Pay the ransom or we’ll send your son’s execution video

A filmmaker from Mariupol is facing a painful ordeal. She is said to have to pay around $5,350 to the Russian military or else her son Alexey will be executed in front of the camera. Olga Novikova, who is popular in her native Ukraine, detailed the Russian threat in a deleted Facebook post Sunday night.

She said she has until Monday to collect the money and give it to the rogue Russian army holding her son. “If I don’t pay, they promise to kill him and send me a video of the execution,” she told the independent Russian newspaper Meduza. “The bottom line is there’s no guarantee they’ll let him live even after I pay the ransom.”

Mikhail Podolyak, an adviser to President Zelensky, posted a video of the boy being interrogated by the Russians on Twitter, claiming that this was the behavior of terrorists. “The Russian military is increasingly reminiscent of ISIS fighters. Russia should be recognized as a terrorist state, he said.

Novikova learned of her son’s arrest in Mariupol through a message from her son’s Facebook account asking for her Telegram phone number, she said. Then someone called her Sunday night through her son’s Facebook Messenger account with the intent of being a Russian soldier, she said. They told her she had 15 minutes to make an offer to free her son. “If you make an offer that interests us, we’ll let your son live; otherwise, we will shoot him,” she said they told her.

When they called back, they asked for €5,000, which she didn’t have. She told them that as a refugee she had no access to money. “It’s none of our business,” they told her. “If you don’t get it, we’ll send you a video of your son being killed.”

She said she had been told that her son, age unknown, was being held separately from other prisoners of war. She said Ukrainian negotiators have now added him to the prisoner exchange list, but the Russians she is dealing with are not part of those negotiations and act alone – possibly. without their commander’s consent – blackmail her and others as part of the monetization mechanism. “I think going public can help,” she said. “We need to act now to make sure that the Russian side won’t dare to shoot him like they would if he were just another person to them.”

Novikov, who left Mariupol on March 18 with female members of her family, said that the Russians she dealt with did not let her talk to her son, but sent her a video to found him alive with a photo of his student. Mariupol State University identification and his passport. In the video, he tells his mother he wasn’t beaten, but she doesn’t believe them. “Of course he told the camera they hadn’t hit him yet,” she said. “I don’t know what’s really going on. They could have hit him, threatened to chop off his fingers, or anything else.”