Inside the Ukraine war crimes investigation, Part 1: The Missing

By Anthony Galloway and Kate Geraghty

The Russian soldiers were pointing at Yevhen Kulakivskiy’s wife Natalia when he started talking.

“I think they might have told him that they’d do something to me unless he talked,” Natalia Kulakivska says from her home in Bucha.

It was March 18, three weeks into the invasion, when the Russian soldiers arrived at the door of their home armed with machine guns.

Natalia still doesn’t know for sure whether Yevhen is dead or alive. Credit:Kate Geraghty

Natalia watched as Yevhen was forced to his knees at gunpoint, while the Russians seized their mobile phones, computer, camera, gold and jewellery. Looting is a war crime, but the soldiers didn’t appear to care.

Eventually, they told Natalia she was “free to go”. But they took her husband away.

“Why did you come here? What for? Why did you come here to liberate us?” she asked them, tears streaming down her face.

“No, we didn’t come here to liberate you, we came here to take the Crimea and Donbas from you,” one soldier said.

“But you already have. What are you doing here?” Natalia responded.

“Your government doesn’t want to give them to us”, the soldier said.

Yevhen is among thousands of Ukrainians who have disappeared since Russia invaded on February 24. It is still difficult to know exactly how many, but Ukraine’s national police has received more than 9000 missing person reports since Russia invaded.

Nataliya Kulakivska with her missing loved ones. From top right: nephew Vladyslav Bondarenko; brother-in-law Serhiy Lyubych and husband Yevhen Kulakivskiy, Bondarenko is now confirmed dead.Credit:Kate Geraghty

Enforced disappearance is a crime against humanity. Many of the practices associated with making someone disappear – torture, depriving them of a fair trial and inhumane treatment – are also war crimes under the Geneva Conventions.

In a four-part series, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age are revealing new details of apparent war crimes committed in Ukraine – including enforced disappearances, torture, unlawful killings and indiscriminate bombings – based on first-hand accounts of victims, witnesses and forensic investigators.

The International Criminal Court has described Ukraine as a “crime scene” and deployed its largest ever team of detectives to the country to assist in multiple investigations.

While it is impossible at this stage to say exactly how many war crimes have been committed in Ukraine, stacking up and prosecuting each case will be a long and arduous process for investigators.

According to Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Iryna Venediktova, Russia has committed more than 22,500 war crimes and crimes of aggression against Ukraine since the invasion. For its part, Russia has repeatedly denied targeting civilians.

Matilda Bogner, an Australian who heads the United Nations human rights mission in Ukraine, says her agency’s investigators have documented 270 cases of arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance committed by Russian forces so far. It has also identified 12 cases committed by Ukrainian authorities.

“That’s only a fraction of the actual number of cases,” she warns. “The Russian side has not spoken, they have not given figures on how many people they hold.”

Bogner says enforced disappearances are terrifying not only for the person but for their family.

“It is a form of torture or ill-treatment of the families as well, by keeping them in the dark,” she says. “And that’s one of the key elements of enforced disappearance – the family becomes the victim as well.”

Yevhen, 42, wasn’t the first to disappear in Natalia’s family. Her sister’s husband Serhiy Lyubych, 37, had gone to collect water for neighbours on March 7, as the town was already cut off from electricity, gas and running water. He never came back, leaving his wife Snizhana wondering what happened to him.

The battle for Bucha, a Kyiv satellite city of about 37,000 residents, was still raging and nobody could find out anything. Fearing the worst, the family evacuated the couple’s two children with a stranger.

By March 12, Russia had complete control of the city.

Eleven days after Natalia’s brother-in-law went missing, her husband was taken right in front of her. Hours later her nephew Vladyslav Bondarenko, 20, also went missing. He is now dead.

“Three men were taken from my family. We will never see one of them again,” Natalia says.

For more than a month, Natalia had no idea where they were. They checked basements and morgues but found nothing.

Then on April 20, weeks after the Russians had fled Bucha, a man turned up in her street who had been released by Russia as part of a prisoner exchange.

A man is dwarfed by the ruins of one of the many buildings impacted by Russian shelling and missiles in Bucha. Credit:Kate Geraghty

The man, who doesn’t wish to be identified, was held with her husband and nephew in large freezers at an airport in the nearby town of Hostomel, before they were shipped to Belarus on March 22. On the way, Vladyslav panicked and tried to escape from a truck. He was shot dead by Russian soldiers. His body was buried by strangers.

Days after learning of her nephew’s death, Natalia heard from other released Ukrainians that Yevhen and Serhiy had been taken to prisons in Russia.

Since then, the Russian Red Cross has confirmed that Serhiy is alive in a prison near the city of Bryansk, but there has been no news about her husband.

