Russia said Sunday that its forces had captured the eastern Ukrainian village of Orikhovo-Vasylivka near the strategic military hub of Chasiv Yar that Moscow is attempting to seize There is intensive fighting in the frontline town of Chasiv Yar one of the last remaining urban areas blocking Russia from advancing further into the region The Russian Defense Ministry said in a daily briefing that "as a result of decisive attack actions the South group of troops liberated the settlement of Orekhovo-Vasilevka in the Donetsk region," using the Russian name for the village Orikhovo-Vasylivka is located around 10 kilometres (six miles) north of Chasiv Yar and near the road to the Ukraine-held city of Sloviansk The latest advance comes as Russian troops are pushing further into the Donetsk region They claimed the key mining town of Toretsk on Friday while Ukraine denies Moscow troops are in full control there said Sunday that it had repelled attacks in the areas of Chasiv Yar and Toretsk and shot down a Russian military jet near Toretsk Russia had attacked six regions with 151 drones of which it shot down 70 while a further 74 were lost "without negative consequences." Russia's Defense Ministry said it had destroyed 35 Ukrainian drones overnight and one in the northwestern Leningrad region on Sunday morning Russia's Prosecutor General's Office has designated The Moscow Times as an "undesirable" organization criminalizing our work and putting our staff at risk of prosecution This follows our earlier unjust labeling as a "foreign agent." These actions are direct attempts to silence independent journalism in Russia The authorities claim our work "discredits the decisions of the Russian leadership." We see things differently: we strive to provide accurate We, the journalists of The Moscow Times, refuse to be silenced. But to continue our work, we need your help please support us monthly starting from just $2 and every contribution makes a significant impact independent journalism in the face of repression “I was standing in water up to my knees inside my house and two bombs landed just metres away,” Alyna recalls as she shows the damage around her home was devastated not only by heavy bombardment but also by the catastrophic flooding that followed the Kakhovka dam explosion in June 2023 people are returning to the village – but they need help to make their houses livable again all Alyna’s furniture was still covered with tarpaulins as it couldn’t be brought back inside the house until the roof was fixed Alyna had her roof repaired and new windows installed by Southern Development Strategy (SDS) a partner of Danish Church Aid and Norwegian Church Aid The project was funded by the Ukraine Humanitarian Fund (UHF) “My house is once again weatherproof and that means this winter won’t be as hard,” says Alyna residents prepared for the cold season after enduring two harsh winters Sixty-six-year-old Larysa recalls surviving numerous bomb strikes “I had to sleep in the shed after the explosion,” she says Larysa relied on a cast-iron stove to stay warm but her damaged home made it difficult to live normally 3.4 tonnes of solid fuel have been distributed to both Kyselivka and Vasylivka ensuring the communities can heat their homes as they face cold winter temperatures Larysa’s neighbour Angela had her windows replaced with new glass “It’s wonderful to have light in my home again and to see nature outside,” she shares Adapted from an original story fromDanish Church Aid. More information about the Ukraine Humanitarian Fund This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page Residents of Vasylivka village in southern Ukraine's Mykolaiv region are desperately waiting for support to survive after their houses were flooded due to the explosion at the Kakhovka dam on June 6 Following the explosion at the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant due to which more than 70 houses in Vasylivka were flooded and became unusable "The water rose above the windows in the house We were only able to save the cats and dogs in the house We went as a family to the village of Pavlivka next door our family is there," Gennady Nezhlukchenko The homes in the village went underwater three days after the explosion adding that he and his family are now looking for a new home We have applied to the state regarding this issue Nothing was given for the bombed houses either We may have to rebuild a house,” Nezhlukchenko said Calling the event a "big disaster," he said the environment was adversely affected by the flooding because the flood water is not clean and could pose a risk to people’s health It is difficult to overcome this psychologically I do not know how we will continue our lives," he said adding that the village was under Russian control for about nine months told Anadolu that he was now homeless because of the flood and did not know what to do in the future “We will look for a new house here because it is not possible to renovate our damaged house adding that he is staying at the house of an acquaintance in a village nearby told Anadolu that her house was flooded and that she needed a new home It is no longer possible to live in the house Neighbors' houses are also in the same situation and I have no place to stay,” she said Ukraine and Russia both blamed each other for carrying out strikes on June 6 which led to the destruction of the walls of the Kakhovka dam an unremarkable civilian car drove slowly toward a Russian checkpoint in the occupied town of Vasylivka It had passed dozens of checkpoints on its way from the occupied city of Melitopol to the Ukrainian-controlled regional capital Zaporizhzhia None of its passengers expected what was about to happen he