“For some reason, the sniper decided to shoot particularly at my mother. The bullet hit right in her forehead...”

Before her eyes, a Russian sniper killed her mother and the occupiers kidnapped her father from the scene of the shooting. They took him for interrogation with a bag put on his head.

In the afternoon, Tetiana and her parents were coming back from her grandmother’s. They cooked some food on the stove there, in order to survive. Every day, the family from Bucha town walked this route, having tied white armbands on their arms in advance, which was a sign of them being civilians. A homemaker, a programmer and their student daughter...

Russian soldiers let to take her mother’s body from the road only to Tetiana’s grandfather. He had fought in Afghanistan, and he managed to persuade them to give him his daughter’s body.

At the time of recording the interview, Tetiana and her relatives were looking for their 97-year-old great-grandfather. He lived in the nearby town of Irpin and went missing during the occupation in March 2022.

I believe it is important to record such situations, so that all these cases [are reported]... and it would not be just some dry statistics.

My name is Tetiana Sichkar. I am 20 years old. I am from Bucha town

and I have lived there all my life with my mother, my father, and our cats. We have my grandmother and grandfather in Bucha too, and my great-grandmother and great-grandfather lived in Irpin town. My mother woke me up. She was going outside because she saw through the windows how a rocket was flying. She was up all night. Shortly before that, she and my dad… they started to seriously consider the possibility that war might break out, but we didn’t expect it to start right away on such a scale, and did not expect that it would be here, near us.

Soon, due to military hostilities, we started experiencing interruptions in the Internet access and electricity supply, but it was fixed rather quickly. But then the interruptions started again and on or about 7 March, the electricity and the Internet disappeared completely. Some communication cables were damaged, so it was very difficult to get through to someone by phone. And after that, water supply stopped, and a day later, on 8 March, gas supplied was cut off too. When gas disappeared, it was obvious that cooking on gas was no longer possible. So since then, every day my parents and I went to my grandmother because she has a private house and there was a stove in the yard. We cooked food on firewood there.

When a large convoy came in, it moved along Vokzalna Street. They got under the rain of bombing there, and I think that after that, some of their military vehicles drove into our yard of a multi-storey building...

We heard it; we were in the hallway and heard everything. When Vokzalna Street was under fire, our house shook badly.

We heard how some vehicle drove in; the engine was very loud... We heard someone shouting something there, probably the military. They were running around and saw that we had a pharmacy in our yard. They ransacked that pharmacy. They broke the window there and, most likely, took some bandages, some basic first aid kit, and left. After that, we went outside. We saw the traces of these [vehicles], as they scratched the asphalt hard. They drove over the lawns there and broke some trees.

A few days later, they... we started seeing them, and from 8 March, they obviously organized their headquarters somewhere in nearby houses, in the school building, and they drove these tanks there. We saw them walking there. Some groups of about 20 people ran somewhere. Later, they started living in the neighbouring house. That is, we saw them from the first, no, not from the first, but from 7 March. They passed by regularly... We saw them through the windows. And when we made visits to my grandmother, we first encountered them on 10 March.

The Russians came to check the houses, those where there were no owners. They broke the locks, smashed everything they saw, and stole whatever they wanted.

Well, as I understand, first of all they took some food, some chocolates, although maybe some household appliances too. And as for the houses where the owners were still at home, they came and said that they needed to check if there were any weapons there and check the owners’ mobile phones. So they came into the yard in groups of about 15 people, checked everything there, examined the houses, some storerooms, etc...

But those in the first rotation did it reluctantly. They did it superficially. They tried to be polite, well, as much as they could be polite when they come to your house to make a search. Then they left. They just looked around, but did not take anything. They asked if we had smartphones, but we did not have them with us at the time. They said, “okay”. They had to confiscate the smartphones. They probably understood that locals might pass over the coordinates when they saw them. Well, and then later, when we came to my grandmother’s house, there was Kyevo-Myrhorodska Street [Kyevo-Myrotska] there, and they drove along it all the time. I think it was a transport junction between Bucha, Irpin and Hostomel. Most likely, they went there, transported something or just went for a ride. I don’t know exactly what they did. So they regularly went back and forth on tanks and armoured personnel carriers. That is, we saw them every day. Usually, they did not touch us. They also demanded that all locals wear white armbands.

