“I could not sleep peacefully for several days,” Tatiana Monko told VICE News. When Tatiana Monko returned to her home in Bucha on the outskirts of Kyiv last Saturday after two months away, she found it in ruins. Explosions had shattered the windows of her apartment, and almost everything they owned had been destroyed by the Russian soldiers who lived there while occupying the town. “The door to our apartment was broken into, everything was scattered in the apartment, many things were damaged and looted,” Tatiana told VICE News. But at least the soldiers hadn’t destroyed the piano her 10-year-old daughter Darinka loved to play. Tatiana did notice, however, that the scores of medals and trophies Darinka won for piano, theater, singing, and chess in recent years, which were carefully arranged on top of the piano, had been moved and put back incorrectly. As Tatiana idly ran her fingers along the piano keys, four or five of them didn’t move. “The men called specialists, sappers arrived,” Tatiana said. “While they were clearing the piano, we waited outside the apartment. When the specialists left the apartment, they reported that a grenade had been planted in the children’s piano.” The sappers identified the munition that had been placed under the hammers of the piano as a VOG-25P grenade, which is used by the Russian military. While the discovery was shocking, it was hardly surprising: Since the beginning of the Russian invasion, there have been numerous reports about mines and booby-traps being discovered in Bucha and other cities, including grenades left in washing machines, “I could not sleep peacefully for several days and do not understand how they could put explosives in a child’s piano,” Tatiana told VICE News.
via vice: Russian Soldiers Planted Grenade Inside a 10-Year-Old Ukrainian’s Piano, Mom Says