Ukrainian Woman Says Russian Soldiers Shot Her Husband After Asking For Cigarettes

A Ukrainian woman said her husband was killed by Russian soldiers, who shot him right after asking him for cigarettes.

The 46-year-old mother from Bohdanivka was living with her husband, 10-year-old daughter and 81-year-old mother-in-law when Russian troops encroached on her village, which is situated in the east of Kyiv.

The troops had lined up their tanks on the streets on March 7 and 8, the woman recalled. While sheltering indoors, the family heard shots being fired through the window downstairs on the evening of March 9. The woman and her husband yelled that they were civilians and had no weapons with them before making their way downstairs, according to Business Insider.

Two Russian soldiers then pushed the adults and the child into a boiler room and shut the door on them.

“They forced us in and slammed the door,” the woman recollected, according to Amnesty International.

She said the soldiers returned in a minute and asked her husband if he had cigarettes.

“He said no, he hadn’t smoked for a couple of weeks. They shot him in his right arm. The other said, ‘Finish him,’ and they shot him in the head,” the woman went on to say.

The woman then helplessly watched her husband’s final moments as he slowly passed away.

“He didn’t die right away. From 9:30 p.m. to 4 a.m. he was still breathing, though he wasn’t conscious. I begged him… ‘If you can hear me, please move your finger,’” she told Amnesty International. “He didn’t move his finger, but I put his hand on my knee and squeezed it. Blood was flowing out of him. When he took his last breath, I turned to my daughter and said, ‘It seems daddy has died.’”

One of the family’s neighbors confirmed seeing Russian forces breaking into the woman’s house. He also saw the sight of the husband’s lifeless body in the corner of the boiler room.

Following her husband’s death, the woman and her daughter fled the village while her mother-in-law stayed behind.

The Ukrainian woman was one among more than 20 people who shared their frightening accounts with Amnesty International’s Crisis Response investigators. The interviewees told the organization about the harrowing incidents where Russian soldiers committed “extrajudicial executions and other unlawful killings, which must be investigated as likely war crimes,” according to Agnès Callamard, Secretary-General of Amnesty International.

“Testimonies show that unarmed civilians in Ukraine are being killed in their homes and streets in acts of unspeakable cruelty and shocking brutality,” Callamard continued. “The intentional killing of civilians is a human rights violation and a war crime. These deaths must be thoroughly investigated, and those responsible must be prosecuted, including up the chain of command.”