So, given the danger and devastation caused to Verkhnya Krynytsya by the war, who could have possibly made the track marks leading to and from my old home?<\/p>\n
It is highly unlikely anyone would choose to move to the village now – with the exception of Russian soldiers.<\/p>\n
Many of them moved into vacant houses after capturing Verkhnya Krynytsya. In June 2022 authorities in Zaporizhzhia said they had information that Russian troops were staying in the village. This is when satellite images first show signs of the path at my old home.<\/p>\n
To check if I was right in assuming that Russian soldiers had likely moved into my old house, I approached the Ukrainian 128th Detached Heavy Mechanised Brigade, which is involved in operations in the area.<\/p>\n
“You’re not wrong. It’s extremely likely,” its spokesman Oleksandr Kurbatov told me.<\/p>\n
As locals have been fleeing frontline areas, they are being replaced with Russian military, he said.<\/p>\n
“If there are not enough empty houses, demand is running high. Of course, it’s usually military personnel from the occupation army,” he told me.<\/p>\n
Because nobody in the village was willing to take the risk of having a look at my house, I asked my BBC Verify colleague Richard Irvine-Brown to obtain and analyse recent satellite images. They showed a pattern of movement around the house where I grew up.<\/p>\n
There was no sign of a path to the property in March 2022, a month into the invasion.<\/p>\n
Aside from the faint path seen in two satellite images in June, the property seemed ignored. Then the path reappeared in December, and a car was seen using it in January 2023. We don’t have any images for the property again until August, by when the track had become well established.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So, given the danger and devastation caused to Verkhnya Krynytsya by the war, who could have possibly made…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":484340,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7655],"tags":[332],"class_list":{"0":"post-484339","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-russia","8":"tag-russia"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115341499058555505","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484339\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/484340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}