‘The pain, the tears, it’s all there’: how Putin’s war has left Ukraine haunted by its past

For occupied parts of Ukraine, Russia’s war and the propaganda fuelling it has forced many to relive the horrors of previous wars

Mariia Sinhayevska was 11 when the Germans occupied her village, near Zaporizhzhia in south-eastern Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. She can still remember some German words from the year she spent in school under occupation. The soldiers were friendly, she said, though not if you were suspected of being a Communist or a Jew.

“There was a place about three kilometres away where people used to say the ground was breathing; it was where the Germans put the bodies of all the people they had shot,” she said.