in the heart of the city of Balaklya, taken back from the hands of the Russians

After several weeks of media blackout, the Ukrainian authorities invited around a hundred journalists to enter the town of Balaklya (Ukraine), liberated after several months of Russian occupation, on Tuesday 13 September. The Ukrainians want to show us a school, bombed by the Russians after the liberation. According to the city’s education official, Moscow had already begun its policy of Russification. “They went to the city to erase all Ukrainian symbols”she says.

In downtown Balaklya, residents are running. There are no more stores open here, so to get food, you absolutely have to be present during the distribution of humanitarian aid. On site, everyone tells us about the difficult months spent under the Russian occupation. “For two months, we had nothing. We couldn’t even buy bread. It was cold, we sometimes had to wait five hours to find something to eat”, says a woman. Experts and investigators are present in the city, with the aim of proving possible war crimes committed by Vladimir Putin’s army.