Alexey Zdorovets

On the night of March 9, at what seemed to be about 10:00 p.m., Mikhail Romanov appeared at Yevgeniya’s house — the easternmost house on the street.

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He’d already been there early that day with a group of conscripts — just like they’d gone to Kristina’s home. One of the soldiers had shot Yevgeniya’s dog and started breaking through the gate, Yevgeniya told Meduza. One of the soldiers in the group was Vitaly, who immediately started apologizing; he told her he breeds dogs at home in Russia, and that he wasn’t the one who’d shot her dog. Romanov didn’t try to introduce himself to Yevgeniya. “He’d already had something to drink, so he got on his knees and kissed my hands,” she said. “He said he wanted to go home, and he asked us not to be afraid of them. At that point, we still thought the dog being killed was the worst thing that would happen.”

Then, however, Romanov saw a khaki-colored jacket in a car parked outside the house, and his demeanor changed abruptly. He became furious and shot his gun over Yevgeniya’s husband’s head. The couple managed to calm him down by saying it was an Airsoft uniform.

Later that evening, Mikhail Romanov came back on an ATV — though not with Vitaly, but with a different person, who was “wearing an all-black uniform,” said Yevgeniya.

“It was already completely dark, and they knocked at the gate. I went down to the boiler room, where my son was sleeping, and my husband went to open the gate,” said Yevgeniya. “Then I heard a gunshot outside, then footsteps in the house. ‘Come out!’ they yelled. ‘Where’s my husband?’ I asked them. Then that man in the black uniform said, ‘You don’t have a husband anymore — your husband was a Nazi, so we shot him.’”

Yevgeniya started crying. The man in the black uniform put his gun up to her head and said, ‘If you don’t shut your mouth, we’ll go get your little one and show him his mommy’s brains flying around the house.” Then Mikhail Romanov ordered her to undress.

As Yevgeniya told Meduza, for about two hours, Romanov and the man in the black uniform took turns raping her in the hallway and on the staircase. Her son was in the boiler room the entire time. “They would leave and then come back and keep doing the same thing. They held a gun to my head the entire time. Eventually, they came back so drunk that they couldn’t stand up — they were pissing themselves right in the house — and finally they sat down in armchairs and fell asleep.

Amnesty International and The Times confirmed the circumstances surrounding these events through independent interviews.

While the Russian soldiers were sleeping in Yevgeniya’s home, she got her son from the boiler room and explained to him that they “needed to run away right now” or they would be “shot.” Before leaving the property, she found her husband’s body and touched his hand; it was already cold. “We ran through the field to the first house we could find, climbed over the fence, and started knocking. We were lucky it was a house that still had people in it,” she said.

More:

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/04/18/i-can-do-whatever-i-want-to-you