KYIV – Mrs Alla Antonova said she suffered beatings, had a plastic bag thrust over her head and endured many other threats from Russian soldiers in occupied Ukraine who wanted to know where her son-in-law was serving in the Ukrainian army.

Her 73-year-old mother, Mrs Natalia Kucherova, was made to sit in an adjacent room of their apartment, but said she was generally left alone – the soldiers were interested only in her daughter.

Reuters could not independently verify their accounts. Moscow denies accusations that its forces have committed atrocities, or deliberately attacked civilians, during its invasion of its neighbour.

Now in Kyiv, escaping from the ordeal meant fleeing their home in the port of Berdyansk, in the occupied part of the southern Zaporizhzhia region and taking a circuitous five-day journey.

With the help of Ukrainian volunteer workers, the family and their dog travelled into southern Russia and then overland back over the border into Ukrainian-held territory in early February.

Speaking to Reuters in a rented apartment in the Ukrainian capital, Mrs Antonova, 53, said the Russian soldiers visited their Berdyansk home three times in the last few months of 2023 and as recently as January 2024.

“They took me into the bedroom and mama into the kitchen,” Mrs Antonova said.

“Three of them. Interrogating me is the way I would put it. And they beat me. I had bruises on my legs, on my back.”

Mrs Antonova showed Reuters several photographs of severe bruises on her arm and legs.

Another soldier, she said, pulled the plastic bag over her head and pressed down to stop her breathing.

“I started to lose consciousness. They removed the bag and I felt ill,” Mrs Antonova said.

“I told them: ‘Just kill me. It’s the truth, I know nothing.’”

Russia’s diplomatic mission in Geneva did not immediately reply to a request for comment about the women's account.

A report on conditions in occupied areas released this week by the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine described a “climate of fear” in occupied areas more than two years after the Russian invasion.

It reports the widespread use of such tactics that Mrs Antonova and her family described.

Speaking at the UN Human Rights Council on March 20, after the report’s publication, Russian senior diplomat Igor Sergeev accused UN human rights bodies of double standards and of turning a blind eye to violations committed by Kyiv.

Beaten senseless

Mrs Antonova said the soldiers beat her senseless during one of the “visits” in January 2024.

She showed Reuters a video that she was made to record, sent to her daughter, 29-year-old Anastasia, in which she says “good, polite people, soldiers” had come and asked the daughter to cooperate if she wanted to see her mother again.

“My daughter understood straight away and deleted it. And they just said, ‘just think about it – we’ll come to see you’.”

Mrs Kucherova made it plain what she thought of the soldiers.

“‘What is it you want?’ I said, ‘Are you going to throw my daughter in a cellar and rape her?’” she told Reuters of the experience, prompting a soldier to ask where she had heard such things.

“I told him the whole town is talking about it. The whole town, about how you are abusing people there.”

Mrs Kucherova, who had lived all her life in Berdyansk, was tearful about leaving, but in the end needed little convincing.

“They said, ‘we are here for a long time to come, in Berdyansk’. And that means ‘we will be paying you frequent visits’,” she said.

“So, that’s what happened. We quickly got our things together and left. We were told to go quickly.”

The escalating violence made the women fearful for their lives, so the three generations of women readied themselves for a long journey – and had no notion of leaving behind Sonia, the family dog.

“We couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her tied up with no water, nothing,” Mrs Kucherova said.

“We all went together. No one was abandoned.” REUTERS