During the Russian occupation of Peremoha village in Brovary district, which lasted from 28 February to 30 March 2022, local residents witnessed brutal war crimes against the civilian population. On the first day of the occupation, 28 February 2022, five local men were executed in the village. In total, according to various sources, between 15 and 20 people were killed or went missing while Russian troops were in Peremoha. The occupiers tried to hide some of the crimes by destroying the traces with explosions and fire.
One of the sites of the tragedy was the building of the Nova Poshta branch. According to eyewitnesses, Russian soldiers used this building as a place to hold and torture people. The building was then blown up. When the village was liberated, locals cleared the rubble by hand, trying to find and collect human remains. Charred bones and other remains were found in the ruins. The collected remains were enough to fill a whole coffin. It was then that a new mass grave appeared in the village – next to an older one, where victims of the German occupation during the Second World War had earlier been reburied. A plaque was placed on the new grave with the inscription: “To the tortured, burned unknown boys”. Personal testimonies of the villagers about the events of those days have also been preserved. A local woman’s diary describes the moment when, after a long time, people were able to retrieve the bodies of the dead near Nova Poshta and bury them.
In the entry of 14 March 2022 she recalls:
“Vasia Turkov arranged with the orcs that they would allow us to go to Nova Poshta to take away our murdered children (they had lain unburied for 16 days). And we went… Some of the lads dug a pit for the burial, while others pulled the bodies of the dead out of the pit.”
Eyewitnesses describe the bodies as severely mutilated by the explosion. Some of the dead could be identified only by remnants of clothing or footwear.
“Dima Koval was more or less wounded, he could be recognised. Rusik – half a head, no arm… Yaryk – no head… Yareshko Serhii – half a head, no arm, no leg… And the fifth – we didn’t know who… the body was completely torn apart… We laid each one separately in bags, put them in the pit and buried them.”
The diary stresses that it was an extremely painful sight for the people who were forced to bury the dead without the usual funeral rites:
“It hurt to look at all this, that innocent children were being buried… Simply horror, there are no words, just a groan and tears.”
Later, after the village was liberated, these burials were put in order. On 11 April 2022 the dead were reburied in the cemetery, this time in coffins, as tradition requires. According to eyewitnesses, it was a hard but necessary decision, in order to pay the victims their final respects with dignity.
On 30 March 2022 Peremoha village was liberated. Local residents remember this date as the day of liberation from the occupation.
At the same time, the new mass grave is a reminder of the tragedy of the people who died during those events. The names of some victims have been established, but some of the dead remained unknown, commemorated in the community’s memory as “tortured and burned unknown boys”
Additional photo and video materials about the events at the link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bEe0oUexb4Uc9ALHqjwHjwWAMIN-f9DV?usp=drive_link
