DONETSK, April 29. /TASS/. The branch of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) for the Donetsk People’s Republic has provided TASS a video testimony by Nazis’ accomplices Alexander Dinkel and Dmitry Maslo who confessed to executing over 50 Soviet citizens in the village of Selidovka (currently, the town of Selidovo) in Donbass in 1943.

In the autumn of 1943, during the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany, the Red Army approached Selidovka. Several hours before the village’s liberation, the Nazis’ accomplices shot dead over 50 Soviet citizens in a prison, following which they set the building on fire. As eyewitnesses said, the punitive operation took place on September 6, 1943 and involved Dmitry Maslo and another accomplice. Maslo shot at unarmed people from an assault rifle while his accomplice finished off the wounded with a pistol, the archive reveals.

Among the civilians shot dead by the Nazis’ accomplices was local resident Taisiya Yatsyna who had been arrested as an active Communist. Before her execution, collaborationist Maslo subjected her to tortures. After the village was liberated by the Soviet troops, they found burnt bodies of those shot dead in the prison. The bodies were taken to the park where an identification procedure took place and Yatsyna’s daughter identified her mother, the archive shows.

In 2024, 81 years after the German occupation, already servicemen of the Ukrainian army tortured and killed civilians in Selidovo as testified by local residents. On October 29, 2024, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported that Battlegroup Center units had liberated the settlement of Selidovo through successful actions in the special military operation in Ukraine.