Ukraine school siege: Will country’s biggest war crimes trial bring justice for Yahidne survivors?
Surrounded by forest, the village of Yahidne in northern Ukraine looks deceptively peaceful.
On a bright, summer’s day, a troupe of singers dressed in national costume perform in the ruins of a bombed-out, community club. Their voices lilt and lift, as their bodies sway. The audience clap, smile and tap their feet.
On the surface, there are little signs of the shared trauma they’ve suffered. But look closer at this joyful scene, and several spectators are weeping. Others hold their heads in their hands.
Kyiv under attack – latest updates on Ukraine war
The memory of “28 days of horror” – when Russian soldiers trapped almost the entire population in a school basement – is still raw.
In the middle of their performance, the singers fall silent, their heads bowed to honour those who lost their lives when the Russians took over the village.
“We went in as children and came out as adults. Your values change when you can’t eat, sleep or go for a shower,” says 16-year-old Marina, one of the singers. “It’s hard to forget and hard to remember.”
Back in late February 2022, in the violent first month of war, almost the entire village – with a population of around 400 before the Russian invasion – was held captive below ground in dark, freezing temperatures with little electricity.
They were starved of food and water, tormented and tortured by their kidnappers. Ten of them died in captivity, while others spoke of enduring humiliating and brutal conditions where disease and fear ran rampant.
Now more than a year after their ordeal, these villagers are about to be the star witnesses in Ukraine‘s biggest war crimes trial to date which will see 15 Russian soldiers go on trial. Prosecutors believe the case is so strong it could end up in the International Criminal Court.
Sky News has been given access to a mass of evidence gathered over more than a year of investigations. Our team has also interviewed more than a dozen survivors and seen the 3D scanners that are being used to recreate the crime scene in forensic detail.
A list of names of villagers killed by the Russians
During that time, 368 of the villagers including 69 children were kept in appalling, cramped conditions. The 10 who died during their confinement were mainly elderly people who deteriorated due to the unhygienic conditions and lack of sustenance.
Corpses lay among the living for hours, sometimes days, until the Russians could be persuaded to bury them.
‘They deliberately starved us’
Valentyna Lohrynchuk was among those held captive. “How can I describe something like that?,” she says, with horror in her voice. “One minute we’d be talking to a granny and then next, we’d realise they were dead. They deliberately starved us. They had food but they didn’t give us any.”
Even then when a group of seven was allowed to go to the village cemetery to dig graves for those who had died, within minutes they were shelled from Russian positions.
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Ukraine war: Inside hostage scene
The village priest, Dimetry Yarema, who was conducting the burial prayers, says: “It was definitely the Russians who shelled us. I feel it was a deliberate tactic to try to kill us or scare us.”
The Ukrainian lawyers will attempt to prove the Russian soldiers violated a string of international laws centring on the treatment of civilians during war time. These include setting up their military base inside a protected building and using the villagers as human shields to stave off attacks by the Ukrainian military who were fighting to reclaim Yahidne.
The 34-year-old prosecutor who has been working non-stop on this case for more than a year is optimistic about the outcome. Serhil Krupko unlocks the safe in his office and shows us some of the vital evidence.
War crimes cases, he explains, rest on multiple factors. “It is necessary to have physical evidence which can prove the individuals were there. As well as witnesses who can identify them.”
The documents Krupo and his team have collected include army files with photographs of the soldiers and all their personal details. He says Ukrainian journalists, who are part of a group called the Reckoning Project, helped gather a stash of evidence.
Some of the journalists tracked down Russian sim cards, traced them to Russia and even interviewed some of the soldiers involved who’d returned there.
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Ukrainian prosecutor, Serhil Krupko, shows Sky News’s Alex Crawford some of the evidence in this case
On top of that, the prosecutors have more than 300 survivors who were also witnesses to the crimes and have been able to identify the Russian soldiers involved, as well as give detailed accounts about what they did and how they behaved.
Villagers unable to stretch or move for 16 hours
In the windowless basement, villagers were kept confined to separate cell-like rooms, which were all so overcrowded that there was no space to lay down. Many spoke about regularly spending 16 hours straight in a single position, unable to stretch or move.
There was limited access to urinate or defecate and they were given buckets to use in the corner of some of the rooms. School teacher, Valentyna Danilova, says she believes it was a deliberate tactic to break them: “They didn’t want us to feel human,” she says. “We had no hygiene – we couldn’t even wash our hands the first 10 days.”
Many of the elderly people were terrified to drink very much, she adds, because they feared going to the toilet with little privacy or worse, being forced to urinate where they sat.
‘No War’ painted on the wall by children
The walls of the basement still have some paintings drawn by the children and maybe some of the adults. We find the words of the Ukrainian anthem as well as hearts coloured in red and the words “no war” inscribed above in big letters.