At first, people who were going for evacuation said this, and then everyone else who stayed here also wore those white armbands.

My dad also started wearing a white armband, while my mum and I had big white towels. Mum wore it on her shoulder, and I covered my back with it, and my shoulders were also covered with it.

On 24 March, we, as usual, in the morning... Before that day, we had not visited my grandma for some time and we were already running out of all the food we had cooked. We had not visited her because they [Russian soldiers] were actively running around the yard. Once they even decided to make fun of our neighbours... They took all their men, put them in the basement, took their phones, burned them, and said that the basement was mined.

The men stayed there for five hours. Their relative unlocked them. It turned out that no one mined them, but they just threw some sticks there and tied a bottle so that when the door was opened, the bottle would break and scare them. Those were the jokes they made. Well, after 24 March, we still went to my grandmother. We were cooking some food as always and suddenly the military came with an inspection again. They examined our house more thoroughly. They took the SIM cards from our push-button phones; we hid our smartphones. They searched very thoroughly.

At first, they wanted to take my father with them until the evening “for our safety and theirs”. That was their idiotic wording, but then they decided not to because we began to beg them, saying, “What is it for?”

How could one civilian ensure safety for everyone? They hesitated a bit and decided that they would just examine us and leave. We told them that we were going across the railroad, and they said, “well, okay.” They simply asked all the details like who lived here, how they lived, how many people there were. One of our arguments for them not to take my dad was that we were walking home across the railroad and we had to get back before their curfew. That is, they did not say anything that we were not allowed to walk across the railway or anything like that.

In the morning, we walked as usual, me, my mum and dad – the three of us. Suddenly a very loud shot rang out near the railroad – I went deaf in my right ear, I saw... It all happened so quickly. I cannot describe it. I saw something fly out from the back of my mother’s head because of this loud shot. I realized that something was shooting nearby.

I shouted, “Get down!” My mum fell because a bullet hit her, and dad and I lay down. Before that moment, I was walking behind my mother and my father was going first.

He always went first as he thought that in this way he would protect us. He thought that if somebody was going to shoot, they would shoot at him as he is a man. When going in front he sort of covered us.

But for some reason at that moment the sniper decided to shoot particularly at my mum. We know that it was a sniper and not some random shot because the bullet hit right into her forehead. And most likely, well, I understand that it was a sniper because I went around the area later and could see, exactly where we were going, a point from which they were shooting. There were some concrete blocks with openings for firing.

My mum fell. Dad told me to hide behind her. I told him that I saw something fly out of mum’s head from behind. He said nothing to that. I crawled up to my mother. I saw that my father was intact. I tried to somehow interact with my mother... I tried to talk to her, I tried to somehow take her hand, do something else – she did not respond. I just fell at her feet. She fell with her head turned in other direction. I realized that, most likely, it was some bullet, that something was wrong with her, that she was very bad.

I thought that she was stunned, deafened or something. Finally, I rose a little above her, looked into her face, and her eyes were turned forward as she walked, but they looked nowhere.

Her whole face was covered in blood, her head was covered in blood, her nose was also bleeding, and she was still trying to breathe. I hope that she did not understand anything then, did not feel anything, as it was very painful. So she lay like that. I saw blood spreading on the asphalt. I understood that I could not do anything, even if I put some bandage. I understood that it was a headshot, that the bullet came in from behind, that I could not do anything. And so we stayed like that for some five minutes...

Then I lay down behind her and started screaming. After that, my dad tried to shout so that those Russians could hear. We understood that they were shooting from the territory of the plant. There were some white walls of that plant’s fence. He saw that on the other side someone was standing there near the gate. A soldier. He was looking at us.