spotted a teenage boy checking something on his phone He took the boy's phone and pulled him out of the car "Should I shoot you right now or smash your phone?" he shouted The furious soldier dragged the boy to the backyard of a nearby cafe where Russian troops were based leaving those in the car speechless and terrified Russian soldiers realized the detainee was a "jackpot" for them The boy they captured was Vladyslav Buryak the son of one of the region’s highest-ranking Ukrainian officials – Oleh Buryak the head of the Zaporizhzhia District State Administration Buryak was a member of the Russia-friendly Opposition Bloc political party The following 90 days in Russian captivity would become nothing but unimaginable horror for the 16-year-old Vladyslav Buryak Locked in a tiny dilapidated prison cell in Vasylivka's pre-trial detention center the boy heard the harrowing screams of Ukrainian prisoners of war being tortured by Russian soldiers He watched as some of them died after enduring hours of torture and was forced to clean the "torture room" awash with their blood "Every minute there was a very severe challenge because every minute could have been my last," the boy told the Kyiv Independent during an interview alongside his father He is not the only Ukrainian minor who has spent a long time in Russian captivity since Russia’s all-out war began on Feb 24: According to Zaporizhzhia Oblast Governor Oleksandr Starukh Russians have held captive five minors in Zaporizhzhia Oblast Two of them remained imprisoned as of the end of July A total of 203 children have been recorded missing in Ukraine as of the beginning of August Most of them went missing in the war’s hotspots Russia's war has also killed at least 358 children as of Aug The numbers are expected to be higher since they don't include casualties in the Russian-occupied territories and areas where hostilities are ongoing Among all of Russia's atrocities against Ukrainian children Vladyslav Buryak’s "normal and happy" teenage life came to a halt when Russia began its all-out invasion on Ukraine where he lived with his mother and younger sister was occupied by Russians in the first days of the full-scale war Even though his father had urged Vladyslav and the family to evacuate the boy wanted to stay in the occupied city to take care of his grandfather "I was with him almost all the time," he says Leaving the city in early March was also too risky since there were too many Russian troops everywhere and street fights became a part of Buryak's everyday life in Melitopol In between supporting his grandfather and hiding from Russia's attacks Buryak shared information on local collaborators and other machinery movements with his father "We agreed that if (Vladyslav) sees that I read the message he should wait 10 minutes and immediately delete it," Oleh Buryak says the two also called themselves by different names so that Russians couldn’t identify them "I forbade him to call me father or dad," Oleh says "I was worried from day one that sooner or later they would be captured." As he was looking for ways to get his son out of the occupied city Oleh's friend from Melitopol found some local women with whom Vladyslav could evacuate The boy’s mother and sister fled the city a week before him But he didn't want to leave his grandfather behind until the end the day the women were planning to flee Melitopol Oleh was at a work meeting when he received a call from a friend The earth slipped beneath his feet when he heard that Russian soldiers had abducted his son "I instantly started thinking of what I could do the Russians didn’t give Buryak any food or water Five days later they brought Vladyslav some food and water for the first time the Russian soldiers allowed him to take a shower And only one month after he was imprisoned Vladyslav was finally allowed to wash his clothes I couldn't understand why someone was screaming so loudly Later he would realize they were Ukrainian prisoners screaming in agony while being tortured by Russian soldiers "Most Ukrainian prisoners kept there were members of territorial defense units or civilians who the Russian military tortured and interrogated to get information," he says He remembers that on the fourth day of his imprisonment the Russians threw a 24-year-old man into his prison cell That man told Vladyslav he was a local priest Russian troops detained him along with members of a local territorial defense unit The Russian troops tortured the young priest for several hours a day they beat him on the genitals," Buryak says He was stammering and couldn’t say anything properly He used the toilet every three to five minutes and he practically didn't have a face," he says Vladyslav says he had tried to talk him out of it and stopped him when he tried to hang himself in the cell "He didn’t think he’d get out of there alive He thought it would be better to die than endure the torture again," Buryak says a 16-year-old boy tried to comfort a man who had just slit his wrists with a can lid A Russian soldier entered the cell shortly and called a doctor who bandaged his hands and took him away He says that man became one of the reasons he found the strength to survive the horrors of captivity 'Get out from this captivity and tell about everything we've been through," Buryak says "'Tell my story so that my death is not in vain.'" The Russian soldiers never tortured Buryak since he was considered a "valuable" prisoner they could use in an exchange and collected trash around the prison," Buryak says Vladyslav was forced to clean the so-called torture room up to five times a week The room was a slightly bigger prison cell where Russian soldiers interrogated Ukrainians severely beating