Ukrainian woman ‘is raped by Chechen soldier who slit victim’s throat’ near Kyiv 

Footage has emerged purporting to show the murder scene of a Ukrainian woman allegedly held captive and raped by soldiers under the command of Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov.

The clip, shared on Telegram and Twitter by Ukrainian Interior Ministry adviser Anton Gerashchenko, showed the inside of a house where Tetiana Zadorozhniak is thought to have been slaughtered in the town of Makariv, 30 miles from Kyiv, last month.

According to residents of the town, Tetiana was dragged out of her home by Kadyrov’s men as she waited to evacuate the town with her friend before being held captive in a nearby house and abused.

After days of torture, one of the soldiers raped her for a final time before cutting her throat and unceremoniously dumping her lifeless body in a shallow grave, local residents said.  

Witnesses claimed that the Chechen soldier who raped and killed Tetiana was later executed by other officers. 

The harrowing incident is thought to be one of the latest examples of brutality enacted upon helpless civilians during Russia’s war in Ukraine as the conflict approaches its seventh week. 

In his Telegram post, Gerashchenko said Tetiana had lived in her house in Makariv since 2012 with her husband, who had died from Covid in the early days of the pandemic, and their dog Reeny.

The official claimed Tetiana was killed on March 15, after days of being kept in captivity and abused.

‘When Chechens from Kadyrov batallion entered the village, Tetiana was waiting for her friend to leave together,’ he said.

‘One of the occupants took her to the next house where he raped her and then cut her throat… No one could help her because the locals were locked up in basements by Russians.’ 

The video accompanying Gerashchenko’s post showed the inside of the house where Tetiana is thought to have been killed. 

Bloodstained sheets could be seen in rooms where contents had been smashed and thrown about, and the camerawoman can be heard sobbing as she describes the scene.

Residents who said the Chechen soldier who murdered Tetiana was later executed by his comrades admitted they did not know why the occupiers would kill one of their own.

The offender was believed to be under the command of Kadyrov – head of the Chechen republic and friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin.  

One woman speculated that soldiers who stumbled upon the scene were simply disgusted by the rapist’s conduct.

However, recent intelligence cited by the Ukrainian ministry of defence suggested that troops involved in the torture and massacre of civilians in Bucha weeks ago were redeployed to the front lines, in the hope they would be killed and therefore unable to testify in any future war crime tribunals.  

In a later post, Gerashchenko said he had a personal contact who knew Tetiana and had returned to her house to find Reeny waiting patiently outside the house for her slain owner. 

‘This is Reeny, 9 years old. Her human Tetiana we wrote about was brutally murdered. Reeny doesn’t know and still waits for her. No one took care of Reeny during the month of occupation,’ the Ukrainian official wrote. 

Makariv, the town in which Tetiana’s brutal final days were spent, was named over the weekend as the site of yet another mass civilian slaughter committed by Russian forces retreating from areas around Kyiv weeks ago.

The bodies of well over 100 civilians have been found so far in the town since Ukrainian troops managed to recapture it in late March, with more bodies yet to be discovered.  

‘As of yesterday, we have found 132 civilians who have been shot dead by the Russian orcs,’ Vadym Tokar, Makariv Village Head, told Ukrainian TV on Friday.

He added that 40 per cent of the town had been destroyed, saying it would not be possible to restore many of the buildings.

Meanwhile, horrifying stories of torture and rape of Ukrainian civilians similar to that of Tetiana have emerged in recent days as the survivors of such ordeals begin to reveal their stories.

Natalya, 33, whose name has been changed, recently told of how a Russian commander and another soldier came to her family’s home in a small village near Kyiv after dark on March 9 and shot dead her husband Andrey, 33, in the front yard. 

Moments later, Natalya heard footsteps in the house, which Andrey had built years earlier, and saw the Russian commander – who told her his name was Mikhail Romanov – and a younger soldier dressed in black.  

Natalya shouted to her four-year-old son Oleksii, whose name has also been changed, to stay hidden in the boiler room, where the family had been sheltering from the shelling in their home in Shevchenkove, a village just outside Kyiv.     

The mother told The Times the younger soldier pointed a gun to her head and spat: ‘You’d better shut up or I’ll get your child and show him his mother’s brains spread around the house.’

Natalya was then raped over several hours by the two soldiers whilst a gun was pointed to her head, and she could hear her son sobbing in the boiler room.

‘[The younger soldier] told me to take my clothes off. Then they both raped me, one after the other,’ Natalya told the newspaper. ‘They didn’t care that my son was in the boiler room crying.

‘They told me to go shut him up and come back. All the time they held the gun to my head and taunted me, saying: “How do you think she sucks it? Shall we kill her or keep her alive?”‘

After hours of the Russian soldiers taking it in turns to rape Natalya, the men left but within 20 minutes they returned and raped her again. 

The soldiers came back to the family’s home for a third time to rape Natalya, but this time they were so intoxicated that they were stumbling. 

They eventually fell asleep, giving Natalya time to run to her son, who was huddled inside the dark boiler room, and flee their home. 

‘While I was opening the gate my son was standing next to his father’s body but it was dark and he did not understand it was his father,’ Natalya recalled. ‘He said: “Will we get shot the same as this man here?”‘

Natalya, who has since fled to the western Ukrainian city of Ternopil with her son, said the four-year-old still does not know his father has died, and she can’t bare to tell him just yet. 

Natalya’s horrific ordeal is being investigated by Ukraine’s prosecutor-general Iryna Venediktova, the country’s first official investigation into alleged rape committed by Russian soldiers.