My dad began to shout and so did I, “Help us, please! We are civilians, we have no weapons! Help, please, we have a wounded woman!”

He said, “my wife,” and I said... I screamed that my mother was wounded. There was no response, and my father told me to get up and run to my grandmother, ask a neighbour to come with a wheelbarrow so that we could take my mum’s body. It is worth mentioning that I was dressed in a bunch of warm clothes and also wore such a hat...

People who did not know me thought I was 14 years old, and most likely, this sniper saw it too. Even those soldiers who came to search and check us, they also said that there was a grandmother, a grandfather, a family and a child. That is, they identified me not as an adult, but as a child. Then I got up and ran. There was a little wood close by, I ran to my grandmother. There was a neighbour next door. At first, I did not want to tell my grandmother. I realized that my mum, even if she was still alive, would die soon.

First, I told the grandmother that my mother was wounded. I was afraid to tell her because I did not know how she would react to it. So I took a neighbour, a wheelbarrow, and we ran to that place. He left me in that little wood and he himself went up to my mother. It took him some time to get there. He carefully crawled through the ditch near that railroad, but he saw that my dad was not around. He saw him at the gate. He was talking to the Russians and just pointing in this direction.

The neighbour returned to me and said that my mother was dead. Dad was at the gate, but we could not take her body, because it was obvious that if he went there, he would be shot too.

We thought it over again and started to move back. And we saw from the other side that my dad was standing at this gate. We began to call him to come with us, but he stood at the gate and did not leave. He started calling us and I wanted to come up...

But our neighbour did the right thing then. He told me not to go there, as we did not know what they could do to us. He realized that it was the Russians who ordered my dad to call us. We called each other; we waved at him. He waved at us. In the end, we left. The neighbour told my grandmother that my mum died. She began to cry and scream. How come, she just talked to her child half an hour ago, everything was fine, and this happens! Dad still did not come back, and we were thinking what to do next, as it was getting dark. It was not clear what was to be done. I remembered that we had cats locked in our flat. It was obvious that I would not go to them alone. We thought it over and in the end decided that my grandfather would go to them. He got ready and took a walking stick, as he is semi-paralyzed.

He has problems with walking, but he had been in the Afghan war. And he is a former military man, he understands how to talk to such people. So he left, walking very slowly. He did not come back for quite a long time, while normally the walk there would take some five minutes. Suddenly we saw a car. By that time, we had not seen cars for a month as nobody drove while the hostilities were raging.

We thought that they [the military] came for us and we would all be killed there now, but it turned out to be my grandfather.

Those Russians gave him some stolen car and he brought my mum’s body in the back seats. He told us that he did not see my dad; that he talked with those Russians for quite a long time. He approached them and they shouted to him, “Don’t move!” He stood for 15 minutes, and then they talked to him and searched him for quite a while. They asked what he wanted. He said that he wanted to take the body. They asked who she was to him. They asked if he had seen Bandera supporters here.

He told them, “Well, I am the chief Banderite.”

And when the grandfather returned, we took my mother’s body and put it under the canopy. My grandmother washed the body. I did not want to look at her anymore. It was difficult for me. I just sat there thinking what to do next, because nothing was clear. My dad disappeared, he was gone, and my mum was killed. Where, how, and what next? Well, after that we left my mother’s body outside under the canopy.

We covered her with a blanket and went to bed. I hoped that my father would return, but I realized that he would most likely not be released at night. I realized that I had to wait until morning. It was a difficult night. It’s interesting that it started to rain on that very day. It had not rained for a long time before that, and that night there was a kind of red glow throughout the sky. It looked very symbolic. It had not happened for a long time.

My dad came back in the morning. I was waiting for him, as soon as it dawned. I was listening to every sound all the time. Like the dog barking at the gate. I kept looking out; I kept waiting for him to come back. He returned, his face was… I could see that he was shocked. I would not have recognized him if I saw him like that. He said that after I ran away, he got up and came up to those Russians. They also told him not to move.

