Today’s Russia Adds to its Roster of War Crimes in Ukraine

Mass graves, mass murder, wartime atrocities and crimes against humanity are not confined to any place and time. Nazi Germans committed them in Ukraine during World War II and so did the Soviet Russians throughout history. Mass graves were also uncovered during the war in the Balkans in 1991-2001.

The culprits behind the latest discovery are today’s Moscow and its leaders Putin, Lavrov et al who are wined and dined around the world.

Authorities in the war-torn eastern Ukrainian town of Sloviansk uncovered this week a mass grave of people killed in mid-2014 when the town, located some 430 miles east of Kyiv, was under the control of the known Russian military intelligence officer and killer Igor Girkin and his militant cutthroats, according to the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. The unearthing is part of a preliminary criminal investigation, and therefore some of their findings are still secret.

Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group reported that the atrocity is located on the territory of a cemetery but it noted that it was clearly not intended to be found. DNA samples have been taken and sent to Kyiv for analysis in hopes that local residents can finally learn the fate of their loved ones who disappeared without a trace during the early months of the Russo-Ukraine War and subsequent occupation from April 12 to July 8 July, 2014. Forensic experts from the International Committee of the Red Cross were present during the exhumation.

“The police note that this is not the first such exhumation of mass graves in Sloviansk. On July 24, 2014, just weeks after the militants fled the advancing Ukrainian Army, a major exhumation was carried out which uncovered the bodies of 14 civilians believed to have been killed by Girkin and his Russian and pro-Russian militants. These included four members of the Evangelical Church of the Transfiguration in Sloviansk: the two sons – Reuben and Albert – of Pastor Oleksandr Pavenko, and two deacons of the church Viktor Bradarsky and Volodymyr Velichko. The four were abducted from the Trinity Sunday festive service on June 8, and are believed to have been tortured and then killed the next day,” KHPG said.

Russian television earlier had tried to pass off the murders as the work of Ukrainian soldiers, falsely claiming that the Ukrainians had been killed for helping the Russian invaders. In fact, KHPG explained further, the innocent residents may have been killed for their cars, which would not be the first time that militants, regarded as heroes by Russia, killed purely in the commission of a robbery.

The bodies in the mass grave were not the only signs of Russian war crimes in Sloviansk.

“The militants did not bother to hide the bodies of all their victims. Volodymyr Rybak, a 42-year-old Horlivka City Council deputy, was seized on April 17, 2014, after he tried to remove the flag of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), which the Russian and pro-Russian militants had hung over the Council building and restore the Ukrainian flag to its place. His horrifically mutilated body was found in a stream near Sloviansk, together with that of 19-year-old Yuri Popravka. The young lad had, together with Yuri Dyakovsky, who was 25, and three other young Maidan activists, set off for Sloviansk to try to gather information about the militants. They were seized almost immediately, with Dyakovsky’s body found a bit later,” KHPG wrote in its edition of August 19.

Girkin is known for his brutality and Sloviansk is not the first example of his demonic behavior. KHPG said the first evidence of extrajudicial executions and other war crimes was reported by western journalists that arrived in Sloviansk soon after the militants fled. Girkin, who is on trial in absentia in The Hague for his alleged role in the destruction of Malaysian airliner MH17, frequently boasts about his criminal activities in Donbas, and in 2016 admitted to extrajudicial executions during an interview. Although the latter was later removed, it has been widely reported, and was doubtless saved for submissions from Ukraine to the International Criminal Code. More recently, Girkin also admitted to using civilians as human shields in Donbas, KHPG said.

Christopher Miller, one of the journalists who had entered Sloviansk after the militants left, and other RFE/RL journalists published an article in July 2020 titled The Executioners of Sloviansk. They identified some of what they called “the Russia-backed militants — including one with ties to a longtime Putin aide in the Kremlin — who ordered the extrajudicial executions of Ukrainians by firing squad and set a dark tone for the war in the Donbas,” KHPG said.

KHPG further noted that documents about the extrajudicial killings of civilian Oleksiy Pichko and two Ukrainians who joined the militants (Dmytro Slavov and Mykola Lukyanov) show that the order to execute came from so-called “military tribunals” set up by Girkin “on the basis of a draconian law conceived by dictator Josef Stalin and imposed shortly after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in World War II.” The authors identified nine militants who took part in these military tribunals, and discovered that one of them, Viktor Anosov, “is tied through a Moscow-based organization for Russia-backed fighters to Vladislav Surkov, one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest aides at the time of the executions and the architect of the Kremlin’s Ukraine policy.”

The human rights group also said the authors determined that at least a few of the nine men had received Russian citizenship and will undoubtedly be protected from prosecution, just as Russia is shielding the men on trial over MH17, the men who tortured and murdered 16-year-old Ukrainian student Stepan Chubenko, and others. “That is one of the reasons that justice is denied the victims and their families, but unfortunately Ukraine is also to blame. In the seventh year of Russian aggression Ukraine’s legislators are still dragging their feet on critically important legislation that will enable criminal prosecution for war crimes, crimes against humanity, etc.,” KHPG said.

It is indeed mindboggling that the legislators and government of independent Ukraine, which is engaged in the latest iteration of war with Russia, refuses to expeditiously adopt legislation that would give it the authority to punish the perpetrators – the Russian soldiers on the ground – and organizers and co-conspirators – the Russian leaders in the Kremlin – for their latest round of war crimes against Ukraine.