45 days of captivity: the story of a school principal from Kharkiv who refused to submit to the occupiers
A village with an unusual name, Lesnaya Stenka, is located in the eastern part of Kharkiv Oblast. It has a large lyceum, whose director and teacher, Larisa Fesenko, survived Russian captivity, but refused to bring the “Russian world” to her schoolchildren. She has agreed to share her story.
She refused to remove Ukrainian symbols
Our village is quite remote, so before the covid pandemic, the school in Lesnaya Stenka operated as a boarding school. The school is large, designed for 750 children. Children from remote villages stayed there for five days and went home at weekends.
I tried to make sure that everything in the school was in the national style: traditional Ukrainian ‘rushnyki’ (embroideries), flags, a huge map of Ukraine in the hall. Also, in the school there was a museum with photos of fallen soldiers, and on the other side of the room it was like a traditional Ukrainian sitting room. There we collected old things, clothes – things that were used in our region.
Immediately after the invasion, the head of the community told me to take pictures of all these symbols. Despite the fact that Kupyansk district was occupied in the first days, the Russians didn’t actually visit our village until the summer. Our village is very remote, it is like the very corner of the district, around the forest. The Russians had not yet even come to the village, and the head of the community was already talking about removing the symbols. But I am a wilful woman. I said I would not remove anything, because to tear down the Ukrainian flags means to be afraid of the Russians. The only thing I did was to hide the photos of the heroes because there were surnames, and I didn’t want to endanger my relatives.
The occupiers promised teachers 10,000 roubles
Sometime in early June 2022, I was informed that I had to go to Kupyansk, our district centre, for a gathering of principals of all schools in the district. And at this meeting I had to submit the lists for the lyceum: who of the teachers agreed to go for retraining in the Russian Federation.
I thought that selling out for money – and the Russians promised 10,000 roubles each – was low and disgusting. But out of 17 teachers, nine went to cooperate. I was shocked, I didn’t sleep all night, I didn’t understand: it turns out that we don’t know the people with whom we have been working, communicating, living in the same village for years. I told everything to those teachers who decided to cooperate with the occupants. After that, they wrote a letter about me and took it to the occupation administration of Kharkiv region to Vitaliy Ganchev, who had collaborated with the occupation authorities in Luhansk since 2013. Now, he is wanted by Kharkiv regional prosecutor’s office on suspicion of high treason and cooperation with the aggressor.
The FSB guards tied my hands and told me to go to the basement
In early July 2022, for the first time, the FSB guards came to me. They came in the yard and said: “We are from the FSB. And we have a complaint against you.” They told me that I was setting my colleagues against Russia, although Russia had been here forever, and Ukraine was not coming.
I stood, calmly looked at them and replied: “This is your opinion, and mine is quite different”. And they said to me: “Are you still going to argue with us? Now there will come another unit, and we don’t know what they will do to you. Think carefully, we are definitely not meeting you for the last time”.
I was pressured for a long time to hand over my school stamps and documents. I refused, and the Russians came a second time. They were all wearing balaclavas and did not reveal their faces. They twisted me, broke my arms. They dragged my husband out into the corridor and put a guard near him. Everyone else started going through everything in the house. I had yellow and blue ribbons from the school bell taken away. I had diplomas with the emblem of Ukraine – they took them away. I tried to resist, then they hit me with the muzzle of an automatic rifle. And then they told me to get dressed, because I was going with them.
In captivity people had to sing the Russian anthem
It is very hard to remember the captivity. There were about 12 people in a double cell. No sanitation, a toilet with a broken cistern. And it was the height of summer, the heat in the cell was up to 50 degrees. And they sometimes closed the openings in the doors, through which food was given, and then opened them and laughed. They also made us sing the Russian anthem three times a day and watched through a video surveillance camera to see who didn’t do it. Then these people were humiliated in all sorts of ways, beaten. That’s how 45 days passed.
On the night of September 7-8, 2022, the Russians closed us in our cells and left. A rocket fell near our room, and we realised that the occupiers had either been killed by this explosion or escaped. Then we all piled on the doors together and were able to open the cell. I spent the night in an empty church that I came across on my way home. When I got home, it was a miracle to see my husband. The Russians told me it would never happen. And I didn’t know whether it was because I would never come out of the cellar or because he wasn’t alive.
When I returned to the lyceum for the first time after my captivity and the liberation of the village, the map of Ukraine had been taped over, the Ukrainian coat of arms torn down, and Russian textbooks had been brought into the library. Ukrainian textbooks were packed in sacks, clearly meant to be destroyed. A Russian flag hung in the school, as well as a sign that read “Russia is our motherland”.
The first school bell rang under the barrel of rifles
According to the children’s parents, before September 1, 2022, teachers who cooperated with the occupation administration went around to all parents and told them that if they did not bring their children to school on 1 September, they would be deprived of their parental rights. On 1 September, during the first bell, armed men stood on the roof of the lyceum. That’s how the “Russian world” was.
In January 2024, the so-called ‘Department of Internal Affairs of the Military-Civil Administration of Kharkiv Region’, an occupation authority, opened a criminal case against Larisa Fesenko as an “accomplice of the Nazi regime”.
On 1 July, 2024, the Russian Federation dropped an aerial bomb on the lyceum in Lesnaya Stenka. A fire started and the building was almost completely destroyed. In addition, the House of Culture of the village and several dozen private houses were damaged, among them the house of Larisa Fesenko and her husband.
“Four KABs (guided aerial bombs weighing from 250 to 2,000 kilograms) were dropped on our school. And our house is five steps away from it,” the teacher said.
Larisa believes that in this way the Russians could take revenge for her insubordination, because “this is the only thing they are capable of”.
This story was written in collaboration with The Reckoning Project, an initiative that brings together journalists, researchers, data scientists and legal experts to document war crimes, build legal cases, and combat disinformation by using reliable media outlets. The European Union has recently reinforced its support for The Reckoning Project.
Author: Alina Dykhman
The story was published in Romanian and Russian by NewsMaker.md
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