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Ozera (Ukraine), Oct. 25 (AP) Tetiana Boikiv gazes from the cellar door as Russian soldiers ask about her husband’s phone.
“Come up,” her husband Mykola Moroz called to her. “Do not be afraid.”
Moroz – Kolya told his friends – tried to explain that the surveillance video they found was from his job as an electrician, all of which were taken before the February 24 invasion.
“I’m a religious man,” Kolya said. “I didn’t hurt anyone.”
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But the two soldiers and their commander were not listening. They put a bag over his head. Desperate Boykov demands to know what they will do with the man she calls great love.
“Shoot him,” one of the soldiers replied. They took him away.
She never saw Kolya again.
While the atrocities in the nearby town of Butcha drew worldwide attention and became the number one case for Ukrainian prosecutors, the massacres there were not out of whack.
Rather, it is part of a trail of violence that often spreads widely under prosecutors’ radars to ordinary villages such as Zdvyzhivka, a half-hour drive north of Bha, where Kolya lives.
An investigation by The Associated Press and PBS series Frontline found that much of the violence was systematic, not random, conceived and carried out within the command structure of the Russian military.
Troops were instructed to block and destroy traces of “nationalist resistance”, according to a Russian operational plan obtained by the Royal United Services Institute, a prominent defence and security think tank in London.
In their usual brutality, they hunted potential enemies on Russian intelligence lists, tortured and killed volunteer fighters, veterans and civilians suspected of assisting the Ukrainian army.
The Associated Press and Frontline interviewed dozens of witnesses and survivors and reviewed intercepted audio and surveillance footage to document what happened.
These purges — zachistka in Russian — became sharper as the lines between civilians and combatants blurred.
Ukraine made it very easy for anyone with a cell phone connection to report the location of Russian troops, as did many civilians. As Russian soldiers fought to crush what had become what had become a crowdsourced resistance, they swept through many civilians who had done nothing.
Ukrainian prosecutors say they will deal with all crimes committed in the war, but they are busy triaging more than 40,000 war crimes investigations.
Right now, their most pressing priorities are cases with promising evidence and high body counts, such as places like Bucha that capture the public imagination.
Kolia would die in a garden not far away, probably at the hands of troops commanded by the same man who led Operation Bucha, but his death was largely ignored.
This leaves Boykiff on his own to find his missing husband and struggle to understand his death.
Every time a new body turns up in Zdvyzhivka — an idyllic village an hour north of Kyiv where the Russians turned into a major forward operating base for the attack on the capital — Father Vasyl Bentsa’s phone rings.
The village priest himself is responsible for documenting the deaths.
On March 30, the bodies of two unidentified men, covered in torture, were found in the back garden of one of the town’s largest and most luxurious houses as Russian troops evacuated.
The bullet passed through a nearby red wooden fence, and the casings were scattered on the ground. By the next morning, when Bentesa arrived, three more bodies had appeared in the same spot.
There were no police around, no prosecutors, no ballistics experts, and no Ukrainian army to ask for help. Only five people needed names.
“We had no idea who to contact,” Bentsa said. “It’s stupid to leave a dead body for that long. Obviously, we all know the physiology — humans break down and smell. What do we do with them?”
Father Bentesa put on medical gloves and searched the pockets of the body for identification. He didn’t find it.
These people don’t seem to have been dead for long. A town woman helped remove a blindfold from a dead body with fresh blood on her hands.
Bentsa took the photo and helped drag the body to a cemetery on the edge of the forest. He buried them together in a sand pit, carefully marking the place with a rough wooden cross. “March 31, 2022,” he scratched in the wood. “Five unknown men.”
“It’s good that someone has a pen,” he said.
Under the laws of war, civilians who pose a security threat can be detained and soldiers can target civilians actively participating in hostilities, international human rights lawyers say. But under no circumstances is it illegal to torture and kill civilians or combatants held as prisoners of war.
The extent of crowdsourced intelligence in Ukraine raises new legal questions.
“It’s really a novel issue,” said Clint Williamson, the former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes. “This is outside the scope of international humanitarian law.”
But, he added, the Ukrainian government has every right to mobilize the population.
“It’s still everyone’s choice whether to participate,” he said.
Russian soldiers are sloppy in deciding who lives and who dies. Perhaps fear or anger clouded their judgment. Maybe they don’t care that much.
On the day of the funeral, church friends poured into the courtyard to stand beside Kolya’s coffin. The sky threatened to rain.
“We’ll meet again, Kolya,” Boykov said, slipping her work gloves along the top of the coffin. “I’ll make him feel bad because he doesn’t listen to me and we don’t leave when we get the chance. How much time do I spend looking for him? How much do I travel.”
She felt a panic. “I double-checked it was him,” she whispered. “I’m at peace. I’m at peace.”
The mourners sang in a low, slow song about drawing near to God and finding a place without sorrow. Beneath a low cloud of slate, they lined up to the cemetery behind the church.
Overhead, majestic storks instead of warplanes circled. Neighbors hugged and sat in front of the fence as Boikiv returned home. So far, they are still alive. They would bury their dead, and somehow life would start anew.
“Everything is fine here. But Kolya is gone,” Boykov said, looking at a row of tall red tulips planted by neighbors. Thick and warm spring rain drops on the soil.
“They took my love away,” she said.
All that remains now is to seek justice. For those who have lost a loved one, this is everything and nothing.
Across Ukraine, gardens, courtyards and basements are littered with corpses. Whether Kolia will count is unclear. (Associated Press)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from the Syndicated News feed, the body of the content may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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