Those who have fled face the uncertainty of carrying on with their lives elsewhere, while those returning to areas liberated by Ukrainian forces, if possible, must rebuild. Snyder describes visiting the village of Yahidne in Ukraine’s northeastern Chernihiv Oblast, where during the occupation, Russian soldiers forced nearly the entire village — more than 360 people — into the school basement at gunpoint. The locals would spend a month there, in inhumane conditions, used as human shields for the Russian soldiers’ headquarters upstairs. Eleven of them would not make it out alive.“A liberation suggests that a woe has dissipated,” Snyder writes. “But the adults need support, the children a new school. It is so very important that (the village) is no longer occupied.