The Brooklyn Signature, the scene of events. Photo: Street View
In a bar in Brooklyn far, far away from the territory where the war between Russia and Ukraine was taking place, confusion and hostility reigned: a ukrainian violently attacked another ukrainian for thinking he was russian.
Andriy Meleshkov36, was at Signatura bar in Sheepshead Bay celebrating a friend’s birthday when he met Oleg Sulyma, 31, at his desk. Sulyma heard him speak a language similar to Russian and addressed him: “You look Russian.”
Meleshkov, who speaks Russian because he is the son of a Russian woman and knows it well, does not know how to let the man who continues to insult him understand that he was not born in Russia, that he is his compatriot.
The bar where the tragedy took place. Photo: Instagram
To let others see the reason, Andrii and his staff started speaking Ukrainian. no case, Oleg wants proof.
At that moment, the aggressor, who was quite drunk, asked the fake Russians to translate a very difficult word to pronounce into the language of the enemy: “Palianytsia”, which, translated, is a kind of Ukrainian bread.
“If you’re wrong, I’m leaving,” Oleg told Meleshkov. Andrii said, it was good and he went to the counter to pay the bill and left, but there was no case: Oleg won’t leave without destroying it.
Sulyma then took two bottles of beer from the table, smashed them with sharp objects, and said to Meleshkov before he was attacked: “I am preparing to kill you.”
Andrii received a fairly serious stab wound until he overwhelmed Oleg, sat on top of him and held his neck. “I was shouting to call the police and the doctors … everyone was filled with blood and it was crazy,” Meleshkov recalled in The Post.
“I was lucky … the paramedics told me it was my second birthday because the wound on the left side of my neck was near the carotid artery,” the victim added to New York media.
According to the New York Post, the event is being investigated as a hate crime and Sulyma has been charged with crimes including threats, stalking, and criminal possession of a firearm.
Buses to a refugee center in Zaporizhia, where Andrii’s family is hiding. Photo: AP
Meleshkov is not only Ukrainian, but his parents are currently hiding in a cellar in Zaporizhia to escape Russian army attack. In New York, the city where he lived for five years, he worked as a truck driver.
Sulyma, on the other hand, is a construction worker who has lived in Brooklyn for 12 years.
Source: Clarin