them with "iron fittings Buryak saw a special tool with wires used for electrocution He says that Russians often tortured their prisoners by pushing needles underneath their nails sometimes connecting the needles to the electrocution tool to increase the pain He heard Russian soldiers discussing how they would torture their prisoners he heard them laughing when torturing someone (Torturing people) is like fun to them," Buryak says One day when he came to clean the torture room He saw a man hanging from the ceiling with his hands tied with cables A small bucket with blood stood next to them “It was one of the days when I saw (the torture) myself,” he says He often heard Russians saying they had come to "save Ukraine and liberate it from Nazism.” Buryak says they called themselves the "army of good" and claimed they were “doing everything for the Ukrainian nation to live well." Vladyslav was allowed to spend 10 minutes outside the boy either worked or was locked alone in his prison cell Vladyslav spent a total of 48 days in prison he hoped he wouldn’t become the soldiers’ next victim Oleh says he was doing everything he could to never let that happen His strategy was to publicize the case so that Russians would value Vladyslav as a prisoner and save his life He knew the horrors that his son was exposed to At one point during the boy’s three-month captivity Oleh was shown a transcript of the testimony of a former prisoner of the jail where Vladyslav was kept That person had survived two weeks of torture that included sexual violence Almost immediately after his son was captured a Russian officer contacted Oleh to begin what would be an arduous process of negotiations to free Vladyslav The officer wanted to exchange the boy for a specific person "an adult citizen of Ukraine," Oleh says including whether that exchange took place the Russians transferred Vladyslav to a hotel in occupied Melitopol While the conditions were much better —  there was a toilet and a shower in the room — Vladyslav was still a prisoner and it wasn't clear whether they would agree to set him free a Russian negotiator agreed to release Vladyslav – three months after he was captured Oleh was worried that the Russians might change their mind Even when Vladyslav called him late on July 6 saying the Russians said they would let him go the following day The video of Vladyslav Buryak meeting his father Oleh Buryak after spending three months in Russian captivity Vladyslav was put into one of the civilian cars evacuating from Melitopol When he saw his son getting out of the car in the Ukrainian-controlled area of Zaporizhzhia Oblast Oleh said he felt that “a piece of his heart returned home.” There, on the road not far from the Russian-occupied settlements, the two stood for several moments, hugging and crying. Vladyslav had made it back home he will never forget the horrors of captivity he endured destruction — this is what (Russia) represents,” said Vladyslav Seeing his son alive and at home with him feels like a personal “victory” for Oleh “Now we need a victory for the country,” Oleh said you can help us continue telling the world the truth about this war Daria Shulzhenko is a reporter at the Kyiv Independent She has been a lifestyle reporter at the Kyiv Post until November 2021 She graduated from Kyiv International University with a bachelor’s in linguistics specializing in translation from English and German languages She has previously worked as a freelance writer and researcher has come with news of the killing of the mayor of Hostomel In the south-eastern oblast of Zaporizhzhia six towns have been taken by Russian forces as Moscow has promised a humanitarian corridor to Russia to civilians in strategic cities defending themselves against the invaders Ukrainian public media Ukrinform and British public broadcaster BBC report Ukrinform announced the killing of the head of the Hostomel community was killed while handing out bread to the hungry and medicine to the sick comforting the burnt and consoling the desperate along with his comrades-in-arms Ruslan Karpenko and Ivan Zoria,» the statement unveiled Read also: Polish Ambassador to Ukraine continues to work in Kyiv as last one In Zaporizhzhia oblast, the towns of Polohy, Vasylivka, Tokmak, Enerhodar, Berdyansk and Melitopol are temporarily occupied, according to the military administration of the south-eastern region It added that near the settlements of Huliaipole Orikhiv and in the direction of Vasylivka-Balabino the Armed Forces of Ukraine are conducting a defensive operation and called on local population to join territorial defence forces Russia claimed on Sunday that it took control of another village amid its ongoing offensive in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region A statement by the Russian Defense Ministry claimed that its forces captured the village of Orikhovo-Vasylivka located about 22 kilometers (13.6 miles) east of the city of Kramatorsk the region's provisional seat since Moscow seized control of Donetsk city in 2014 Ukrainian authorities have yet to comment on Russia's claim and independent verification of the claim is difficult due to the ongoing war which will be three years old later this month Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article Notifications can be managed in browser preferences. International correspondent Bel Trew has spent weeks covering the war in Ukraine she recounts some of the most indelible scenes from her time in the country I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our Privacy notice All of a sudden, moving through Ukraine became a stumble through the sick dreamscape of your worst nightmare Under a railway station in the northern town of