Perhaps the most poignant image though is of a line of stick figures, stark in the simplicity of the drawing but with some of the figures clearly shooting those next to them in the head.
Occasionally, the soldiers opened the basement door to let them out to go to the toilet behind the main school building but every time they ventured out from the basement, they risked being shelled in the battle over the village.
The Russians told them they had already taken Kyiv and that President Zelenskyy had fled. They even presented their captives with a Russian newspaper detailing this ‘news’ of the Ukrainian collapse.
Ivan, the school caretaker, shows the calendar that was marked on the wall
‘None of us expected to leave alive’
The teacher, Valantyna, managed to smuggle a bit of charred wood into the basement and started a calendar where she chalked off the days and kept a note of the dead – those who were killed as the Russian troops entered the village and another list of those who died while being held in the underground school rooms.
With so little light, they struggled to differentiate between day or night.
“None of us expected to leave alive,” Valantyna says, “and there was an understanding among us that one day our children would come and find this place and at least they should know who was here and what happened.”
She describes how some of the guards seemed to enjoy tormenting their prisoners. It was freezing cold in the basement, so she asked to collect a blanket for her elderly mother.
“They agreed but the moment I got outside, the soldiers started shooting at my feet. I stumbled and they laughed. It was funny to them.”
Mykhailo Shevchenko’s son was killed
Several villagers were killed before making it into the basement. Mykhailo Shevchenko said his son Viktor was one of the first killed as the Russian troops entered Yahidne.
His death will be investigated too after post-mortems appeared to show he was tied up and tortured before being shot in the head. His body then lay in the garden of his home for more than two weeks.
“Seventeen days he was lying there barefoot and his hands were tied behind his back,” says Mykhailo.
The villagers’ hopes have been raised by the guilty verdicts handed out to soldiers involved in terrorising local resident Nadiia Radchenko’s family.
Nadiia Radchenko in front of her husband’s grave
Her husband was killed, her house looted and guns put to their heads. Ukrainian lawmakers sentenced three Russian soldiers to 12 years in prison in absentia.
“It’s good to get a verdict,” Nadiia says, “but not good they’re still walking free because everyone needs to be held accountable and if you deliberately came to attack us, you need to be punished.”
Serhil Krupko, the Ukrainian prosecutor, emphasised to us how important he thinks this case is. “We believe his case will show how the Russians were using ordinary civilians as human shields,” he says. “And our international criminal court partners were very interested in this.”
Brazil was “a bit surprised” Britain hasn’t contributed to a new investment fund to protect tropical forests, despite having helped to design it, a senior official has told Sky News.
The Amazon nation has used its role as host of the COP30 climate talks to tout its new scheme, which it drew up with the help of countries including the UK and Indonesia.
With Britain’s budget day looming, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer decided against chipping in when he visited the Amazonian city of Belem this month.
The news came out the day before Brazil was about to launch it.
“The Brazilians were livid” about the timing, one source told Sky News.
Lush rainforest and waterways in the Brazilian Amazon
A waterfall in Kayapo territory in Brazil
Garo Batmanian, director-general of the Brazilian Forestry Service and coordinator of the new scheme, said: “We were expecting [Britain to pay in] because the UK was the very first one to support us.”
The so-called Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF) was drawn up with the help of “very bright people from the UK”, according to Mr Batmanian.
“So we are a bit surprised, but we expect that once internal situations get better, hopefully they will come through,” he added.
The UK’s climate envoy, Rachel Kyte, told Sky News: “The PM agreed the decision was about not doing it now, as opposed to not ever.
“We will look at the TFFF after the budget and are carefully tracking how others are investing.”
Forest growing back from a fire (bottom left) and deforestation alongside healthy sections of Amazon rainforest
The fund has been hailed as a breakthrough – if Brazil can get if off the ground.
Paul Polman, former Unilever boss and now co-vice chair of Planetary Guardians, said it could be the “first forest-finance plan big enough to change the game”.
Why do tropical forests need help?
At their best, tropical forests like the Amazon and the Congo Basin provide food, rainfall and clean air for millions of people around the world.
They soak up carbon dioxide – the main driver of climate change – providing a cooling effect on a heating planet.
But they are being nibbled away at by extractive industries like oil, logging, soy and gold.
Parts of the Amazon rainforest already emit more carbon dioxide than they store.
Other pockets are expected to collapse in the next few decades, meaning they’d no longer be rainforests at all.
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Greenpeace says deforested land could be better used, which would save the need for more land to be cleared
Cristiane Mazzetti, senior forest campaigner at Greenpeace Brazil, said: “Science is saying we need to immediately stop deforestation and start restoring what was once lost.
“And in Brazil, we already have enough open land that could be better used for agricultural expansion… There is no need [to open up] new areas.”
Can Brazil’s new investment fund save the world’s rainforests?
For decades, forests have been worth more dead than alive.