“I don’t know who can influence the Russians, I don’t know who can influence those who decide the fate of my relatives and loved ones and thousands of other people,” Natalia says. “But I am begging – begging – if there is a chance, to reach their hearts and for this to end.”

More than 1300 civilians in Bucha and its surrounds were killed by Russian soldiers.Credit:Kate Geraghty

Crimes ‘must be investigated’

After Ukrainian soldiers liberated Bucha on March 31, authorities had to exhume a mass grave of 117 people in the grounds of the city’s Orthodox church. Many had been carried there by relatives and friends after they were shot in the street or beaten to death.

Father Andriy Halavin stands at the rear of the church, in front of the memorial and plaque at the site of the mass grave of civilians killed by Russian soldiers.Credit:Kate Geraghty

Andriy Halavin, the priest at the Church of the Holy St Andrew the First-Called, says many residents still don’t know what happened to their relatives.

“It’s twofold. On the one hand, they can’t find the bodies. On the other hand, a lot of people have been forcefully taken to Belarus and then deported to Russia,” he says.

Justice won’t come overnight, the priest says, but it is important the “crimes that have been committed here – the murders, the looting, the rapes – are investigated and the criminals prosecuted”.

In response to a series of questions on these cases and others, the Russian embassy in Australia said many of the allegations of war crimes were unverified and were being fed by Ukrainian propaganda.

Nadiya Kuksenko weeps as she talks of the pain they have suffered in Bucha. She says the hardest part is collecting prayer messages residents write at the church as she takes on the pain of each prayer.Credit:Kate Geraghty

"With no substantiation, lack of identifying data or at least indication of sources, most of your questions hardly deserve consideration," the embassy said.

‘I spent a night under a dead body’

Tradesman Boris Popov, who was held for weeks in a Russian prison with Natalia’s brother-in-law Serhiy, has some of the answers.

Popov has provided the full account of what happened to Ukrainian prosecutors and the UN body investigating war crimes in Ukraine. Now he wants to tell his story to the world, partly in a bid to secure the freedom of men such as Yevhen and Serhiy still stuck in Russian prisons.

Willing to testify: Boris Popov has been through an unimaginable ordeal. Credit:Kate Geraghty

On March 5 Boris was on his way to Vorzel’s town centre, about six kilometres from Bucha, to fetch water. His wife, also called Natalia, would not see him again for almost two months.

Four Russian soldiers in camouflage emerged from the forest and ordered him to strip naked and lie on the ground. They broke his nose, smashing his face with their guns, then blindfolded him with tape and tied his hands. The next morning they threw him in a room with about 30 Ukrainian prisoners in the nearby town of Hostomel.

One by one, the men were taken to be interrogated and tortured. Shots rang out. They put a gun to Boris’ head, asking him where the Ukrainian military was positioned.

“I told them that I really didn’t know and that I was a civilian. But in the last moment, they took the gun away and shot over my ear.”

Boris Popov stands in the forest glade where he was captured by the Russians. Credit:Kate Geraghty

The soldiers told Boris they would release him; he could go back to his home in Vorzel. At a cemetery on the outskirts of his town, the soldiers let the prisoners untie themselves and walk across a field.

As Boris began to run, grenades exploded and gunfire whistled overhead. The prisoners were surrounded by more than 50 Russian armoured vehicles.

“I felt like I was being hunted down like an animal just for fun,” Boris says.

Black bags were pulled over their heads and the Ukrainians were taken to a dugout in the forest where they’d been captured.

Then, he says, “the most terrible things” started to happen.

He saw a man tied to a tree trunk, who he later learnt was a lieutenant colonel with Ukraine’s intelligence agency, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). Days earlier, he’d grabbed an old grenade launcher from his house in Bucha and tried to fire on the Russian convoy, but it had jammed.

Boris watched as a young Russian commander slammed a wooden peg deeper and deeper into the lieutenant colonel’s skull. But the officer, knowing he would die, was taunting his attackers.

The other prisoners were beaten with wooden hammers and made to lie on the ground with their legs and arms spread before being kicked under the ribs. Months later, Boris’ left ribs still ache; he is sure some of them were broken.

The soldiers ordered Boris to “finish off the colonel” with an axe.

“Put him out of his misery,” they said.

“Guys, I am afraid of blood, I just can’t,” Boris replied.

The soldiers threw Boris blindfolded into a hole and pretended to shoot him multiple times. The bullets whistled past his head and into the ground.

“I was an atheist before, but I started to remember prayers. I started talking to God,” Boris says.

Then all the other prisoners including the lieutenant colonel – about 30 men – were thrown into the hole with Boris, who was stripped to his underpants in sub-zero temperatures.