Trosytanets where artillery has blasted suburban mundanity into a muddy moonscape men emerged with their stories of being tortured  for information they didn’t have In a quiet wood, over 350km (220 miles) west, near the capital Kyiv we found the body of an unknown Ukrainian teenager He was just metres from a Russian trench camp where an abandoned cafetiere chicken coop and pair of socks drying on trees spoke of a hasty retreat and an escape route out for those fleeing the besieged city of Mariupol a woman whose legs were stuttered with shrapnel recalled watching her bed-ridden aunt burn to death because no one could get her to a bomb shelter in time In the southern city of Mykolaiv at a hospital who picked up an unexploded banned cluster munition bomblet All along an 8,500km odyssey through Ukraine As Putin’s invasion grinds past the miserable milestone of two months they only get more bloody and more awful These testimonies show that despite Moscow’s  protestations of good faith and innocence we have only just scratched the surface of the horrors that have already happened or are going on right now as I write this and his forces turn their attention to the east “It was a nightmare – it was the worst thing they has ever happened to me and I worry it is happening again elsewhere,”  said Dima one of the civilians I spoke to who who survived several days of torture in Trostyanets He is too gentle a person to shrug off the violence he was subjected to: his hands who was shot and tortured in a different basement by Russians several hundred kilometres away in a village north of Kyiv He spoke to us from a hospital bed where doctors are trying to save his mangled foot “I feel like I was lucky to have survived as I did,” he told The Independent “I met a guy who was kept captive for 20 days without light It even took some time for him to get used to the sunlight again We will likely never know the true scale of what has happened Maxar Technologies published images showing mass graves so vast in Russian-occupied territory near Mariupol that they appear in satellite imagery The British Ministry of Defence had previously released footage of it says are mobile crematoriums “to evaporate” one human body at a time and so erase the worst crimes President Putin who has focuses his forces on consolidating the east and south of Ukraine But Dima shows the scars on his legs and wrists as evidence ‘There were bits of corpses all over the ground’ “I realised I had a choice,” said 22-year party planner Marina as she coordinated a makeshift conveyer belt of people making sandbags on the beach of the coastal city of Odesa Against the soft whomp of outgoing anti-aircraft fire hundreds of volunteers continue the back-breaking work of making over 10,000 sandbags a day which are sent across the country to reinforce buildings In the background a young drummer accompanied the Arctic Monkeys on a speaker and so the teams intermittently broke to dance this one begins with the present continuous of grief: a rollercoaster of hope and horror resilience and despair as people go through the process of dealing with the ambush of a new past For many this immediately translated into rallying to the war effort I met grandmothers weaving military camouflage netting in community centres in the western city of Lviv construction workers welding Czech hedgehogs in the central city of Khmelnytskyi young fashion designers forging bulletproof vests out of truck springs in the port city of Mykolaiv and party planners like Marina filling sandbags at the beach in Odesa In multiple towns there were queues around the block and waiting lists for people to join the army Gyms and town halls across the country became civil and territorial defence training grounds for civilians learning how to use everything from molotov cocktails to rifles And so the invasion rather than breaking spirit has had the adverse consequence of uniting the country At the bewildering number of checkpoints that now carve up the country the repeated phrase “glory to Ukraine” has become synonymous with “hello” Homemade billboards telling the Russians to eff off back home (or to The Hague) litter the roads As do ones glorifying particular strategic wins the alleged battle cry of Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island is such a popular epigram it is now commemorated on Ukraine’s newest postal stamp And at the helm is populist President Volodymyr Zelensky who with his 21st-century mix of Dancing with the Stars and battlefield videos has one of the most recognisable faces of our time a tech start-up nation famous for its call centres harnessed that knowledge to help deal with the nightmarish consequences of war together with a team of computer programmers launched the Prykhystok website – which is a bit like Airbnb or couch-surfing for refugees as it maps 5,000 shelters across the country Two of the developers then pivoted to partnering with car-sharing and taxi apps – the Ukrainian equivalents of Uber – to organise carpools and rides for civilians fleeing some of the worst conflict zones Someone else built an app that notifies you of every air raid siren while others developed web-based programmes offering detailed maps of local bomb shelters and hospitals Across the country these resources became a lifeline for those forced to forge the new refugee trail Second World War-like scenes of child evacuees layer over the technicolour nightmare of what was unfolding All roads ultimately culminate in the last gruelling stretch to countries like Poland or Romania where I watched a stream of figures emerge ghostlike through the darkness carrying their children and the pets and their hastily packed suitcases: the last quick