Over the next 18 days, in just one cornerof this Kyiv suburb where the brigade took control, 12 people were killed,including all of the inhabitants of six houses where the soldiers set up camp.
Olha Havryliuk’s son and son-in-law, alongwith a stranger, were shot in the head in the yard of their house. Russiansoldiers smashed the Havryliuks’ fence, parked their armoured vehicle in thegarden and moved into the house. They cooked in the neighbour’s garden, killingand plucking chickens and roasting them on a barbecue while the men lay deadyards away across the alley.
By the time the troops pulled out at theend of March, two brothers, Yuriy and Viktor Pavlenko, who lived at the end ofthe street, lay dead in a ditch by the railway line. Volodymyr Cherednychenkowas found dead in a neighbour’s cellar. Another man, caught by Russian soldiersas he ran along the train track and taken into a cellar of a house at the endof the street, was also found shot dead.
The story of Bucha and its horrors hasunfolded in chapters as new revelations of Russian atrocities emerge, fuellingoutrage among Ukrainians and across much of the world. But prosecutors andmilitary intelligence officials were investigating early on, collectingevidence to try to identify the perpetrators responsible for the mass killings,torture and rapes in the once tranquil suburb.
Working with war crimes and forensicexperts from around the world, Ukrainian investigators have reached somepreliminary conclusions, focusing in particular on the 64th Brigade. They havealready identified 10 soldiers from the unit and accused them of war crimes.
Ukrainian officials say that the brigadewas formed after Russia struggled in a 2008 war with Georgia, and that it wasawarded an honorary title by President Vladimir Putin of Russia last month forits performance in Ukraine.
Yet the brigade took little part in anyfighting, coming in after other units had seized control of Bucha and thentasked with “holding” it. The troops established checkpoints throughout thetown, parking their armoured vehicles in people’s yards and taking over theirhomes.
“They imprisoned our people,” said RuslanKravchenko, the chief prosecutor for the Bucha district, describing the actionsof the accused soldiers. “They tied their hands and legs and taped their eyes.They beat them with fists and feet, and with gun butts in the chest, andimitated executions.”
The name of the 64th Brigade and a list of1,600 of its soldiers were found among computer files left behind in theRussian military headquarters in Bucha, providing investigators with an immenseresource as they began their investigation. Dmytro Replianchuk atSlidtsvo.info, a Ukrainian investigative news agency, soon found the socialmedia profiles of dozens of the names, including officers.
Three victims who survived beatings andtorture have been able to identify the perpetrators from the photographs,Kravchenko said.
One of the victims was Yuriy, 50, a factoryworker, who lives near one of the most notorious Russian bases, at 144Yablunska St. On Mar 13, a unit of the 64th Brigade came to search his house.He said that he had identified the soldiers when shown photographs byprosecutors. The soldiers were rough and uncouth, he said. “You could see theywere from the Taiga,” he said, referring to the Siberian forest. “They justtalk to bears.”
Yuriy managed to avoid suspicion, but Mar19, the soldiers returned and detained his neighbour Oleksiy. Like severalothers interviewed for this article, the men asked to be identified by onlytheir first names for their security.
Oleksiy declined to be interviewed butconfirmed that he had been detained twice by the Russian unit, interrogated ina basement for several hours and put through a mock execution when the soldiersfired a gun behind him. Still shaken, he said, “I just want to try to forget itall.”
CREATED TO ‘SCARE THE POPULATION’
Based in Russia’s far east, near the borderwith China, the 64th Brigade belongs to the Eastern Military District, longseen as the part of the Russian army with the lowest levels of training andequipment.
The brigade has ethnic Russian commandersbut consists largely of soldiers drawn from minority ethnic groups anddisadvantaged communities, according to Col. Mykola Krasny, the head of publicaffairs of Ukrainian military intelligence.
In radio conversations that wereintercepted by Ukrainian forces, some of the Russians expressed surprise thatvillage roads in outlying areas of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, were paved withasphalt, he said.
“We see it as a deliberate policy to draftsoldiers from depressed regions of Russia,” Krasny said.
Not a lot is known about the brigade, butKrasny claimed that it was notable for its lack of morality, for beatings ofsoldiers and for thieving. Drawn from a regiment that had served in Chechnya,the brigade was established Jan 1, 2009, shortly after Russia’s war in Georgia,Krasny said. The goal was clear, he added: to build up a fearsome army unitthat could instil control.
“The consequences of these politics waswhat happened in Bucha,” he said. “Having no discipline, and these aggressivehabits, it looks like it was created to scare the population.”
He claimed that the Russian soldiers’disadvantaged backgrounds, and the fact that they could act with impunity,prompted them “to do unspeakable things.”
