“Four days guarded corpses from dogs”: a resident of Mariupol told RT about the murder of her husband by the Ukrainian military

35-year-old Valeria Stugareva lives with her three children with her friends on the outskirts of Mariupol in the private sector.

The house has neither water nor electricity.

A woman cooks food on a fire.

The apartment in which Stugareva lived before the start of the special operation was destroyed, and her common-law husband, 29-year-old Eduard Chaplygin, was killed.

According to the woman, he was shot by the Ukrainian military, who set up an observation post in their high-rise building. 

“When the fighting began, we lived in different apartments,” the woman recalls.

- I was with my mother and children, and Eduard lived in a neighboring house in the apartment of his elder brother Vladimir.

Despite the shelling, he made his way to us every day.

But on March 12 he didn’t come.”  

According to the woman, two days later she decided to find out what happened to him.

“On March 14, I could not stand it anymore and, without telling anyone, ran to their house under shelling.

There I found him dead.

I started yelling: “Get up, get up!”.

Then two Ukrainian soldiers came in and forcibly pulled me out of the apartment by my hair.

They told me that if I came again, I would lie down next to me, - the woman recalls.

“I felt like I died at that moment.

She sat down on a bench near the house.

There is shooting all around, but I can’t hear anything.”

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Julia, Lera's mother, tells how she saw her at that moment: “I looked out the window and see Lera, she is sitting on a bench in front of the house, detached from the whole world.

We went there again, and the military was just coming down.

My daughter became hysterical, she started screaming: “Why, why did you do this?”.

I drove her into the entrance, and I myself, too, to the military: “For what?

They have a very small son, ”and they answered me -“ I wanted to! ”.

As it turned out later, the Ukrainians also shot the elder brother of her husband, Volodymyr, in the same apartment. 

“The bodies first lay in the apartment.

And then I found out that the military had thrown them into a shell crater in front of the house.

While it was cold, no one got them out, especially since it was not possible to bury them while the Ukrainian military were here and the fighting was going on.

And when our troops entered the city, my mother wrote a statement for Vova and Edik to be reburied,” says Valeria. 

On April 11, according to the woman, the bodies of the brothers were pulled out of the crater.

But there were so many dead that the funeral service did not come for their bodies for another four days.

“And all this time I was guarding the corpses so that the dogs would not tear them apart.

And on April 14, Eduard and Vladimir were buried at the cemetery in Lyapino, ”Valeria sighs and shows the ring that her husband gave her shortly before the start of the special operation. 

“We didn’t have time to sign with him,” the woman says and begins to tell how in 2015 she moved from Donetsk to Mariupol, where she met her husband.

“I moved with my mother and children from my first marriage,” she says. “And Eduard helped me a lot.

We had nowhere to live, and he paid for our apartment and brought food until I found a job.

Eduard was the best, from the moment we met, we did not part with him for a single day.

In 2018, our son was born.

He still doesn't know that his father is no more.

We told him that dad had gone to work.” 

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Lera shows joint photographs that she took from her apartment, and a figurine of a husband, wife and small child embracing.

The woman carefully twists it in her hands: “I left it as a keepsake, on Mother’s Day he gave it to me.” 

According to Stugareva, the Russian Investigative Committee opened a criminal case into the murder of her common-law husband.

The woman says that, according to the investigators with whom she spoke, there were four killers, and one of them has already been detained.  

“One has already been caught, he admitted during interrogation that they just needed an apartment, as there was a good view from two sides.

Thanks to the Investigative Committee, they approached everything very carefully: they took into account each of their bullets and the broken lock.

Everyone was interrogated.

Then they showed me a photograph of the one who was caught, and the face was familiar to me, ”says Valeria.

According to the woman, the investigators promised to help her with establishing the paternity of the child.

“I was recorded as a single mother, because we didn’t have time to sign, and I asked them for Edik’s blood type to file for the loss of a breadwinner, and they said they would help in this,” explains Stugareva.

The woman hopes that the case of the murder of her husband will reach the court and all criminals will be punished.