KOTY, Ukraine—For decades, gunfire and explosions have not surprised the residents of this small village deep in western Ukraine.
The sounds of explosions from artillery training rang out on March 25 from the sprawling Yavoriv military base, the guarded entrance to which lies across the road from the house of Viktor Pokrovskiy.
A self-described pure-blooded Ukrainian, Pokrovskiy moved to Koty from his native Russia in 1977. He has heard gunfire and explosions from the military base at Yavoriv for decades, first from the Soviet army and then from the Ukrainian armed forces, which took over when the nation gained its independence in 1991.
Even for a man used to the sounds of war, nothing matched the blasts Pokrovskiy heard on March 13 this year, when several Russian missiles struck the base, rattling windows in the village and upending the lives of the locals, who had lived in relative calm since Russia invaded Ukraine three weeks earlier.
Pokrovskiy says his relatives in Russia tell him that the Kremlin launched the invasion to save Ukraine from Bandera-vites, a catch-all term Russian state media and politicians use to claim, in part, that Nazis are oppressing and persecuting Russians in Ukraine.
Pokrovskiy, who worked as an electrician at the military base for years before he retired, says he doesn’t need to be saved and doesn’t know where the Nazis are.
“They say, ‘We’re coming to save you from the Bandera-vites,’” Pokrovskiy told The Epoch Times while standing in his front yard on March 25. “It’s all rubbish, nonsense, lies.”
Stepan Bandera, who died in 1959, is a controversial figure even in Ukraine, where many view him as a national hero. Ukrainians who consider their views in line with Bandera’s say they believe that his name stands for Ukrainian independence. Most either gloss over or are unaware of the dark side of Bandera’s legacy, including his movement’s cooperation with Nazi Germany and his involvement in the assassination of ideological opponents.
This gives Russian state-controlled media an opening to claim that Nazism is rampant in Ukraine. Moscow’s years-long media campaign has convinced many Russians, including those who have close family and friends in Ukraine. As a result, the Bandera black and red flags flying over administrative buildings and block posts in western Ukraine mean two entirely different things to mainstream Ukrainians and to Russians who get their news from Kremlin-controlled media.
This is the case for Pokrovskiy’s son, who has broken off all contact with his cousin in Russia. The two men grew up together as best friends and loved each other. The relationship deteriorated after the conflict between pro-Russia separatists and Ukraine in 2014. It came to a painful end after Russia invaded. The man in Russia is convinced of one reality in Ukraine, while the man in Ukraine can only assume his best friend has gone crazy.
“When they were in touch with each other, I told my son to just stop talking to him,” Pokrovskiy said.
“If a man has graduated university and still doesn’t understand that this is all politics, he is ...” he broke off, shrugging.
Pokrovskiy met his wife while working at an All-Union Leninist Young Communist League construction site in Russia’s Saratov region, not far from Ukraine’s eastern border. The two married and had a son there. In 1977, they came to vacation in Koty, where Pokrovskiy’s wife had grown up. By the end of the vacation, she refused to go back. He traveled back to the job site to resign and returned to Koty, where he has lived since.
“What’s not to love here? The apple trees will bloom soon. My six children, I love them. Should I not love my neighbor? He helps me,” Pokrovskiy said.
Pokrovskiy said everyone in the village treats him well. He speaks Ukrainian to everyone, but slips in Russian words every now and then for fun.
Although everyone in western Ukraine speaks Russian, after Russia’s invasion, using the language can draw instant suspicion. Russian spies, or “diversanty” as they’re called here, are a reality, and Ukrainian media have advised locals to report suspicious Russian speakers. In the first days of Russia’s invasion, authorities in the Lviv region in western Ukraine received more than 15,000 suspicious person reports each day. All of the reports have been looked into, according to the region’s governor. The volume of reports has dropped since to roughly 1,500 per day.
The Russian language can nonetheless be heard spoken, though rarely, on the streets and in the restaurants in Lviv, the unofficial capital of western Ukraine.
While Koty is just a two-hour drive from Lviv, it’s quickly apparent that the villagers are far removed from the nationalist sentiments found in urban areas. The customary greeting in the village, heard both from little boys on bicycles and old women in their yards, is “Glory to Jesus.” The people being greeted respond with “Glory to God forever.”
