATT IN UKRAINE: Inside the small village that stood fast against Russia’s attempt to capture Kyiv

Even now, six months on as we stand chatting outside his family’s grocery store in the small Ukrainian village of Moschun, you cannot help but sense the trauma of that time still racing through the 52-year-old’s mind.

As he speaks, his contemplative pauses, deep intakes of breath and occasional tear-glazed eyes all point to momentary flashbacks.

“It was very frightening – only a stupid person would not be afraid. I was especially afraid for my grandchildren,” Zherdetsky tells me, before going on to describe how he swept one of them up into his arms as the whole family rushed to escape the house and battle that was about to consume the countryside idyll that is Moschun.

Tucked away in the forest and sitting adjacent to the Irpin river just over 20 miles north of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, Moschun, before the Russian invasion, was the epitome of rural suburbia. Alongside those like Zherdetsky whose family have lived here for seven generations were Ukrainians who had retired or built summer holiday homes.

“Before the war it was calm and prosperous, we wanted to build a kindergarten, then on February 24 my wife woke up and we could hear the explosions at the airport in nearby Hostomel,” Zherdetsky recalls of the night the invasion began.

Battle for Kyiv

FOR the villagers of Moschun and indeed Ukrainians across the country their lives were about to be changed forever as Russian forces bore down on Kyiv from all sides in an effort to take the capital.

By early March, however, the Russian advance had slowed from all directions except in the north where tanks and troops had rolled into Ukraine from neighbouring Belarus in a pincer movement towards Kyiv. Both ends of this pincer were bearing down on two key locations – Moschun and Irpin.

It is estimated that in the battle that ensued some 30,000 Russians were pitched against a much smaller force of just over 3,000 Ukrainians, a Ukrainian brigade and battalion, respectively.

For the 1,000 or so pre-war residents of Moschun, the priority was getting to safety as the Russians sought to obliterate the village with a relentless bombardment of rockets and shells.

“The Russians came in on tanks and armoured personnel carriers (APCs), so we began the evacuation between March 3-6,” says Zherdetsky, adding that the villagers’ departure only came after nearly everyone in the community had thrown their collective weight behind trying to halt the Russian advance.

“People here were united so much. We did everything together. We built trenches and bunkers, people baked bread to feed the people as there was no food,” Zherdetsky explained.

“People of all professions and backgrounds took part. The unity was huge. Never before had I thought that people could do such things together.”

Local heroes

THE villagers of Moschun also covertly assisted the Ukrainian military by passing on key details of Russian troop movements, some villagers paying subsequently with their lives after having been discovered to have photographs of tanks and other weaponry on their mobile phones.

Some military analysts have described their actions as a 21st-century version of partisans behind Nazi lines during the Second World War. Stuck behind the Russian lines, they used chatbots to relay vital information while elsewhere in Ukraine, special teams filtered the reports to make sure they were not planted by the Russians before passing it on to the Ukrainian military.

Throughout this time, shuttling back and forth from the village, Zherdetsky and others helped take civilians out and bring weapons and ammunition in.

Along with Zherdetsky’s own wife Olya and his 10 grandchildren, other women and youngsters were taken to a nearby town where a local hotelier opened his premises and allowed those who had escaped to shelter there in the basement.

Zherdetsky describes how, on one occasion, he ferried out 15 children in his minivan and how on another of his “very scary” runs he delivered weapons to frontline defenders and was buzzed by a Russian helicopter as he drove out from Moschun through a field.

No-one in the village, he says, ever surrendered and except for “tiny kids”, everyone engaged in Moschun’s defence in one way or another, he tells me.

“The son of one local farmer volunteered to bring in supplies of ammunition but unfortunately on one occasion he was surrounded by the Russians and was hit by five bullets,” Zherdetsky recalls.

“He was taken to the hospital and three bullets were removed, but he signed himself out of the hospital even though there were still two bullets in him, and today he is still alive.”

I asked him about the role played in Moschun’s defence by the now-legendary 72nd Mechanised Brigade of the Ukrainian armed forces.

At the height of the battle to defend Kyiv, the brigade was taking massive losses and its commander, Colonel Oleksandr Vdovychenko, is said to have called the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s forces, General Valeriy Zaluzhnyy, requesting permission to withdraw.

Zaluzhnny is reported to have told him that the72nd must at all costs hold their ground and, if necessary, to the last soldier otherwise the Russians would flood through and Ukraine would likely lose Kyiv and the war.

From what he had witnessed would the gates to Kyiv have been left wide open had the 72nd collapsed, I asked Zherdetsky?

“That’s 100 per cent true,” he attests, describing how locals did everything they could to help the first of the soldiers from the unit who arrived in Moschun, many of them unfamiliar with the area and forested terrain.

“On the night of February 24, the 72nd Brigade came to the village in a dozen or so vehicles and we as locals knew where it was better to put them. One local farmer helped a lot in locating them in the forest,” Zherdetsky explained.

Outnumbered

IT was from these positions that the Ukrainian defenders, though vastly outnumbered, fought off as best they could the advancing Russian forces. Local knowledge of the terrain played a key part in the battle, as did some remarkable improvisation.

