Liberated villagers tell of great escape from Russian shells

The moment of liberation was also the moment of greatest danger. Nataliia Nevesela hugged the Ukrainian soldiers — “they were so handsome!” — who had come into her house to tell her she was free, but they said she had to get out, now.

Since her village was now in Ukrainian hands, the Russians would shell it, the soldiers told her.

It was true. As she and her husband dragged their motorised tricycle out of its hiding place and leapt onboard, a cluster bomb exploded over the house, destroying the roof above their heads.

For half an hour she clung on as her husband, Volodymyr Myza, drove the trike as fast as he dared between exploding shells and the minefields along the road north. Its maximum speed was 50 miles per hour and the Ukrainians were attacking villages to the west.

“I had to try to go as fast as I could because everything was burning all around me,” he said. “But we also had to zigzag round the craters and mines.”

Nevesela said that the couple, both 50, passed strings of burning armoured vehicles as they struggled towards safety in the Ukrainian-held town of Zelenodolsk. At one point they drove past the village where she grew up, Dobryanka. It was destroyed.

The whole process was terrifying, she said, adding that she had already been through four stages of terror in the war. The first was when the Russians arrived. Then there was the period where she and her husband hid in the basement of their farmhouse for six months.

Then there was the shelling on Russian positions. Finally there was the intense battle for the village itself, as the Ukrainians repeatedly tried to enter but were held up on the outskirts. “Shells were whistling overhead,” she said. “We just gave up thinking about it. We were just waiting to die.”

At one point, they heard the tank parked in the yard above their heads try to evade shellfire. Nevesela could see through the doorway how it frantically manoeuvred to escape the Ukrainian artillery. It was no use. “After half an hour they hit it and it blew up,” she said.

The Russian army had arrived in their village, Novovoznesenske, in March, as part of its advance across southern Ukraine, eventually establishing a front line five miles away.

So close to the front, which remained largely static for months, there was no avoiding the repeated shelling. In August, the Ukrainians launched a complex strategic manoeuvre which may now have changed the war in their favour, though their supporters are warning against over-optimism.

The Ukrainian army had signalled for weeks that there would be an advance on the Kherson front. The Russians sent reinforcements, but on August 29 the Ukrainians attacked anyway. It has been a gruelling fortnight. The Ukrainians have sustained heavy casualties, though they have refused to give details and banned reporters from anywhere close to the fighting.

They managed to clear areas of no-man’s land in open countryside to the northwest of Kherson, but made their most significant breakthrough on the northern side of the front, from the direction of Kryvyi Rih.

What initially looked like a vulnerable salient has now turned into a bridgehead that has sucked Russians away from positions nearby, and enabled the thrust to Novovoznesenske.

Meanwhile, the Russians may have fallen into a bigger trap by transferring so many of their resources to defend Kherson. On Tuesday, the Ukrainians opened a new, unexpected front around Izyum, southeast of Kharkiv.

The Russian lines collapsed in an advance of 30 miles in three days. A railway line used as a principal supply route for the Russians is under threat.

The couple from Novovoznesenske made it to safety. Arriving at Zelenodolsk, they found other residents of their village already waiting in buses to take them to Kryvyi Rih.

About sixty of the village residents stayed throughout the occupation, mostly to look after their farms as best they could, out of 300 before the war. Just one died in the fighting.

Nevesela said that by the time she reached safety, she was emotionally numb, and felt more lost than relieved. At least she was able to call her two daughters, in Poland and northern Ukraine, to tell them she was safe. But she could not help thinking about her pigs and cows and their calves, which the couple released into the fields so they could fend for themselves.

The tricycle is waiting for them in the car park by the bus stop in Zelenodolsk. The locals have said they will look after it, for when they return.