Successive attempts to save them have fallen flat because they’ve not been able to flip the economics in favour of conservation, or ensure a long-term stream of cash.
Brazil hopes the TFFF, if it launches, would make forests worth more standing than cut down, and pay out to countries and communities making that happen.
Mining is a lucrative industry in the Amazon. Pic: Reuters
“We don’t pay only for carbon, we are paying for a hectare of standing forest. The more forests you have, the more you are paid,” said Mr Batmanian.
The other “innovation” is to stop relying on aid donations, he said.
“There is a lot of demand for overseas development assistance. It’s normal to have that. We have a lot of crisis, pandemics, epidemics out there.”
Instead, the TFFF is an investment fund that would compete with other commercial propositions.
Mr Polman said: “This isn’t charity, it’s smart economic infrastructure to protect the Amazon and keep our planet safe.”
How does the TFFF raise money?
The idea is to raise a first tranche of cash from governments that can de-risk the fund for private investors.
Every $1 invested by governments could attract a further $4 of private cash.
The TFFF would then be able to take a higher amount of risk to raise above-market returns, Brazil hopes.
That means it could generate enough cash to pay competitive returns to investors and payments to the eligible countries and communities keeping their tropical trees upright.
At least 20% of the payments has been earmarked for indigenous communities, widely regarded as the best stewards of the land. Many, but not all, have welcomed the idea.
Will the TFFF work?
The proposal needs at least $10-25bn of government money to get off the ground.
So far it has raised $5.5bn from the likes of Norway, France, and Indonesia. And the World Bank has agreed to host it, signalling strong credibility.
But it’s a hard task to generate enough money to compete with lucrative industries like gold and oil, many of which governments already invest in.
Dr Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, director, Brazil Institute, King’s College London
Dr Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, director of King’s College London’s Brazil Institute, said TFFF has the potential to make it “very financially viable to have a forest as a forest”.
“But the problem is that TFFF would need to compete with these very profitable industries… because you need to capture as much money from governments, from investors.
“And so far it’s not quite balancing the competitiveness of other sectors that are potentially harmful for forests.”
Hot, humid, loud and proud: the climate protest in the city of Belem was the embodiment of the Amazonian rainforest that surrounds it.
Hawkers brought carts selling bananas, mangoes and coconuts – while demonstrators bore umbrellas, hats and fans to shelter from the scorching tropical sun.
After a week of dreary negotiations at the COP30 climate talks, the streets were alive with the drumming of maracatu music and dancing to local carimbo rhythms on Saturday.
It was a carnival atmosphere designed to elevate sober issues.
The climate protest in the city of Belem
Among those out on the streets were Kayapo people, an indigenous community living across the states of Para and Mato Grosso – the latter at the frontier of soy expansion in the Brazilian Amazon.
They are fighting local infrastructure projects like the new Ferrograo railway that will transport soy through their homeland.
The soy industry raises much-needed cash for Brazil’s economy – its second biggest export – but the kayapo say they do not get a slice of the benefit.
The climate protest
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Uti, a Kayapo community leader, said: “We do not accept the construction of the Ferrograo and some other projects.
“We Kayapo do not accept any of this being built on indigenous land.”
Many Brazilian indigenous and community groups here want legal recognition of the rights to their land – and on Friday, the Brazilian government agreed to designate two more territories to the Mundurucu people.
It’s a Brazilian lens on global issues – indigenous peoples are widely regarded as the best stewards of the land, but rarely rewarded for their efforts.
In fact, it is often a terrible opposite: grandmother Julia Chunil Catricura had been fighting to stay on Mapuche land in southern Chile, but disappeared earlier this year when she went out for a walk.
Lefimilla Catalina, also Mapuche, said she’s travelled two days to be here in Belem to raise the case of Julia, and to forge alliances with other groups.
The protest in the city of Belem
“At least [COP30] makes it visible” to the world that people are “facing conflicts” on their land, she said.
She added: “COP offers a tiny space [for indigenous people], and we want to be more involved.
“We want to have more influence, and that’s why we believe we have to take ownership of these spaces, we can’t stay out of it.”
They are joined by climate protesters from around the world in an effort to hold governments’ feet to the fire.
Louise Hutchins, convener of Make Polluters Pay Coalition International, said: “We’re here to say to governments they need to make the oil and gas companies pay up for the climate destruction – they’ve made billions in profits every day for the last 50 years.”
After three years of COPs with no protests – the UAE, Egypt, and Azerbaijan do not look kindly on people taking to the streets – this year demonstrators have defined the look, the tone and the soundtrack of the COP30 climate talks – and Saturday was no different.
Whether that will translate into anything more ambitious to come out of COP30 remains to be seen, with another week of negotiations still to go.
For now, the protests in Belem reflect the chaos, the mess and the beauty of Brazil, the COP process, and the rest of the world beyond.
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