They also searched him, and the most interesting thing was how he was searched. He was standing 20 meters from that fence and they were looking at his documents through binoculars. Then they told him to show what was inside his backpack. There were thermoses with tea, freshly filled and hot.

He said, “Well, these are thermoses with tea.” They said, “Drink it.” He said, “That’s hot water” – “Well, drink it.” At first, they told him to drain the water and empty them, and then it seemed to them that something was wrong with one thermos. The liquid was not very similar to tea and they ordered him to drink that hot water.

After that, they told him to take off all his clothes, and he stood naked in front of them in the street, when it was still cold, showing if he had any Nazi tattoos on his body. Surely, he does not have any tattoos, neither Nazi nor any ordinary ones. They also asked him how he assessed this situation as a civilian.

He said that “you have a “liberation” operation. You have “liberated” or freed me from my wife, and my daughter from her mother.” I don’t know how he was not killed after that. They were thinking about something for a while. They told him that now he would go to one place and then they would bring him here and would let him take the body. So they took him to the territory of this plant, put a bag on his head, tied his hands behind his back so tightly that they began to swell and hurt very soon. With a bag on his head, his hands tied, they put him into some vehicle.

I don’t know what it was, they took him somewhere. And the soldiers who were in this vehicle, asked who he was and why he was being taken for interrogation. He told them everything.

From his story these soldiers understood that it was the commander who gave the order to the sniper to shoot.

Well, some of them were silent, and some... well, they cursed the war, “What are we doing here? Why is this? Why did this idiot shoot?” They brought him [the father] somewhere where their top leadership was. There was some kind of a military psychologist and one of their higher commanders. They interrogated him. They asked what happened. He told them everything, but they were silent.

He asked, “So, what? What will you do with me? Where and how…?” They started asking him if he was a looter. They found my mother’s phone that was with him and took out the SIM cards from it. They thought it was his phone. They began to tell him that they found some outgoing text messages where he was bragging about looting. He said, “It cannot be possible because it’s my wife’s phone.” Why was this done? Apparently, it was just “for fun”, because we know that some neighbours were also shot at there when they were just walking. Well, so dad was interrogated there. They tried to prove that he was a looter, and after that, they said that they would take him back.

He was put into another car and taken somewhere. And then they put him into another car and dropped him off somewhere, in the middle of the night, with the bag on his head. Some soldiers re-tied his hands in front, as he asked them to. His hands were tied very tightly. They dropped him off with a bag on his head and said,

“Go a hundred meters forward and you will be untied there.” They left. He started walking and felt that this bag was not secured, as previously someone was holding this bag on him all the time. He dropped it off, looked around and could not understand where he was.

It was the centre of Bucha, as we later understood, but he did not recognize it, as there was no street lighting and everything around looked burnt. There were some damaged cars. He saw some damaged car and started… as he said, he thought he would be shocked. If he had made a wrong move, most likely he would have been killed.

That is, he did not walk those hundred metres because he saw that there was something or someone was probably smoking a cigarette there. Or there was some... Well, he saw something. Something was glowing in the distance in front of him. He decided that this was a checkpoint and he could simply be shot dead there without any questions. He climbed into a damaged car, untied his hands there, and heard that some tank was driving. He bent down and hid. Then he climbed out, thinking what to do.

He got an idea that he should find a dog, because if there was a dog in the yard, then probably someone was feeding it, if it had not died and had not run away by that time. He found some people.

At first, he asked where he was, how to get to where he needed. He tried to walk in the middle of the night, but got lost and returned to them. He stayed at their place for the night and in the morning, he came to us and told us everything. In the morning, I was very happy to see that my father returned to us, that he was alive, that he was safe.