The 72nd Brigade commander Vdovychenko took advantage of the fact that the levels on the Irpin river were 15 feet higher than normal. By demolishing a dam that held back more water,the defenders were able to flood the area and boggy wetlands, hampering the Russian advance.

The Russians, too, found themselves hoodwinked after Ukrainians, using pieces of cheap foam mat known as karemats and costing no more than £1.50, covered themselves while advancing by holding the mats over their heads, preventing thermal imaging drones from detecting human heat and raining down fire on Ukrainian troops.

Using this stealth method, the defenders were often able to get near enough to Russian armour to destroy them with hand-held anti-tank weapons.

Despite such doggedness and ingenuity, however, the Russian forces did eventually succeed in taking Moschun, leaving as much as 80% of the homes in the village bomb-blasted and burned-out ruins.

Months on from the battle, the significance of Moschun’s defence in preventing the Russian breakthrough to Kyiv is now recognised here in Ukraine at least. One senior military commander has even drawn a latter-day comparison of its 72nd Brigade defenders with the story of the 300 Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae who fought a huge Persian army in 480 BC. I asked Vadym Zherdetsky, given that what he, his family and fellow villagers had lived through, whether he now viewed the Russians differently than he did before the war?

“They don’t exist, the Russians don’t exist in my life – to my mind that nation just vanished,” he eventually replied, after a long and thoughtful pause.

“I think the whole country is to blame for it, because Russians do understand what is going on and do understand what their president is doing in our country,” he continued.

“Here in Ukraine if we don’t agree with our leader we ask him to move on, leave or we fight for change,” he added.

For now, the villagers of Moschun, like many people across Ukraine, are simply trying to hold their lives together and pick up the pieces or rebuild what has been destroyed.

Dead Russians

WAR crimes investigators and forensic teams have already visited Moschun on several occasions. They say that they have only found the bodies of a few dead Russian soldiers in the area and that there are reports the Russians took their dead with them, or even had mobile crematoriums where they could burn the bodies.

What is not in doubt is that some villagers were killed and that before retreating, the Russians heavily mined the area and forest where locals once collected wild berries and mushrooms. Intermittently during my time in Moschun the heavy thud of explosions could be heard, which locals say is the detonation of discovered ordnance. They believe, too, that the invaders buried villagers who are still missing.

On one of Moschun’s tree-lined streets flanked by charred buildings and shrapnel punctured gates, I came across 69-year-old Valentyn Shvets, who was standing talking with policemen over a shallow hole that had been dug in the earth by the side of the road.

For weeks, the elderly man has been looking for his 42-year-old son Sergiy who went missing in the wake of the Russian pullout.

“He returned to the village and was living in what remained of our basement, but then just disappeared,” explained the father of his son’s disappearance.

No-one knows what happened, only that Sergiy’s identification documents were found in the basement along with his jacket, the sleeves of which were turned inside out suggesting it had been forcibly removed at some point. “I’ve come here with the police today because a neighbour reported a terrible smell, and I wanted them to check in case a body had been found,” Valentyn explained, adding that other human remains had been found around Moschun.

However, the case of his son is something of a mystery, given that his disappearance appears to have most likely occurred after the Russians had withdrawn. Nevertheless, Valentyn believes that perhaps the last remaining Russian troops might have been responsible.

Rebuilding lives

TODAY, Moschun has been fully reclaimed by the Ukrainian military and those civilians who fought alongside the soldiers are busy rebuilding their lives and homes.

What now for the future, I ask Vadym Zherdetsky who at the end of our chat is joined by his wife, Olya.

“The first thing is to prepare for the coming winter, that will be tough,” he warns, as the couple allow me to photograph them.

Moments earlier I had noticed that Olya had been crying as I talked with her husband. Had something about my questioning upset her, I wondered?

With the help of my translator, we were able to establish that six months on, Olya remains traumatised by the events of last February and March. For some time afterwards she had even been unable to speak.

Now, despite the ongoing war, both are more upbeat about what lies ahead but are under no illusions about the challenges they and other villagers face, especially with Ukraine’s coming bitter winter.

“The future is to renovate the village to make it blossom and be as prosperous as it was before the war for my family. I must live about 10 years longer to give them a life again and help them to recover,” says Zherdetsky.

Everyone, he says, is doing their part just as they did during the defence of Moschun. He has a son in the local military and a nephew fighting “somewhere in the east”, he tells me.

As I leave the village and pass through the main entry-exit checkpoint surrounded by sandbags and manned by Ukrainian soldiers, I’m momentarily taken aback at the sight of a life-sized, stuffed effigy of a Russian soldier hanging by the neck from a nearby tree.

Kitted out in full uniform with a shopping carrier bag and umbrella dangling from its arms, the effigy also has traditional Russian felt boots known as Valenki on its feet. Twisting slowly on the rope from which it was suspended it’s an eerie and slightly sinister sight, albeit simply an object of black humour on behalf of the Ukrainian soldiers who put it there.

Casting a parting glance at this surreal image I couldn’t help thinking that it will take a lot more than black humour to exorcise the ghosts of those days back in February when the “real” Russians came to Moschun.