It was not only the enemy who sufferedtheir brutality. The Russian army has long had a reputation for hazing its ownsoldiers, and on a cellphone left behind in Bucha by a member of the 64th,investigators found recent evidence of the practice: a video in which anofficer is talking to a subordinate and then suddenly punches him in the sideof the head while other soldiers stand around talking.
The Russian government did not respond to arequest for comment on the accusations against the 64th Brigade but hasrepeatedly claimed that allegations of its forces having committed atrocitiesin Bucha and elsewhere are false.
Western analysts who have studied theRussian army said that the behaviour of troops in Bucha was not a surprise.
“It is consistent with the way theyconsider responding,” said Nick Reynolds, a researcher of land warfare at theRoyal United Services Institute, a military research organization in London.“Reprisals are part and parcel of how the Russian military does business.”
THE ‘BAD GUYS’ WILL COME
Killings occurred in Bucha from the firstdays that Russian troops appeared. The first units were airborne assaulttroops, paratroopers and special forces who fired on cars and civilians in thestreets and detained men suspected of being in the Ukrainian army orterritorial defence.
The extent of the killings, and the seeminglack of hesitation among Russian soldiers to carry them out, has led Ukrainianofficials to surmise that they were acting under orders.
“They couldn’t not know,” Kravchenko saidof senior military commanders. “I think the terror was planned.”
Many of the documented killings occurred onYablunska Street, where bodies lay for weeks, visible on satellite images. Butnot far away, on a corner of Ivana Franka Street, a particular form of hellplayed out after Mar 12.
Residents had already been warned thatthings would get worse. A pensioner, Mykola, 67, said that Russian troops whofirst came to the neighbourhood had advised him to leave while he could.“‘After us, such bad guys will come,’” the commander told him, he recalled. “Ithink they had radio contact and they knew who was coming, and they had theirown opinion of them.”
Mykola left Bucha before the 64th Brigadearrived.
The spring flowers are pushing upeverywhere in Bucha, fruit trees are in blossom, and city workers have sweptthe streets and filled in some of the bomb craters. But at the end of IvanaFranka Street, amid smashed cars and destroyed homes, there is an eeriedesolation.
“From this house to the end, no one is leftalive,” said Havryliuk, 65. “Eleven people were killed here. Only we stayedalive.”
Her son and son-in-law had stayed behind tolook after the house and the dogs, and were killed Mar 12 or 13, when the 64thBrigade first arrived, she said. The death certificates said that they had beenshot in the head.
What happened over the next two weeks ishard to fathom. The few residents who stayed were confined to their homes andonly occasionally dared to go out to fetch water from a well. Some of them sawpeople being detained by the Russians.
Nadezhda Cherednychenko, 50, pleaded withthe soldiers to let her son go. He was being held in the yard of a house andhis arm had been injured when she last saw him. She found him dead in thecellar of the same house three weeks later, after the Russians withdrew.
“They should be punished,” she said of hiscaptors. “They brought so much pain to people. Mothers without children,fathers, children without parents. It’s something you cannot forgive.”
Neighbours who lived next door to theHavryliuks just disappeared. Volodymyr and Tetiana Shypilo, a teacher, andtheir son Andriy, 39, lived in one part of the house, and Oleh Yarmolenko, 47,lived alone in the other side. “They were all our relatives,” Havryliuk said.
Down a side alley lived Lidiya Sydorenko,62, and her husband Serhiy, 65. Their daughter, Tetiana Naumova, said that shespoke to them by telephone midmorning Mar 22.
“Mother was crying the whole time,” Naumovasaid. “She was usually an optimist, but I think she had a bad feeling.”
Minutes later, Russian soldiers came in anddemanded to search their garage. They told a neighbour to leave, shooting atthe ground by her feet.
“By lunchtime they had killed them,”Naumova said.
She returned to the house with her husband,Vitaliy, and her son Anton last month after Russian troops withdrew from Kyiv.Her parents were nowhere to be found, but they found ominous traces — her father’shat with bullet holes in it, three pools of blood and a piece of her mother’sscalp and hair.
There was also no sign of the Shypilos orof Yarmolenko, except trails of blood where bodies had been dragged along thefloor of their house.
Eventually, French forensic investigatorssolved the mystery.
They examined six charred bodies found inan empty lot up the street and confirmed that they were the missing civilians:the Sydorenkos, the three Shypilos and Yarmolenko. Several bore bullet woundsbut three of them had had limbs severed, including Naumova’s mother, theinvestigators told the families.
Her father had multiple gunshot wounds tothe head and chest, her mother had had an arm and a leg cut off, she said.
“They tortured them,” Havryliuk said, “andburned them to cover their tracks.”
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