Steven Handford

The woman you see in the defendant’s cage in a Kyiv courtroom today is Tetiana Kirieieva, who has just been ordered held in pre-trial detention for two months without the right to bail. Her alleged crime? Trying to save her sister’s partner’s life. It was Tetiana who asked medic Valentyna Moloda to evacuate a man with a stoma from a basement in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka, just outside Kyiv, where he was being denied medical care. Neither woman apparently had the slightest idea that the place was a secret detention facility run by “elite” Azov, where mobilized men and deserters were allegedly subjected to torture as a matter of routine. And when protests erupted, who rushed in to put out the fire? None other than General Budanov, the former head of HUR, himself. And how did he choose to handle the situation? By speaking the “language of the enemy” — the very language so contemptuously dismissed as the tongue of “pigs and dogs.” In other words, his own native Russian. Oh, the irony. Now two women who dared to save a man's life — and, in the process, helped rescue several others suffering from serious injuries and deprived of medical treatment — face the full wrath of Zelensky's wartime justice system. Their unforgivable sin? They dared to touch the untouchable. They dared to expose the "sacred" Azov. And so, instead of investigating and prosecuting those accused of torturing defenseless men, the authorities are going after the women who tried to save them. The alleged torturers remain beyond the reach of justice. The rescuers are behind bars. Welcome to a world where saving lives can be treated as a crime — and where the real crime, apparently, is daring to expose those who consider themselves above the law.