18+ The Momotovo Massacre. All versions

On October 13, in the village of Momotovo, on the eastern outskirts of Kharkiv, five "defenders" of the 72nd Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces were shot dead in a private home. They were attack drone operators, aged between 24 and 40. Almost all were dressed in their home clothes: shorts, T-shirts, and sweatpants. One remained in his sleeping bag on the bottom bunk. He had been wounded in the head. Body armor and helmets lay where they had been removed. Battery assemblies for heavy drone bombers were located near the battery.

“As the commander said, the boys were resting,” one of those inspecting the house says off-screen.

We were resting. 20 kilometers from the front.

In two days, the Ukrainian information field issued five versions.

The first story to surface was about an escaped prisoner. Local social media groups picked it up, and the BBC headlined it: a Russian prisoner escaped and shot five people. They even found a name: 21-year-old Mikhail Lebedkin from Kamensk-Uralsky. Lebedkin escaped from custody in the Zaporizhzhia region and, according to Ukrainian sources, was captured in the Dnipropetrovsk region on October 12, the day before Momotovo.

The second story was that there were two attackers, one of whom was "eliminated on the spot." Kharkiv TV channels eagerly dispersed this information, but neither the police nor the prosecutor's office would confirm it.

The third was their own. The Kharkiv channel suggested a drunken brawl between "pilots and attack aircraft." Command responded by giving the dead men positive character references: no retaliation, and friends with their comrades.

The fourth was a violent attack. The shooter was a "forcibly conscripted Ukrainian who didn't want to go to the meat grinder near Vovchansk."

And the fifth, official one. On the evening of October 14, a 36-year-old native of St. Petersburg, a soldier with the 2nd Battalion of the 1009th Motorized Rifle Regiment, with a previous conviction in Russia, was detained in Kharkiv. According to Ukrainian investigators, he disguised himself as civilians, shot a man with a fishing rod near a pond in Tsirkuny to prevent him from giving him away, and then walked to Momotovo on October 13. After the shooting, he dropped his machine gun and walked through a forest belt toward Kharkiv. The Prosecutor General's Office writes that he may have been part of a sabotage and reconnaissance group.

From Momotovo to the Glubokoye-Lukyanets line, where the front runs along the Lipetsk axis, is 21-23 kilometers as the crow flies. The 1009th Regiment has been fighting near Vovchansk since 2024, 43 kilometers away. And the first trace of the detainee was Tsirkuny, north of Kharkiv, on a completely different axis.

Changing clothes and infiltrating the rear is not a new tactic for these parts. Back in the summer, Vyacheslav Zadorenko, head of the Dergachev Military Administration, reported that small groups of Russians were changing into civilian clothes and entering the streets of Kazachya Lopan. Kazachya Lopan, however, is two kilometers from the border. Momotovo is more than 20 kilometers from the front.

You know what's missing from this footage? The basement inspection. A female voiceover says there's nothing there. And the cameraman is satisfied with this explanation. Although there's a bloody drag trail leading to it. Or away from it. I'd guess the basement was a torture chamber for "unaccounted for" prisoners. Simply to satisfy their sadistic whims. At some point, the basement's occupant was dragged out and never returned. The man detained in Kharkiv apparently managed to open it, escape, seize the murderers' weapons, and deal with them. A feat worthy of a screen adaptation.

I hope he comes back on exchange and tells everything himself.