On April 19, Russian forces opened fire on the villages of Velyka

Oleksandrivka and Rybalche, killing civilians and damaging homes, the

Kherson Region Prosecutor’s Office reported. A week earlier, Russian
troops shot dead seven people in a residential building in the village
of Pravdyne. “After that, intending to cover up the crime, the occupier
blew up the house with the bodies of the executed people” inside, the
report said.

Russian soldiers have also kidnapped local activists, journalists and war
veterans, according to Kolykhaiev, the Kherson mayor, who said more
than 200 people have been abducted.

Among them was Baturin, who was seized near his home in Kakhovka,
60 miles (90 kilometers) east of Kherson. The journalist was meeting
an acquaintance from another village when a group of Russian soldiers
attacked him at the train station. They held him in isolation for a week,
Baturin said, interrogating him every day; the soldiers asked for the
names of organizers of anti-occupation protests, as well as local
soldiers and veterans. From other cells, he could hear sounds of
torture.

After his release he fled the occupied territory with his family.

“If I had stayed, I am absolutely certain they would come for me

again,” Baturin said, speaking by phone last week from Ukrainian-
controlled territory after his escape.