So what happens to Ukraine’s “traitors” now?
, leaving behind ammunition boxes, propaganda newspapers, and empty vodka bottles in their trenches and foxholes.
Three weeks on, the fighting is not yet over in the area. Artillery fire still booms out as Ukrainian troops push on into the neighboring Luhansk oblast. But whatever happens on the battlefield, life here, and in other liberated towns and villages in eastern and southern Ukraine, will never return to normal until there has been a reckoning—between those who collaborated with the Russians and those who resisted them.
As Russian troops and armored vehicles poured into towns and villages across the country, many, like Oleksiy and his family bided their time, waiting for the moment they could come out and greet advancing Ukrainian soldiers with the blue and yellow flag they had kept hanging on the clothes-line—despite being ordered to take it down by Russian soldiers. “We never doubted, we knew that Ukraine would take back Cherneshchyna, and we waited,” says Olena.