The Times

🔺Ukrainians who stood firm against Putin’s tanks mark six months of war

The siege of Chernihiv provides a unique insight into how the Kremlin has systematically targeted civilians, writes Maxim Tucker

The roar of Russian jet engines woke Serhiy Ostapenko with a start. Realising he was alone, he ran outside to look for his wife and daughter. The blast of the first bomb knocked him to the floor.

“I heard something fall behind me, it was the parts of our Chevrolet — the engine was thrown 150m (almost 500ft),” he said. “I got up seconds later and ran to my girls. My daughter, she was torn apart. See that spot on the ground?” he says, gesturing at a bloodstained pavement. “That’s what’s left of her. I don’t know how to clean it. I’ve tried different ways.”

The 40-year-old engineer had brought his family to his workplace, a water pumping station in the woods more than a mile outside Chernihiv, thinking they would be safer at this remote location than inside the city.

Ostapenko speaks quietly, his face fixed in the furrowed expression written on it the night his family were taken from him. “We had these two little dogs, Yorkshire terriers,” he says. 
“When I found my wife she was laid out on the ground holding them.”

His daughter is just one of almost a thousand children killed or injured since the Russian invasion began, according to Unicef. His wife is one of probably tens of thousands of adults killed.

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🔺We know the traitors who help Russia. We have a ‘special gift’ for them all, says partisan leader

Putin’s troops are fighting an invisible army in every village they occupy, writes Maxim Tucker

One by one, the men slipped out of their houses into the night in plain clothes, breaking the Russian curfew. Dodging patrols and moving quickly but quietly, they gathered at the site of a weapons cache hidden two years earlier.

Selected from a wide network of Ukrainian partisans in the nation’s occupied south for their weapons training and physical prowess, they were about to embark on their most daring mission of the war to date; one that would almost cost one of them his life.

The partisans have not revealed details of their operations before, because of the risk of reprisals against their families, but they and their handlers in military intelligence agreed to meet The Times — to send a message to those collaborating with President Putin on a staged referendum aimed at annexing the occupied Kherson region into the Russian Federation next month.

“The guys from the south are preparing for September 11,” said “Rebel”, 34, a former military intelligence officer who trains and leads partisan bands across the country. “We know all the traitors. We know everyone who helps the Russians. A big surprise and many gifts await them before this date.”

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🔺Video proves Russia was shelling Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant, Kyiv claims

As Russian soldiers started to melt away from their positions at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant on Tuesday, the Ukrainian staff began to wonder what was afoot.

They were left above ground while the occupying forces moved down into reinforced bunkers. Then, the whoosh of an outgoing mortar round was followed by the thud of impact and explosion, captured on video by one of the workers. Then another, and another.

The director of Energoatom, the Ukrainian nuclear energy company, told The Times that the brief gaps between the sounds of the outgoing and incoming rounds, coupled with the apparent forewarning, showed that the Russians were shelling the plant from a short range.

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