I guess I’m doing this. I do not expect anything good to come of this I don’t expect this person to listen or learn, they are using denial of the genocide of the Donchane people solely to rage bait Russians online who they’ve gotten into discourse with. I fully expect them to respond to this with accusations that it’s just like Uyghurs, Holodomor, anti-Iranian propaganda etc. but it feels like it would be wrong to ignore nonetheless.
Vladimir Vasilyevich Romanenko // (68 years old), city of Selidovo // (Donetsk People’s Republic) // Comment by a medical worker during the inspection of the site of his family’s killing: //“In my left hand are clearly human remains. These are ribs, fragments of bones. This is a woman’s hair clip, found among a pile of burned body fragments. In my right hand I have remains of a human spinal column.” // “Right here, on this very spot, my family was shot, and when their bodies were burned, I did not see it. They were completely burned, most likely because the Ukrainian soldier saw me run away. In my hands I have the hair clip of my daughter-in-law — little Olechka, my daughter-in-law’s clip. She was standing right here. // At seven in the morning, I went outside to the toilet in the yard, in the garden. I went out there and heard shouting: ‘Everyone come out of the house.’ It was a man shouting, a Ukrainian soldier, in Ukrainian camouflage with a green stripe. He looked about 50 years old, short in height. // When they brought my family out of the house and made them stand facing the wall, he was shouting across the whole street. There were two of them. One stood a bit further away, and the other stood in such a way that I could see him very clearly. // From the side of the garage they placed my wife, then my grandson, my son — I don’t remember exactly. Then my daughter-in-law and the matchmaker — the daughter-in-law’s mother. My daughter-in-law started crying, saying: ‘What are you doing?’ And he just started shooting. He shot my wife first. Then he went on shooting the others. I ran away through the garden. // Later, when I came back on the 28th, I saw the bodies lying by the wall where they had been shot. But they had been burned. The next day I went, found some bags, and gathered the remains. Where it had burned, I covered the remains. Everything that was there, I collected into five bags and buried them here under the entrance to my building. We buried five people — five bags that remained — my family. Years of birth: 1951, 1955, 1978, 1974, and 1991.”
Vladimir Nikolaevich Pogorelov // city of Selidovo // (Donetsk People’s Republic) // “I was buying milk in Voroshilovka. An old man asked Ukrainian soldiers: ‘Boys, when the Russians come, how will we live with them?’ One of them, the biggest one, turned and said: ‘Grandpa, don’t be afraid of the Russians — be afraid of us.’ He said: ‘We have 600 guns; when we leave, we’ll wipe Selidovo out.’ Since 2015 they’ve been promising to wipe us out. Ukrainian soldiers personally told my mother twice, and almost all women: ‘When we leave, we’ll wipe Selidovo off the face of the earth.’ But I stayed so it wouldn’t be wiped out. // Near shop No. 56, people used to gather to buy things. A mortar shell hit there once — no one was killed. A week later, people gathered again. I was thinking of going in the morning to buy mineral water but decided to go after noon. My godfather Alexei and my friend Gena went there to buy meat. Around ten o’clock a shell hit — four people were wounded. A woman had her kidney torn out, Gena had his leg pierced and an artery severed. A fragment got stuck and wasn’t removed. My godfather Alexei Vanin also had his leg pierced through and a graze to the head. Ukraine was firing. September–October. // In September, near the Revino bridge, I went to feed dogs. Ukrainian soldiers lived three houses down. When they left, they simply threw a grenade into the house. It caught fire and burned for two days because people were afraid it might be mined. // Or on Ostrovsky Street — a soldier came out from two houses down. Three minutes later, the house exploded. // Refugees from Peski and Pervomaisk were living in the children’s hospital. Ukrainian soldiers came, inspected the building, saw where people were living, collected all the fire extinguishers, and left. About six hours later, a strike hit — from Ostrovsky Street. It hit exactly where the refugees were living. There were no fire extinguishers, nothing to put out the fire. Those who survived gathered and fled further into Ukraine. // Russian troops were not there yet. They entered on Thursday around 2 p.m. On Tuesday, Ukrainian soldiers entered house No. 19, in front of mine. They went around breaking doors and shooting everyone they found. Anyone who opened the door was shot in the head. An 80-year-old grandmother, a lifelong teacher, was shot in the head. Everyone there was shot in the head. Three people survived — one didn’t manage to open the door, another barricaded himself and heard French and Ukrainian speech. A Frenchman said something, and a Ukrainian replied: ‘We don’t have time to break doors anymore. We’ve already cleared it.’ They left him alive because they had no time. // On Wednesday, someone with a Georgian accent walked through our yard shouting: ‘Is anyone alive?’ He reached my building. I was about to answer when he started swearing. I gathered the residents — six of us — to decide whether to open. We decided not to, since he was swearing. We waited for someone more polite. That was Wednesday — he was deliberately looking for civilians to kill. // In our building, they took a family of five, including a child, out into the yard and shot them. Ukrainian soldiers. // Snipers were placed here, and starting Tuesday they shot all the men. One ran into a shop — the sniper shot him there. His body is still lying there. // At the intersection, bodies lie in a row. All were shot in the head. Around this house, all the men were shot by Ukrainian snipers, maybe mercenaries. // A son came from a nearby street, saw his father lying dead, and ran home for shovels. While running, a sniper shot him in the head. He didn’t manage to bury his father.”