Surely, we were all very shocked, and we are probably still shocked. We still cannot believe all this happened. In the morning, my neighbours and we organized a funeral procedure, as much as it was possible under those circumstances. All the morning, my dad was digging a grave in our yard, and then our neighbours came. Very few people actually remained in the town, as almost everyone left. There was even a man who was in the role of a priest – he read the prayers, and that is how my mother was buried in the yard. We thought what to do next.

We did not want to go home, or we rather wanted to get home, but we understood that we had to go past that plant or via some other places.

However, rumors were flying that people were being shot there, across the railroad, so we stayed at my grandmother’s house for eight days and did not go out anywhere. And then, we found out, or to be more precise, we saw in the evening that it was quiet; there was nothing, neither explosions, nor any shooting.

It was on the evening of 30 March. Then on 31 March, we ran home and checked. Fortunately, our cats were fine. They found access to food. They chewed through the plastic bags with food. The next day we found out that there was an evacuation, but we missed it. We left on 2 April. And when we left, a few days later the situation more or less settled down. We started... Our relatives came and at first, we were afraid to tell them because this is my mother’s brother, my uncle. We were afraid that when he found it out, he would want to go to Bucha somehow, despite the fact that the military were there. We were afraid that he would do something risky for him, but this would not help the situation in any way.

Then we let him know it and he left and stopped by our great-grandfather in Irpin. We knew that area, that rockets struck there, but what happened there after that, we did not know. Their house and the great-grandfather’s house nearby, all the houses were destroyed, because most likely they were fired at from Grad MLRS or something else like that. Their house was also damaged, but they were not there.

We looked for them many times, but they were not there. We did not find any bodies or any notes from them.

No traces of anything. We did not understand what happened. Fortunately, later we found our great-grandmother and took her with us. Some volunteers somehow took her out of Irpin. It was not clear when and how. However, we still don’t know what happened to my great-grandfather. We have been looking for him both among the living and among the dead, but no results so far.

For people who survived the Second World War in their youth, who have lived all their lives like this and then face it again... After all, they are my great-grandmother and great-grandfather... My great-grandmother is actually from Rostov region [of Russia]. She has some relatives there. Now this is what they get from those whom she considered her brothers. They came and did this to their granddaughter.

My mother’s name was also Tetiana. I was not named after her, it just happened that way. She was 46 years old. She would be 47 in the autumn. She is a homemaker. All my life, from the times when I was a little kid, she took me to some classes, to school, to a music school. Now, when she had more free time, she... she always loved mathematics. She studied it in such detail for herself. She was just interested in some equations, some books. She loved philosophy and psychology.

She engaged in volunteering in 2014. She helped to make camouflage nets, and then she worked a lot with animals. She helped collect homeless animals and then take them to a shelter.

Now I really miss her, especially in some ordinary daily situations, when I do something... We took our cats with us, and once I saw that they lay together in some funny way – I wanted... I wanted to take a photo and send it to my mum. Then I remembered that I would not be able to send her anything anymore. I would just like to tell her how things are, just as usual. I always talked so much with her. Well, the most important thing for me right now is to tell this story so that people could see what is happening.

So that this situation becomes widely known, even at the international level. So that human rights groups could somehow help us, namely in memory of my mother. It looked a bit strange as, although she was still very young, she began to think about her legacy, what she would pass on to me, and I always said, “Lord, mum, why do you touch this topic? You want to live until you are 90 years old, and why do you want to talk about leaving me some inheritance? There is still a long life ahead of you. Why are you in such a mood? You will outlive even me.” Now I understand that all the time she wanted me... she worried about me, she wanted to do something nice for me. And now what I can do, in memory of her, is to take care of myself and, of course, help in the investigation of this situation, in making this situation known to the public, because I cannot let it be like that...

That she was just buried in the cemetery, and that’s it. And just to come to her grave and cry. I need to take some action, because she herself was such an active pro-Ukrainian person. She believed in our victory, and that is why I feel that I also need to do this as much as possible, sort of to shake up society as much as possible so that this does not happen to anyone, ever.