Two neighbors desperately avoid each other to stand in line in the ruins of Svyatogirsk, a resort town whose monastery was recently retaken by Ukrainian forces.
A tearful Lyudmila Orlova, 61, told AFP she was the victim of a dangerous breach of trust at the hands of 76-year-old Yevdokiya Yarovaya.
“Four days before the liberation of the city, on September 7, she told Russian soldiers that I have a car used by Ukrainian troops.”
“They came in the evening with their guns. They were drunk and interrogated me for half an hour. They knocked over everything in the house,” said Orlova, a Ukrainian teacher in this mainly Russian-speaking city.
Yarovaya denied the allegations, saying she has “no contact” with Russian forces and she only saw them a few times to get help.
“Food is more important than anything else,” she stressed. However, she did not answer the question of whether this help was conditional on collaboration.
“There is a lot of anger and resentment. We still haven’t come to terms with what we went through and I don’t want it to happen again,” Yarovaya said.
She was clutching two trays of spiced pilau rice that were handed to her by volunteers who were helping residents freeze them.
– “Liberator” –
When Russian troops captured the city in June, its mayor, Volodymyr Bandura, hailed them as “liberators” and held a press conference under the Russian flag.
Bandura, a member of the pro-Russian For Life party elected in 2020, disappeared when Ukrainian troops retook the city in September and is now wanted for treason.
In his place, the army appointed Volodymyr Rybalki, who coordinated the city’s civil defense, as head of the military administration for the recaptured territory.
Rybalki said he’s primarily trying to ensure the well-being of residents as winter approaches and doesn’t have time now for a “hunt for collaborators.”
“Finding out who collaborated or not is the work of the SBU (Ukrainian Secret Service) and the police. If there has been treason, they will be dealt with according to the law,” he told AFP.
Ukraine’s law on treason has been amended since the Russian invasion to include a wider range of offenses, including “denying that Ukraine suffered an armed attack”.
People who collaborate with an occupying power face between 15 years in prison and life imprisonment in cases where their crime resulted in “death or a serious consequence”.
– “They support Russia” –
In Svyatogirsk, the Holy Dormition Monastery has become a focus of tension.
Its abbot openly spoke out in support of the Russian-backed separatists in 2014, and Ukrainian authorities accused him of hiding militants and weapons in the monastery.
This time, “the monastery tried to maintain a position that presented it as neutral, but we all know that they support Russia,” said Oleksiy Kashporovskyi, a press officer with the Ukrainian army.
The 46-year-old pointed to the green domes of the sprawling hillside religious site.
At the entrance to the complex stands a statue of the Virgin Mary with only one hand left. The other was demolished by an explosion.
At the height of the fighting, 400 residents of Svyatogirsk, along with its 200 monks, took refuge in the monastery.
Despite evacuation orders, as Russian forces advanced, they stayed.
“This led to many questions about their loyalty,” Kashporovskyi said.
In the monastery garden, Father Theophanus, 51, a former miner, pointed to the fresh graves of three monks killed by a mortar in May.
He said the “hostile” perception of the monastery was linked to questions about the loyalty of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which officially severed ties with Moscow in May.
“We mention Patriarch Kirill of Moscow in our services, but we have never harbored terrorists, separatists or weapons,” he said, adding that he prayed “for the Ukrainian people” daily.
