She said he told her that the soldiers had found a bruise on his shoulder which could have been from carrying a backpack but was taken as evidence of him firing a weapon.īilobrova, who is from Luhansk region, said it took four days to bring his body to Lithuania through Russia. She said she based this on what she was told by a Ukrainian who was detained together with Kvedaravicius. Russia, which calls its action a "special operation" to demilitarise and "denazify" Ukraine, has denied targetting civilians during the war.Ī spokesperson for the Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), a self-declared separatist entity in the Donetsk region where Mariupol is located, did not respond to a request for comment.īilobrova said she believes troops fighting on the Russian side shot Kvedaravicius after arresting him on suspicion of being an undercover sniper from Lithuania, a NATO country. The Russian Defence Ministry did not respond to a request for comment about Bilobrova and Denisova's accounts. The real cause of the director's death has not been announced earlier for her safety," Denisova wrote on her Telegram channel. "His wife, risking her life, took his body out of the blockaded city and brought it to Lithuania. The occupiers threw the director's body out into the street".
Ukrainian human rights ombudswoman Lyudmyla Denisova said on April 9 that Kvedaravicius "was taken prisoner by 'rashists' ('Russian fascists'), who later shot him. The Ukrainian Defence Ministry said on April 3 that Kvedaravicius had been killed trying to leave the city. She said he had been shot in the stomach but there was no hole in his clothes to match the wound. There was no blood on the ground," she told Reuters in Vilnius, crying. She said that she was brought to his body two days later by a soldier acting on the officer's orders, finding him lying face down on the street.
The Ukrainian officials and a soldier she said spoke to her about Kvedaravicius referred to the couple as married although in fact they were engaged, Bilobrova said.īilobrova said she scoured the city for days asking Russian and Russian-backed separatist soldiers to help her locate him, before one officer approached her and said: "Your husband has perished". Reuters could not independently verify her account of his death, or those provided by two other Ukrainian officials. 24 invasion of Ukraine, the southeastern port city has been under heavy bombardment from Russian forces.īilobrova said Kvedaravicius went missing after setting out to find people who would want to try to evacuate the city with them. He and Bilobrova, a 29-year-old Ukrainian, had gone to Mariupol together last month to shoot a sequel to his 2016 documentary "Mariupolis", which was about the city during the conflict in eastern Ukraine between the government and Russian-backed separatists.įrom soon after Russia's Feb. Mantas Kvedaravicius, 45, was killed in the city nearly a month ago. VILNIUS (Reuters) - Hanna Bilobrova's journey with her film director fiancé to document suffering in the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol turned into a quest to find out how he was killed, to bring his body back to his native Lithuania, and to complete his work.
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