Liberated Kozacha Lopan: how border village in Kharkiv region comes back to life

russian occupiers controlled the village of Kozacha Lopan, located north of the Kharkiv region, for more than half a year. Six months is a long time, and what we see now in Izium, Balaklia, and other liberated settlements shows that during this time, the russian military committed hundreds of war crimes, in fact, the genocide of the Ukrainian people. Kozacha Lopan was no exception. Here the invaders killed and maimed hundreds of people.

Now the village is free from the occupation of the russian horde. The Rubryka reporter visited Kozacha Lopan and saw how the village was taking its first sips of freedom.

Blue and yellow on russia's tricolor

It is crowded near the village council in Kozacha Lopan. Locals gather there to solve urgent problems oy share their experiences.

Many artifacts on the village council premises remind us of the occupation. The russians brought a bunch of propaganda materials there. They distributed them to locals and hoped for support.

The russians managed to make a special plate with the name of their "governing body."

At the entrance to the village, there is a fence painted in the colors of the russian tricolor. After the liberation, the local people didn't want to tolerate this for long, so they wrote, "the Cossack family will not die out," and changed the colors to native blue and yellow.

But it was not the artifacts or colors of the hated flag that remained in the local's memory, but the russian cruelty and inhuman treatment.

"During the entire time of the occupation, 200 people died in our community, and more than 500 were maimed," says Viacheslav Zadorenko, head of the Derhachy community.

In Kozacha Lopan, the russians kidnapped people en masse and took them to the torture chamber. One of them is located on the premises of the local train station.

They tried to break the abducted locals to force them to confess to something they didn't do or agree to cooperate.

But the cynicism and baseness of the russians know no bounds: the locals say that the brutal beatings the occupiers committed were not only to induce cooperation or to stamp out "testimonies":

"They brought a notary here and tortured people to force them to transfer their property to a fake person. They used to kidnap whole families. Children were taken to influence their parents," says Viacheslav Zadorenko.

According to him, cases of rape also occurred in the village.

Military psychologists have arrived in Kozacha Lopan to work with local people who suffered from the Russians.

Meeting your own

People say they met Ukrainian soldiers in the village with tears and hugs. They are glad that the Ukrainian flag flew at the long-suffering railway station and the village council.