Police say the attackers account for the attack by being drunk, but the battered Orthodox believer from Zadubrovka is confident of religious motives.
Beaten to a pulp in Zadubrovka, Chernivtsi region, 63-year-old Vasily Khashchiyuk, a parishioner of the local St. Michael’s Church of the UOC, spoke about the details of the attack on him by the thugs, and considers the religious conflict in the village provoked by supporters of the OCU as the motive for their actions, according to a report published on the “Svidok NTN” YouTube channel.
Vasyl Khashchiyuk recalls that young people, aged 17-19, who were indignant that he did not greet them and refused to have a drink, harassed him. The explanation of the elderly man that he had to go to work the next morning didn’t suit them and they pounced on him all together. “All of a sudden, let’s go and have a drink. I say: I’m early for work. I keep walking and hear them following me. They knocked me down and started beating me,” said the injured parishioner. He is sure that the attack was provoked by religious motives.
According to the victim’s wife Maria Khashchiyuk, her husband Vasyl was brought home in a terrible state, his face was bleeding, and he was covered in mud. The woman says: she did not know what first – to wash off the dirt or blood. “The head and face were like a soccer ball, everything from head to toe in mud,” said Maria. At the hospital, doctors diagnosed her husband with a concussion, multiple hematomas of the face and head, and sent him for treatment to a neurologist, an ophthalmologist, and a maxillofacial surgeon. Regarding the young men who beat Vasyl, the woman says that she would like them to be in her children’s shoes: “If only their father was beaten like that and rolled along the road so that they would feel what my children are feeling now.”
A representative of the district police department, in a commentary for NTN journalists, cited the attackers’ statements that they were drunk, did not accept the refusal to drink with them and therefore began to beat the elderly man. But both Vasyl Khashchiyuk himself and his fellow villagers refuse to accept this version. A parishioner of St. Michael’s Church in Zadubrivka, Volodymyr Shveiko, says that the village is divided into supporters of the UOC and OCU, which provokes conflicts on religious grounds: “Whether we like it or not, in connection with this situation the village is divided and everything that iis happening has a religious ground.”
The local police are investigating the attack in Zadubrivka as intentional bodily harm.
As reported, the family of the parishioner beaten in Zadubrivka doubts the punishment of the attackers.