summary of their former lives And through them we started to hear the drip-feed of horror would eventually stumble into in areas liberated from Russian forces “A rocket hit a queue of people waiting for humanitarian aid there were just bits of corpses all over the ground,” said Ruslan who escaped the besieged city of Mariupol with his wife and daughter to Zaporizhia the worst hit area of the city that has recently become a last stand Right now hundreds of civilians – they may well include Ruslan’s family members – are holed up in the Azovstal steel factory on the left bank “We lost contact with them after the first week of the war Behind Ruslan was a white board of desperate messages from families like his asking for help trying to find or get to missing loved ones It is just one of dozens of boards I saw in different shelters and meeting points across the country as well as hundreds of WhatsApp and Facebook groups built for that purpose And so divided families will be the lasting legacy of this war which the cast and backstage staff had turned into a makeshift shelter As a man of fighting age  he cannot leave Ukraine and so was spending the last few moments with his children before he said goodbye to them indefinitely “I try not to think about being separated,” he told me quietly as his boys watched Sonic the Hedgehog “I’m just trying to do the best I can with everything without panicking.” They have a kind of celebrity status among the civilians desperate to get their families trapped under the most ferocious bombardments of the war The volunteer drivers who go back into besieged places like Mariupol and Donetsk braving shelling airstrikes and Russian soldiers to shuttle people out to comparatively safer towns like Zaporizhzhya who have made several trips back into Mariupol who has apparently retrieved over 100 people was last heard heading back to Mariupol before he vanished a few weeks ago who the day we spoke to him was joining a group of other cars to head to areas under bombardment in Donetsk now in the eye of Putin’s storm “I saw with my own eyes how the Russians fired on a Ukrainian Red Cross humanitarian aid convoy – there is no one else who can do this,”  he said while sticking a poster reading the word “children” in Russian on his car to protect against the worst onslaught “We planned to go to our house to find belongings and if we see anyone we will bring them back.” Andre and the drivers was just one example of the extraordinary kindness of strangers across Ukraine during the journey as civilians have adjusted to the new normal where unexploded rockets bristle the ground almost comically an accountant who had taken in a newly orphaned 11-year-old boy whose mother was shot dead by Russians in early March as she drove to get supplies who was pinned under his mother’s dead body and took him to their home while they spent weeks trying to find his father but the boy would write to his mother in his diary every day,” she said in tears during a month long bitter siege and bombing a local pizza chain sourced and fixed three generators as well as an industrial drill to dig a well to provide water to thousands who were cut off “We also had to find a way to feed people,” said Igor And so he said they pooled together resources across the city and with the bridges bombed and roads into the city under fire a wedding venue provided shelter for a night random families welcomed us as we stumbled into their bomb shelters We were also welcomed into reception centres where - during one particularly heavy day a 9 year old boy who fled the front line in Zaporizhzhya taught me Russian via Google translate the resilience and kindness is partly why Anatoliy a former soldier who came out of retirement for the war thinks Ukraine will ultimately be victorious he helped clear up after Chernobyl and has now survived a month-long Russian occupation of his home town he thinks Putin’s war is far worse and more dangerous for Ukraine and Europe than the world’s most famous nuclear disaster He spoke as he took us around the trashed main administrative building of the town which had become the headquarters for Russian forces who have inexplicably left piles of excrement smears of blood and half-drunk bottles of alcohol everywhere But there is no certainty to Anatoily’s belief, which is echoed by many Ukrainians. Western officials still think Russia might “win” this – telling British media last week that the Russian army outnumbers Ukrainian forces in the east by three to one and could even march on the capital again. And so the predictions are that the future will be a bloody and long one. And in the interim families will be riven apart. On the 13-hour train ride from Kyiv to Poland – the final leg out of the country – I watched the men accompanying their families start to drop off as carriages approached the final stop in Ukraine before the border. “Look after your mother,” one father told his little girl as he waved goodbye. Possibly forever. “I’ll see you soon,” he added, lying with love. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies Women react during the funeral of Ukrainian army officer Vyacheslav Vyacheslavovych Dimov, who was killed on 16 April in battle in the Vasylivka district of Zaporizhzhia region govt and politics","score":0.789511}],"mantis":[{"label":"law_govt_politics","score":0.789511},{"label":"war_conflicts","score":0.623539},{"label":"pop_culture","score":0.507955}]},"sentiment":"negative"},"article":{"title":"A tragedy in every town: How two months of war has transformed Ukraine forever","description":"International correspondent Bel Trew has spent weeks covering the war in Ukraine Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.