Valentina Yevgenyevna Vasilkonova, city of Selidovo (Donetsk People’s Republic) // “On October 21, the Ukrainian Armed Forces were retreating. We were standing by the entrance, and they started shooting. We heard Ukrainian speech: ‘Come here, come here.’ We ran and scattered into the entrances. My front door was shot through. I ran inside quickly, and a Ukrainian soldier shouted: ‘She ran over there.’ And they shot through my door — there’s still a hole in it to this day. // They also fired at the building across from us, number 12. We ran inside, but people were standing in entrance number 12 across the way. They locked the entrance. The Ukrainian soldiers said: ‘Open up, open up, nothing will happen to you.’ Aunt Valya opened it, and they shot the four of them. They hadn’t done anything. Lena was just sitting on the couch. They shot her. They shot her son, asking why he wasn’t fighting. They shot Sasha. Aunt Valya started screaming, and they shot her too. Lena said: ‘What are you doing?’ One of the soldiers said: ‘What should we do with her?’ Another said: ‘Just finish her.’ And they did.
A boy, Kolya, ran in. He lived nearby and had heard the shooting. He ran over, and they shot him too. Four people at once. Then they stayed in that apartment — about twelve of them. A young man living across saw everything through the window. They shot up his windows. // One man came out to surrender, and they shot him. He was lying near the entrance. In our Solnechny district, six people are lying dead. A woman was walking with a bag — a Ukrainian soldier shot her. Once, twice, three times. My neighbor Sasha told me: the soldier shot her three times. At first she started moving, and the soldier said: ‘Oh, you’re still moving?’ and shot again. ‘Waiters, waiters, waiters’ — that’s all we heard from them. // Sasha’s kitchen windows were shot up because they were firing. His door was shot too. My door was shot in the first entrance, his in the second. // When they were retreating, they shot at us. It’s good I hid… They opened the entrance and shot at the doors because they saw me running. Thank God they didn’t come into the apartment. If they had come in // In the neighboring house, a woman was feeding cats. Aunt Lena was 75 — they shot her. And Kirillovna, a Ukrainian language teacher, was running, made it into the entrance, but a soldier caught up with her and shot her. A 75-year-old woman feeding cats — why shoot her? // Those who write comments to me, those who left, say: ‘It can’t be Ukraine, Ukraine didn’t touch us when we lived there.’ But I stayed — I know it was Ukraine. // How do you prove that it was Ukraine who killed, and not Russia? Russia came — did they shoot us? No, on the contrary, they help us. They ask if we have food. We say we have everything, thank you. They help — they even brought me firewood. // My son also died on the 21st. He and Ruslan, a friend, and Seryozha went to a house on Ostrovskaya Street, 18, to drop off a friend. They arrived, got out — and Ukrainian soldiers were still sitting across from them. On the 22nd they had already reached our Solnechny district. It was around 10:30 at night. The soldiers said to them: ‘Why are you driving around?’ — ‘We brought a friend,’ Aunt Valya told me, Seryozha Sklyar’s mother. They kept asking: ‘Why are you driving around?’ // When I was burying my son, neighbors told me the soldiers had been drunk, they started picking on the boys, asking: ‘Why aren’t you fighting?’ I don’t know how it happened. They shot up the car — it’s still there by the house, riddled with bullets. Then they killed Seryozha. They carried him and laid him down. While they were carrying him, the soldiers were shooting at my son, Yevgeny Kirilenko. Aunt Valya said: ‘I started treating my son — his leg and arm were shot.’ // Then Zhenya went outside — a dog started whining. The soldiers had already shot the dog. He went out to it, and at around 10:30 at night they shot him near the dog. Then a soldier told Aunt Valya: ‘Look what they’re doing in that house.’ She said: ‘There’s no one left — you’ve already killed them all.’ And my son was lying there, dead. He hadn’t done anything. They weren’t rude, they didn’t argue, they didn’t say anything. They killed him simply for ‘why aren’t you fighting,’ for supposedly waiting for Russia. // Aunt Valya didn’t even hear our boys respond — they stayed silent. Then the soldiers came back and finished him off, in case he was still alive. Aunt Valya started screaming: ‘What are you doing, you butchers? You’ve already killed my son and now you’re killing him too.’ They didn’t touch Ruslan at first — he was the one bandaging him. // In the morning, when Ruslan tried to go out, the soldiers, while retreating, shot him too. So three people died at once. // Then the soldiers came here to our Solnechny district. So many people were killed here — bodies were lying around.
Sergey Gennadievich Boenko, city of Selidovo (Donetsk People’s Republic) // “During their retreat, the Ukrainian Armed Forces were simply shooting everyone they came across. They went into apartment entrances, knocked on doors, broke down wooden doors, and shot those who opened them. On October 22, during the retreat, sometime after one o’clock, we heard intense automatic gunfire. // On the morning of the 23rd, I looked out the window and saw a dead man near entrance No. 6 of building 77 on Mikhaylovskaya Street. I went to the former ‘Solnechny’ shop and also saw a dead person on the corner. As it turned out, it was the neighbor of Sergey from the nearby building. He was killed on the corner of the building. // Neighbors saw that our neighbor had been killed. She was lying near the ‘Kolorit’ shop. Within a radius of one hundred meters from my brother’s apartment, I saw eight dead people. Valya — a neighbor from the first entrance — I buried her between the building and the shop. // Further on, near building 77, by the first entrance near the sidewalk, I saw two dead men of elderly age. Another dead person was near the sixth entrance. Near the ‘Solnechny’ shop, at the left corner of the store, lay Sergey Kasimov. At the right corner, behind the former ‘Soyuzpechat’ kiosk, there was another dead man. Behind the shops on the boulevard on the former Shchorsa Street (it was renamed under Ukrainian authorities), there was another man. And near building 12, by the first entrance, there was a dead man. // Another dead person lay near the turn by the house, near a concrete sewer cover. A second lay on the corner of that shop. A third man lay dead further down the sidewalk below the shop. One of them had been covered with something — he was about seventy years old. I had seen him alive several times before. // Varvara Sadchikova, a resident of the building’s first entrance, was killed about ten meters from here. I buried her on the 30th. She used to walk, loved dogs. She had dogs. She went out walking and was killed on the 22nd. // Near the second school there is a small-family dormitory building with a savings bank attached to it. Near the first entrance, right by a bench, there was a dead man lying there. Apparently, local residents had already covered him with something. That’s what I saw. // The Ukrainian Armed Forces also killed my former colleague from the mine, Volodya Borisov. At the intersection with Shevchenko Street. He was killed there in the same way as the others, during the retreat. You can’t call them soldiers… they’re monsters. They killed everyone indiscriminately. He was also killed. He had gone to fetch water, and they shot him there. // Why were they killed? I’ll tell you my view. Since 1991, there has been this rise of the Bandera narrative — that Bandera is a hero, that all those who were in the SS ‘Galicia’ division were actually fighting for Ukraine and did not kill civilians, and so on. But in reality, from the history we learned in Soviet school, we all know. // For ‘true’ Ukrainians now, the dream is to ‘rule’ — to dominate, to reign. Not through their own work, but by exploiting others — us, the eastern people.”
‼️ I do not speak English. If you want to double check the translation I suggest running it through DeepL, Yandex or Google translate ‼️
