Two women who managed to escape from the Donbass city of Chasov Yar have told RT about how the Ukrainian military deliberately targeted its own civilians in the hotly contested city.
Chasov Yar used to have about 12,500 residents before the conflict, but found itself on the front line after Russian forces took neighboring Artyomovsk (also known as Bakhmut) in 2023.
“They [Ukrainian forces] burned approximately 50 houses on our street. There are no houses left,” a woman who gave her name as Tatyana told RT in an exclusive interview. “It seems like they did it on purpose.”
Tatyana and her family hid in basements, but one day her husband went out for a smoke and was killed by a drone strike.
“It was probably a kamikaze drone, there were batteries and all sorts of tubes around him,” she recalled, through tears. “My son picked up his father. He was already dead.”
After that, Tatyana and her son Kostya fled to another ruined house and hid there, but came under drone fire themselves. The first strike injured Kostya. The second buried them both in debris. Then a third one came and “everything went black,” Tatyana said. When she opened her eyes and looked at where Kostya had been, “there was no head,” only a red smear on the wall.
Zarina, a medical worker, told RT that the Ukrainian military fired a ballistic missile into a civilian area “at the beginning of spring,” then sent a patrol to retrieve the pieces of the Tochka-U, so it could not be identified.
She also testified that on one occasion, Ukrainian forces began shelling their own civilians within hours of a group of foreign journalists arriving in town.
“To say it was Russia,” Zarina responded, when asked why they would have done so. “They also cut the electricity, to say the Russians did it.”