Martyr mansion: Why a Ukrainian millionaire wanted his home bombed

“…They were
starting to shoot Kyiv from my house,” said Ukrainian billionaire Andrey
Stavnitser, explaining why he gave the coordinates of his newly-built mansion to
Ukraine’s army to bomb.

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Stavnitser, CEO of
TransInvestService, an IT company, had escaped to Poland when Russia invaded
Ukraine. His mansion, along with his security detail, remained. Last month,
while surveying security camera footage of his home, he saw men from Moscow
walk about, bring in loot, and use his property to attack his country.

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He felt disgusted,
the millionaire told a British broadcast network, and gave the coordinates of
his mansion to the Ukrainian military and asked them to bomb it.

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“It was a kind of
obvious decision for me,” the 39-year-old said, adding that he had seen
real-time how the Russian forces occupied his mansion. The Russian troops went
about looking for Nazi messaging, which they, obviously, did not find. The
Moscow men interrogated his employees, stripped them naked, took away their
phones and sent them to the woods.

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For Stavnitser,
the Russian forces occupying his home, was a violation of epic scale. “I felt
disgusted. I felt dirty, looking at some guys walking inside my house,” he
said.

He saw them bringing stuff from other homes into his house, “and from there loading trucks with TVs…and iPads, computers, personal
belongings of other people.”

The businessman
said that he had counted 12 military vehicles parked on his land, including
Tornado rocket launcher systems and BM-21 Grad. “This equipment has a range of
40 kilometres, so they were basically starting to shoot Kyiv from my house.”

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Kyiv, the
Ukrainian capital, has perhaps put up the most fervent resistance against the
Russian invasion. The men from Moscow have had to make a humiliating retreat as
the world watched. Typical of occupiers, however, Putin doubled down on his
aggression in parts where the Russian army held greater sway. Russia’s focus
now is on Donbas, a region where Moscow-backed forces have been fighting the
Ukraine government for nearly eight years.