There was no controlling in it, nothing that looked like a threat from her side, nothing except a young woman calmly asking two men why they were treating her this way. By the end of it, even Volkov had stopped arguing.
His partner, a younger officer named Denis Sadov with only three years on the job, took a different approach.
He admitted, quietly, that he’d known during the stop that something was wrong — that they had no real cause to detain her, that the aggression had come from nowhere but Volkov’s mood and his own willingness to go along with it.
He said he’d been afraid to speak up in the moment, afraid of what it would look like to contradict a senior officer in front of a civilian. It didn’t excuse what happened. But it was, at least, honest, and the board noted the difference.