Koty’s greetings would surprise Ukrainian city dwellers, who over the course of eight years have adopted “Glory to Ukraine” as a common greeting. The customary response is “Glory to her heroes.” The two phrases, simple in their patriotic appeal, were, unbeknownst to most who use them, adopted by Bandera’s radical faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.
‘Now We Know What We’re Fighting For’
Everyone in the village is nonetheless aware that Ukraine has been in a drawn-out conflict with pro-Russian separatists in the east since 2014. Mykhailo Login, a Koty native and soldier, was killed in the conflict in 2014, leaving behind his wife and child. His photo, surrounded by flowers and ribbons, rests at the village’s cultural club. In the entrance hall of the club, a large poster shows the faces of the Ukrainians killed during the crackdown on protesters in Kyiv’s Maidan square.Eight years ago, Login’s sister Oksana Salabai was too young to comprehend why he was enlisting.
“When we didn’t let him go, he said, ‘My homeland is there. I’m going to defend you so you can live free,’” Salabai told The Epoch Times as a neighbor’s child played on a swing hung from a tree nearby. “I didn’t understand him then, but I understand him now.”
Although eight years have passed, Salabai, who has since married and had children of her own, still looked stricken with grief, still waiting for Login to come knocking one day. Unlike the confusion of 2014, she’s clear about the significance of the current war.
“In 2014, the men fought, but they didn’t know what for,” she said. “Now we know what we’re fighting for—so we can live in a free land.”
Salabai woke up late in the day on March 25, a sign that her daily life, like those of many other villagers, had been thrown into disarray since the missile strike at Yavoriv. The usual bustle of springtime cleaning all but disappeared after the attack, according to Tatyana Lunyk, a librarian in the village.
“People would usually be painting fences right now, fixing things up. Instead, no one is out,” Lunyk told The Epoch Times.
Coupled with the exodus of women and children after the attack on the military base, the disappearance of the buzz that comes with the first days of spring has left the village quiet even on a sunny Friday afternoon. The crowing of roosters and the distant sound of vehicle-mounted machine guns from another military base to the north punctuated the silence.
There are more than 28,000 villages in Ukraine, not counting the hamlets and tiny clusters of farms that account for the vast majority of Ukraine’s landmass—which is slightly smaller than Texas. The logistics of equipping each village with air raid sirens are so complex that church bells are used instead.
‘I Just Kneel by the Bed and Pray’
Anna Dmitrieva didn’t run for cover when the church bells rang at 3 a.m. on March 13. The front lines of the war were far away, and Russia hadn’t struck many targets in the west since the start of the conflict. At 5:55 a.m., as the missile explosions from the Yavoriv base shook the house, her son rushed in and urged her to hide in the basement.The bells have rung many times since, but she doesn’t hide anymore.
Oksana, the sole employee of the village’s medical office, doesn’t hide either.
“I just kneel by the bed and pray,” she said.
Koty is so old that not even the oldest villagers know how long the place has been around or why it’s named with the Ukrainian word for cats. In 1940, the Soviet Union forcefully relocated 125,000 people from the 150-square-mile area next to Koty to make space for the base at Yavoriv, turning some 170 villages into a desert. Nazi German forces held the base for a time during World War II. The Soviets took control after the war and handed the base over when Ukraine peacefully gained independence in 1991.
Myhailo Romanyshyn has lived in Koty under both the Russian communists and the German Nazis. His house, which is steps away from the village store, club, and medical office, was set ablaze when German bullets hit the roof. He pointed at the ground where he stood, saying that was the spot where he buried two of his horses after communist thugs came to ransack the property. He pointed to the sky to show where a tall linden tree once stood. His father, he said, killed a pig when he heard the communist soldiers were coming, tied it up, and hoisted it up in the tree. The soldiers looked everywhere but didn’t find the pig.
Romanyshyn’s sister moved to Murmansk, Russia, in 1964. A widow, she now lives with her daughter and works as a cashier in a church. She’s convinced, from the talks priests give to the congregation at the church, that Ukrainians kill their own children and eat them. She calls Romanyshyn, screaming and ranting. He can’t believe his ears.
“Come home, I tell her,” he told The Epoch Times. “It’s all Russian propaganda to make Russian people hate Ukrainians.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin calls the invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation” with a stated goal of denazification and demilitarization. While claims about a Nazi takeover of Ukraine are false, the denazification goal may be referring to Ukraine’s Azov Battalion. The U.S. Congress prohibited any U.S. support of Azov in 2018 because the group accepted members with explicit neo-Nazi views.
