VIDEO The disturbing testimony of the mother of the soldier executed by the Russians after he said “Glory to Ukraine!”: It was a cry from the bottom of his heart

​The mother of Oleksandr Matsievskyi, the Ukrainian soldier executed by the Russian military after saying “Glory to Ukraine!”, has recounted the harrowing moment she discovered her son had been killed in captivity.

“It was in the evening, I opened Facebook and I was watching a video recording and it’s Sașa, a terrible video of the execution. I was watching and I screamed: ‘Six!’ It was a shock! Sasha! The filming ends and I watched again. I look, this is Saşa, my Saşa,” the woman named Praskovyia told Bild journalists.

She said she then called her daughter-in-law, Oleksandr’s wife, and sent her a link to the video on the Viber messaging app.

“She looked at him and said ‘He’s our Sasha.’ Misha [fiul lui Oleksandr] he also confirmed: ‘He is our father!’. He threw a fit. ‘Grandma, this is our father!’. He called me the next day: ‘It’s our father! I recognized him by the way he smokes, by the way he stands, he is our father! It was a cry from the bottom of his heart.’ He cried a lot, he cried on the phone,” the woman recounted the conversation.

Oleksandr Matsievskyi was identified on Thursday by his family and the Ukrainian armed forces, after they initially gave another name for the soldier in the video that shocked international public opinion.

Who was the soldier executed by the Russians for shouting “Glory to Ukraine”

Before the outbreak of war, Oleksandr Matsievskyi worked as an electrician in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. After the start of the Russian invasion, he volunteered for the Territorial Defense Forces of the city of Nijin in the Chernihiv region, one of the crucial areas for the Russians in their plans to quickly conquer Kiev.

He couldn’t be drafted right away, though, so he helped build fortifications, manned the checkpoint, prepared Molotov cocktails, and insisted on returning to the recruiting center. On March 11, he was enlisted in the Nijin Territorial Defense Battalion.

On March 29, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced the “drastic reduction” of military activity in the Kiev and Chernihiv regions, effectively abandoning plans to capture the capital of Ukraine.

In December, when the battalion was about to be deployed to the east, Oleksandr did not tell his mother that he was going to the active combat zone because he did not want her to worry. When he said goodbye to his mother, he thanked her for giving birth to him.

But he called the woman on December 29, when they spoke for the last time. Praskovyia said Thursday that she realized her son was on the frontline after he told her on the phone: “Mom, I will never surrender!”

42-year-old Oleksandr Matsievskyi was born in the Republic of Moldova, where his mother was posted during the communist period to work as a technologist at a shoe factory in Chisinau.

There, Oleksandr later graduated from high school and an electrical engineering college. The family later returned to Nizhyn, Ukraine.

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