Global in Ukraine: Russian commander gave order to ‘shoot civilians’, says captured soldier – National | Globalnews.ca

KHARKIV, Ukraine — During his videotaped interrogation with Ukraine’s state security office, the wounded Russian soldier appeared nervous.

Breathing heavily as he answered questions, the young prisoner explained his commander’s orders on the first day of the Russian invasion.

After crossing the border that morning in an armored column, his unit was on the ring road around the city of Kharkiv when a traffic jam formed, he said.

“The political officer got tired and told us, ‘Shoot the civilians,’” ​​the prisoner said in a video of his interrogation, obtained by Global News.

The commander’s deadly order initiated a sequence of events that defies simple narratives about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Unwilling to kill innocents, two Russian soldiers disobeyed and tried to save a woman and her daughter. When Russian troops opened fire, the woman was killed.

So was one of the unruly soldiers. The other was seriously injured and it would take another act of humanity to save his life.

The woman who came to his rescue was a Kharkiv lawyer named Karolina Perlifon, the passenger in the car whom the Russian challengers tried to save.

In an interview at the home he shares with the dogs he inherited from his mother Iryna, he recalled his moral dilemma.

“It was my choice to save it or not to save it,” he said. “And I told him that he will be able to live, and I will save him.”

“He’s a human who was just a hostage to the situation,” he explained. “He directly did nothing wrong, and for me personally it was a shame for him.”

On February 24, she and her mother woke up early in Bobrivka, their village northeast of Kharkiv, to the sound of explosions and news of Russian invasions.

Unsure of what the future held, they headed to Kharkiv to stock up on dog food and supplies.

They were heading back to Bobrivka when they encountered Russian tanks blocking the ring road.

And then the Russians started shooting at cars.

Terrified, Iryna turned her car around and stopped. She turned off the car and two Russian soldiers came running up.

“They told us that it is not safe to be in the car, so we have to get out of the car. We ran out of the car and hid with them,” Perlifon said.

The four hid as Russian troops on the road fired at cars. Perlifon called his father to tell her what was happening.

“Bullets were flying around us,” he said.

His mother was the first of the four to be beaten. One of the disobedient Russian soldiers threw Perlifon to the ground.

He stood up to tell his companions to stop shooting, that they too were Russians.

But then he fell. They had shot him. He tried to pull the gun from him to shoot, but he was shot again and he died.

Perlifon tried to wake her mother up until she realized that she had been shot in the head and was dead. The second Russian soldier did not move either.

Convinced that this was the end, Perlifon hid behind a wall and recorded a video thanking her parents for the life they had given her.

Forty minutes passed, maybe an hour. He realized that he needed to escape, so he went to the car, but the Russian soldier woke up. He had been shot in both legs.

He understood the difficult decision he had to make: let a man die or save a soldier who had just invaded his country.

He dragged himself to the car. She helped him lie down in the back seat. He realized that her mother had the keys. He found them in Iryna’s hand and bid her farewell.

“I just hugged her and kissed her,” Perlifon said. “I told her I loved her and ran to the car to get out of there.”

He drove fast, hands shaking, and called his father to tell him he had run away.

“And I told him, ‘I have a Russian soldier in my car who is injured,'” he recalled.

The soldier was in and out of consciousness. There was blood all over the back seat. He suffered from delusions.

“He asked me to take him home, but I said, ‘I can’t take you home,'” she said.

He told her he needed a drink. He stopped for water and called an ambulance. He arrived five to 10 minutes later.

She never saw him again, the Russian soldier who owes his life to her, and to whom she owes hers.

Perlifon saw his videotaped confession and said it was accurate.

“The lieutenant colonel gave the order to shoot the civilians,” the captured soldier said in the recording.

In the five-minute version of the video obtained by Global News, he said that when the shooting began, he and his lieutenant, Ivan Minkov, made a decision to “save civilians.”

“The lieutenant ran up to them, started pulling them out of the car and yelling, ‘Come here,'” he recalled in the video.

He recounted that he joined his colleague and hid with the two women. But his commander, a lieutenant colonel, “was able to see that we are saving civilians and gave the order to shoot us.”

“We sat with the daughter behind the garage until everything was calm,” he said. “The daughter suggested that she take me from there and call the ambulance.”

“Then he walked towards his mother,” he said. “She took the key. She was crawling towards the car. She pushed me in the car in the back seat, she started the car.”

The commander who gave the order to fire has been identified as Lieutenant Colonel Yevgeny Alexandrovic Zelenov, commander of the 74th Separate Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade.

Kharkiv war crimes prosecutors said this was the first case in which a Russian commander is responsible for ordering the killing of civilians.

“That’s our goal, to get to the top of the commanders,” Andrii Kravchenko, from the Kharkiv region prosecutor’s service, told Global News.

A website that tracks the killings of top Russian officials in Ukraine lists him as dead on March 17. Global News was unable to confirm this.

Zolonov was honored by Russia for alleged “heroic actions” in March. The summons said that despite being seriously injured, he destroyed an armored personnel carrier and captured 11 “nationalists.”

Following the loss of his mother, Perlifon returned home to Bobrivka to take care of the dogs. He survived a month under the Russian occupation.

With no heat or electricity, he ate porridge cooked over a fire and slept at night with the dogs in his bed to keep warm.

His mother loved dogs so much that after studying music and aviation, she opened a kennel in Bobrivka.

“My mom was everything to me,” Perlifon said. “And when she was killed, it was as if they had actually killed me.

“I want people to know how he died and what kind of person he was, and I don’t want his death to be in vain.”

She supports Ukraine’s attempt to prosecute the commander who gave the order to shoot.

But she doesn’t think the soldier who helped her should be charged. At the moment, prosecutors think otherwise. He is still a prisoner of war.

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