Putin’s Army Forced Childbirth Nightmare on Captive Family

VELYKA ALEXANDRIVKA, Ukraine—Ukrainians are celebrating a huge victory in Kherson but after seven months of Russian occupation, the horror stories are just starting to emerge.

Among them the tale of Olga Balan, a resident of the town of Velyka Aleksandrivka, whose husband was kidnapped by Russian soldiers just before she was due to give birth.

“They took [my husband] Serhiy captive and tortured him with electrocution very badly for five days,” she told The Daily Beast as she cradled her 5-month-old daughter, Eva, in her arms. “These are incredibly horrible people. When they found people with Ukrainian tattoos, they would cut them out of their skin. They went from house to house, shooting people’s dogs! Every morning you wake up, look out the window and see that the Russians are still there, and we ask ourselves: ‘When will they leave?’”

At the start of last month, Olga’s prayers were answered when Ukrainian troops liberated her small town in the north of Kherson oblast, during the start of a long-advertised offensive to rid the region of Russian soldiers.

Kherson was one of Moscow’s few success stories during the war, captured after Russian troops stormed the region from occupied Crimea soon after the invasion. As the only regional capital Vladimir Putin’s forces had taken, it was the Russian president’s biggest prize. But last Friday, Ukrainian troops entered the city itself, greeted by crowds of joyful residents, waving the blue and yellow Ukrainian flags they had kept hidden from the brutal occupation government.

The Kremlin attempted to distance Putin from the failures, with the flight from Kherson being announced by General Sergei Surovikin, Russia’s top military commander in Ukraine, and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. But Russian hardliners who support the war are increasingly frustrated with the lack of any meaningful progress, as Ukraine humiliates Russia with victory after victory.

Meanwhile, military and police investigators are going door to door in the liberated territory, collecting evidence of war crimes committed by the Russians, including torture, killings, looting and sexual abuse cases that have been widely documented in all the regions Putin’s troops have been forced out of.

Serhiy, holding his 3-year-old son Daniel, said he was targeted for torture, along with his colleagues, because he was a police chief. “When I found out that the Russians were near, that they would come to our house, I told the policemen who were staying in our house: “Guys, I’m next, we must leave here, because if they find us all here, they will simply shoot us. We left all our police uniforms and weapons in the garage.” But he wasn’t able to escape them for long—the Russians eventually found Serhiy and took him in for interrogation.

Because of his position, the family said they were kept under constant house arrest. Olga was not even allowed to go to the hospital to give birth. Instead, Serhiy was forced to deliver his wife’s child in their dark, damp basement. “For four months I did not leave the basement, I sat there with my children.”

We were standing in the living room of her half-ruined house. The windows had been blown out by a rocket strike, and the floor was covered in debris. One of the children’s bedrooms on the second story had been destroyed. The damage has left the family exposed to the harsh Ukrainian winter, so the Balan family is still sleeping underground to avoid freezing in their own home.

As Julia, a local volunteer delivering food and medicine to houses in the town, described it, “the Russian ‘liberators’ liberated people from everything they had, liberated them from their houses and buildings.”

The Balan family had a constant reminder of the occupation just over the road—the Russians had converted the local primary school into their military headquarters. “There were around 1,200 of them in the school,” Olga said. “There was a lot of Russian equipment: vehicles, armored personnel carriers.” The school’s windows were still covered in sandbags, while broken strands of barbed wire were littered over the courtyards. A missile shell had fallen in the middle of a children’s playground.

Olga and Serhiy were jubilant when the town was liberated. “When our troops entered, it was impossible to convey this joy. Everyone cried when they met them and shouted, ‘These are ours!’ Many did not believe that the Ukrainian troops had finally come to us.”

The couple lambasted the sham annexation of Kherson, painting the idea that they would ever think of themselves as Russian as ludicrous. “In our country you are a free person, you can do whatever you want, you can freely express your opinion,” Olga said. “In their country, Russia this is not possible, so it is very difficult. If you were told that the sun is green, then you should say: ‘Yes, the sun is green.’ You have no right to your own opinion.”

Locals are beginning to adjust back into their old lives. Stepan, a pensioner living in the town, told The Daily Beast that “everything is slowly getting better. It is not normal yet, but it is improving due to the local authorities. It is incomparable to the occupation, which was very scary. The Rashists [a portmanteau of ‘Russian fascists’] are barbarians in the truest sense of the word.”

Ukrainian troops are eager to declare victory in the region. Oleksandr—Ukrainian troops generally do not give last names for security reasons—a military medic from the 96th battalion, recalled how his unit was forced to retreat from the town when it came under Russian encirclement. They were forced to make a dangerous breakout from their positions with nothing but machine guns, unsupported by artillery or armored vehicles. Now, his unit is returning in triumph.

“I don’t think it, I know that it is just a question of time,” he says when asked whether he thinks Ukraine will be able to take back all the land currently under Russian occupation. “Everything will be well; everything will be Ukraine. We just need to do the work, wait, do everything right. It’s our land, we have what to stand for, what to defend it for. And if it comes to that, we have what to die for, so everything will be well.”

Yet the scars of Russian occupation can still be found everywhere. Many of the roads and fields in the region are littered with explosive debris that will take years to properly dispose of. In the basement of the school, the occupiers had left a chilling message for the local population. On one of the walls, they had painted a giant Z, and scribbled underneath “We will soon be back.” It is now the job of Oleksandr and his fellow troops to ensure this never happens.