While trying to take Kyiv, Russian soldiers break into and loot apartments – one left a selfie and was identified with it.
Burglars usually try not to leave any traces – in Ukraine, a Russian soldier didn’t heed this rule. He left a Polaroid selfie in the apartment from which a Ukrainian woman had previously fled. As the newspaper “Ukrainska Pravda” reports, the woman found the photo and handed it over to the authorities. The government has now been able to identify the man from the photo and wants to hold him accountable.
According to them, Valeria, as she is called in the report, found the picture after returning to her apartment. For three weeks, Russians occupied and looted her apartment in Irpin near Kyiv – while the locals hid in cellars. Irpin is a neighboring town of Bucha, where Russian soldiers murdered people for weeks. The two villages are only a few kilometers apart.
“I found the photo under the carpet on May 14. Before that, I saw that my Polaroid camera was damaged. I didn’t even turn it on. I thought maybe they put something in it.” A bomb for example. “When I saw the photo, I realized the soldier must have thought his snap went wrong.” A Polaroid photo takes a few minutes to develop. Which the Russian soldier might not have known. So the photo could have ended up under the carpet. Valeria handed it over to the authorities, who apparently found the man with the help of facial recognition software in the Russian Facebook counterpart “VKontakte”.
Ukrainian Minister for Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov wrote on Telegram that the suspect was a 26-year-old man from Rostov-on-Don. Every member of the Russian military must remember “that we are always watching him, knowing every step he takes and recording all the data.” “The penalty will be severe, but very fair.” It will not be possible to escape punishment for the ruined lives of Ukrainians. However, the Ukrainians will not always have it as easy as it was with the young man from Rostov-on-Don.