In a recent phone call, his sister insisted that it was Ukraine that had attacked Russia.
“It’s Putin who attacked us,” he told her. “They just dropped a bomb near our village.”
Four women from Koty were wounded in the missile strike on Yavoriv. They worked cooking meals at the base and had sleeping quarters there. One of the four still lives in a state of terror and refuses to go back to work, according to Oksana, the medical office staffer, who declined to provide her last name.
Russia and Ukraine are at odds over the number of casualties at the base. Ukraine claims 35 Ukrainians and no foreign nationals died there. Russia says it killed up to 180 “foreign mercenaries.” Locals seemed to know that the real number of people killed was higher than the figure put out by Ukraine, but all were tight-lipped when asked how many had died.
After the war with Russia started in late February, the Yavoriv base became a destination point for foreign volunteer soldiers who had arrived in the country to fight for Ukraine. A Polish man who was at the base at the time of the attack told The Epoch Times there were at least 300 foreigners there divided into two 150-man brigades. The men were in the barracks, which took a direct hit from one of the missiles, the Polish man, who declined to be named, said.
A senior local official told The Epoch Times that the real number of dead at Yavoriv was much higher, but declined to elaborate.
Jesper Soder, a Swedish citizen who was at the facility at the time of the attack, wrote on social media that the base, which according to NATO can house up to 1,790 people, was “totally destroyed.”
The locals’ reluctance to say how many people died at the base may suggest that they too have been caught up in the information war that has unfolded alongside the conventional war in the east of the country. Yaroslav Shevchenko, the priest at the orthodox church in Koty, said there’s a lot that he “just can’t say.”
According to three villagers, the families of the locals who were killed in the attack have yet to receive their remains.
The locals in Koty stayed put after Russia first invaded. Millions of Ukrainians have fled their homes, especially those from the east, where Russia has made steady advances. The villagers in Koty got together to cook food for the refugees who jam-packed the border crossings into Poland in the early days of the war. It was freezing cold outside at the time, and some people spent days waiting to cross.
The flow of people across the border has since slowed to nearly pre-war levels. Stacks of plastic tubs that had been used to take food to the border now stand empty at the village club underneath a table laid with Christian symbology.
Shevchenko said that on the morning after the missile strike, the congregation prayed for peace. Many women and children fled the village after the attack, he said, including one woman who had since given birth to a child in Poland. There were still enough people left to take care of the fields, Shevchenko said, describing the general mood in the village as one of fear and anxiety.
The border with Poland is eight miles from Koty as the crow flies. Since Poland is a NATO country, the proximity of the strike on Yavoriv had geopolitical implications. NATO had conducted military exercises at the base for years, making it a symbol for Russia’s concern with NATO’s eastward expansion. A training exercise in 2000 featured 1,500 participants from 27 countries.
Men had been leaving the village to enlist for the war even before the strike. Those who have three or more children are sent back home under the current enlistment criteria. The men of service age in Ukraine overwhelmingly want to be enlisted for the war. The demand is such that there are rumors of bribes being paid to be enlisted. There are also more volunteers than spots available in the territorial defense forces, which are organized on the regional level.
Like nearly every village observed by The Epoch Times in western Ukraine, Koty has erected a volunteer block post on the road leading into the heart of the village. It was staffed by about a dozen men on the day after the missile strike on Yavoriv. Twelve days later, it was empty, as there was almost no traffic heading onto the dirt road, which runs past a wooden church and a few tiny ponds before forking in three directions near the village store.
The patriotic zeal in the Lviv region in the first days of Russia’s invasion was such that 544 block posts were spontaneously erected throughout the region. The posts became a problem as overly eager locals, paranoid about Russian spies, snarled the roads with traffic, interfering with the movement of military gear, humanitarian supplies, and refugees. Maksym Kozytskyy, the governor of the Lviv region, told The Epoch Times that his administration had to crack down on the posts, cutting the number down five-fold and giving each a list of specific tasks to perform.
White storks, prevalent throughout Ukraine, have several large nests in Koty. Shevchenko said the birds return to the nests on the same day, March 23, every year no matter the weather and despite the constant gunfire and shelling from the training base over the years.
When he spoke to The Epoch Times on March 13, Shevchenko said he believed that if the birds returned in 10 days, the war would be over. On March 25, the storks, which are the national bird of Ukraine and symbolize harmony, had not yet returned.
