Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty
The Russians fled quickly from Cherneshchyna, abandoning their positions in a panic and disappearing into the night to escape the Ukrainian advance. “On the morning of October 2nd, they were just gone,” says Oleksiy, a resident of this small village on the eastern edge of the Kharkiv region, where a sudden Ukrainian counter-offensive saw Russian soldiers flee without a fight, leaving behind ammunition boxes, propaganda newspapers, and empty vodka bottles in their trenches and foxholes.
But in Cherneshchyna—as in many other towns and villages across the region—it wasn’t just the Russians who fled as Ukrainian forces secured bridgeheads on the west bank of the Oskil river and liberated a string of settlements in a lightning-fast advance. Dozens of villagers—who had either sympathized or openly collaborated with the invaders—joined the flight too.
Three weeks on, the fighting is not yet over in the area. Artillery fire still booms out as Ukrainian troops push on into the neighboring Luhansk oblast. But whatever happens on the battlefield, life here, and in other liberated towns and villages in eastern and southern Ukraine, will never return to normal until there has been a reckoning—between those who collaborated with the Russians and those who resisted them.