War in Ukraine: Zelenskiy wants Putin to ‘spend the rest of his life in a basement’

Putin should pay for Zelensky. The Ukrainian president on Monday demanded that his Russian counterpart be locked in a basement without a toilet after visiting a Ukrainian village liberated a year ago, almost the entire population of which was isolated in the basement by Russian occupiers.

According to Head of State Volodymyr Zelensky, 11 people died in this basement of a school of less than 200 m2, where in March 2022, about 367 people out of about 400 residents of Yagidne in northern Ukraine were locked up for 27 days.

“All these people lived in total darkness, waiting for the Ukrainians to return. They wrote (on the walls) the names of the dead and the dates so that they would not be forgotten. And the children celebrated the words of the anthem of Ukraine,” he said during the ceremony of honoring them, accompanied by German Vice Chancellor Robert Habek.

“Cellar with a bucket instead of a toilet”

“After that, I would like the Russian president to spend the rest of his days in the basement with a bucket instead of a toilet,” Volodymyr Zelensky hammered into this village in the Chernihiv region.

Having failed to capture Kyiv, the Russian army retreated from northern Ukraine in late March 2022, about a month after the invasion began.

In the towns and villages he occupied, allegations, often documented, of summary executions, torture, rape and theft abounded. The Kremlin, as always in such cases, denied it.

Valerie Polgi, a 38-year-old resident of Jaguidne who was locked in the basement of a local school, speaks of the appalling conditions of detention. “At first it was cold, but then there were more and more people and there was not enough oxygen,” he said. “Older people fainted from lack of oxygen, went crazy, and then died,” he recalls.