| A pattern of indiscriminate violence committed by Russian forces appears to have taken hold in a number of towns and villages in the Kyiv region.  Photograph by Jérôme Sessini / Magnum for The New Yorker In Novyi Bykiv, a village sixty miles east of Kyiv, I was led to a cellar. For a month, Russian soldiers had taken up residence in the town’s Soviet-era house of culture, laying mattresses on the floors and positioning anti-aircraft missiles outside. During that time, they used the boiler room in the basement of an outbuilding to hold as many as twenty-two prisoners. Within the boiler room, there was a deeper chamber, a stone-walled crawl space the size of a refrigerator turned on its side. Maxim Didyk, a twenty-one-year-old mechanic, told me that he spent eight days inside it. The interior was barely long enough to lie down, and only high enough for Didyk and a few other captives to squat on their knees. At one point, he said, the space held seven people. —Joshua Yaffa, from “The Prisoners in a Cellar in the Ukrainian Village of Novyi Bykiv” | 
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