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 with an armored column, his unit was on the ring road that encircles the city of Kharkiv when a traffic jam formed, he said. “The civilian officer got fed up and told us, ‘Shoot the civilians,’” the detainee said in a video of his interrogation, obtained by Global News.
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The commander’s deadly order set off a chain 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. Karolina Perlifon lost her mother when Russian forces opened fire on civilians in Kharkiv, Ukraine on February 24, 2022. She then rescued a soldier who tried to help her. The woman who saved him was a lawyer from Kharkiv named Karolina Perlifon, the passenger in the car whom the defiant Russians tried to save. In an interview at the home she shares with the dogs she inherited from her mother Irina, she recalled her moral dilemma. “It was my choice to save him or not to save him,” he said. “And I told him he would be able to live and I would save him.” “He’s a man who was just a hostage to the situation,” he explained. “He didn’t do anything wrong directly and for me personally it was a shame for him.” Russian infantry vehicles in Kharkiv, Ukraine, February 28, 2022. Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty Images 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 incursions. Unsure of what the future held, they drove to Kharkiv to stock up on dog food and supplies. They were returning to Bobrivka when they encountered Russian tanks that blocked the ring road. And then the Russians started shooting cars.
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Horrified, Irina turned her car around and stopped. He turned off the car and two Russian soldiers ran down. “They told us it’s 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 of them hid while Russian troops on the road fired at the cars. Perliphon called her father to tell him what was going on. “Bullets were flying all around us,” he said. Iryna Perlifon was killed in Kharkiv on February 24 when a Russian commander ordered his troops to shoot civilians. Family brochure Her mother was the first of the four to be hit. One of the disobedient Russian soldiers threw Perlifon to the ground. He stood to tell his colleagues to stop shooting, that they were also Russians. But then it fell. He had been shot. He tried to draw his gun to fire, but was shot again and died. Perlifon tried to wake her mother until she realized she had been shot in the head and was dead. The second Russian soldier wasn’t moving either. Convinced that this was the end, Perlifon hid behind a wall and recorded a video in which she thanked her parents for the life they had given her. Karolina Perlifon with her dogs, Poltava, Ukraine, June 26, 2022. Stewart Bell/Global News Forty minutes passed, maybe an hour. He realized he had to leave so he went to the car but the Russian soldier woke up. He had been shot in both legs. She understood the difficult decision she had to make: Let a man die or spare a soldier who had just invaded her country. He crawled to the car. He helped him lie down in the back seat. She realized that her mother had the keys. He found them in Irina’s hand and said goodbye. “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.”
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She drove fast, her hands shaking, and called her father to tell him she had escaped. “And I said to him, ‘I have a Russian soldier in my car who is wounded,’” 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 drive him home, but I said, ‘I can’t drive 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 owed her his life and to whom she owed hers. Perlifon watched his videotaped confession and said it was accurate. Kharkiv, Ukraine, May 23, 2022. Stewart Bell/Global News “The lieutenant colonel gave the order to shoot 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 the decision “to save the civilians.” “The lieutenant ran up to them, started pulling them out of the car and yelling, ‘Come here.’” he recalls in the video. He said he joined his colleague and hid with the two women. But their commander, a lieutenant colonel, “managed to see that we were saving civilians and gave the order to shoot us.” “We sat, with the daughter behind the garage until everything calmed down,” he said. “The daughter offered to drive me from there and call the ambulance.” “Then she went to her mother,” he said. “He took the key. He was crawling towards the car. He pushed me into the car in the back seat, turned the car on.” Image of Lt. Col. Yegveny Zeleno released by Ukrainian officials. Alms The commander who gave the order to fire has been identified as Lt. Col. Yevgeny Alexandrovic Zelenov, Commander of the 74th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade. War crimes prosecutors in Kharkiv said this was the first case in which a Russian commander was responsible for ordering the killing of civilians. “That’s our goal, to go to the top of the commanders,” Andrii Kravchenko of the Kharkiv District Prosecutor’s Office told Global News. A website that tracks the assassinations of senior Russian officers in Ukraine lists him as dead on March 17. Global News could not confirm this. Zolonov was honored by Russia for alleged “heroic actions” in March. According to the report, despite being seriously wounded, he destroyed an armored personnel carrier and captured 11 “nationalists”. After the death of her mother, Perlifon returned home to Bobrivka to take care of the dogs. He survived a month under Russian occupation. With no heat or electricity, she ate porridge cooked over the fire and slept at night with the dogs in her bed to keep her warm. Karolina Perlifon in Poltava, Ukraine on June 26, 2022. Stewart Bell/Global News Her mother loved dogs so much that after studying music and aviation, she opened a breeding kennel in Bobrivka. “My mom was everything to me,” Perlifon said. “And when he was killed, it was like I was actually killed. “I want people to know how she died and what kind of person she was, and I don’t want her death to be in vain.” He supports Ukraine’s effort to prosecute the commander who ordered the shooting. But she doesn’t think the soldier who helped her should be blamed. For now, prosecutors believe otherwise. He remains a prisoner of war. [email protected]