“While they were beating me I didn’t care about the weather in the heat of the moment, but as the night was closing in I started to freeze,” Boris says.

The soldiers also made the men shout “Hail Russia!” every 15 to 20 minutes, and if they failed one of the soldiers would hit them over the head with a wooden hammer.

Around midnight, the lieutenant colonel asked for a doctor as blood gushed from his head.

A doctor or paramedic, who Boris says was drunk, then came and said: “You f—ing Ukrainian bastards don’t need a doctor.”

He gave the lieutenant colonel half a pill, which Boris believes was aspirin.

Boris then asked for a blanket, but the soldiers said one more word out of him would lead to his “certain death”.

The prisoners huddled for warmth. Boris thought the colonel had fallen asleep, but then noticed his mouth was open and full of soil. The colonel was dead.

“At first it was very frightening. But then a thought came to me that I should cover myself with the corpse, so I don’t freeze to death,” Boris says. “I managed to push myself underneath him and the rest of the night I spent under a dead body.”

A stick marks the grave of the former colonel who died in the pit next to Boris. Credit:Kate Geraghty

At about 11am the next morning, the soldiers put a bag over Boris’ head and allowed him to put his clothes back on.

The prisoners were taken to a locked room back in Hostomel, where they drank from a puddle of muddy water to slake their thirst.

Then Boris and nine other men were locked in a freezer chamber, six metres long and 2.5 metres wide. That’s where Boris met Serhiy, Natalia’s brother-in-law.

In those terrible nights, when suffering triggered hallucinations and men died around them, Boris and Serhiy and some of the others became what Boris calls a “circle of comrades”.

Boris and Serhiy began to plan an escape by pulling one of the radiators out of the wall.

There were about 20 men alive in the chamber when the Russians brought in a former Ukrainian general in his late 70s. The former general told the Russians it was against the Geneva Conventions to force 20 prisoners to sleep on the concrete floor.

He also told the Russian captain that he recently had COVID-19 and he needed medicine and vitamins. Later, a new body bag appeared. The former general’s body was inside it.

On March 17, 12 days after they were captured, the men were told they would be moved to Russia. Instead, they were taken to a warehouse in Belarus, whose president Aleksandr Lukashenko is a staunch ally of Vladimir Putin.

The beatings weren’t as bad in Belarus, Boris says – just enough to “show us who’s boss”.

The Belarusian soldiers, identifiable by their accents and dark green uniforms, took photos of every prisoner and showed them documents stating they were “prisoners of war” rather than civilians.

Boris says Serhiy was handcuffed when worsening back problems meant he failed to comply with an order to put his head down.

After two days in Belarus, Serhiy was moved to Russia. Boris was taken a day later, on March 20. This meant neither man witnessed the murder of Serhiy’s nephew, Vladyslav.

On the seven-hour drive to Russia, Popov says he passed out from low blood sugar and woke when a Russian soldier burnt his fingers with a lighter.

At some point near the end of the trip, he managed to lift the tape over his eyes and saw a sign that read “Bryansk Jail No. 3” – a jail in the Russian town of Novozybkov.

In the prison cell, still blindfolded, he heard Serhiy’s name and knew his “comrade” was there.

Every morning, in cell 47, Boris had to greet the warden with: “Comrade citizen, my name is Boris Popov.” The Russian anthem would play over the speakers followed by other patriotic songs.

Dizzy from low blood sugar, Boris was frequently made to strip naked and squat on his toes as the guards beat him over the heels with batons.

The prisoners also walked through a “tunnel” of soldiers as they beat them.

“They stand on both sides and just beat you as much as they can. And you have to pass this tunnel while they are beating you,” he says. “Then you get an ice-cold shower.”

On a good day, Boris had a light beating to his head and ribs.

“When it’s a bad day they take you to the hallway and three people just beat the shit out of you,” he says.

Prisoners were beaten with wooden hammers to make them obey. Credit:Kate Geraghty

On a good day, Boris says he would only be beaten around the head and ribs. Credit:Kate Geraghty

The head doctor was one of the worst, Boris says, a bulky woman in her mid- 40s whose uniform indicated she was a major in the Russian military.

“Ukrainians like to get sick a lot,” she would grumble.

Boris complained to her about his ribs. The doctor, flanked by three special forces soldiers, told him: “Our guys could never do such a thing.” She looked at the soldiers, who then kicked him in the chest.

“Do you understand now that our guys could never do such a thing? You have probably fallen somewhere in your Ukrainian trenches or something. Do you understand?” the doctor asked.

Boris demonstrates the stress position he had to hold while soldiers beat him. Credit:Kate Geraghty

“Yes, certainly, no problem,” Boris responded. “I understand now.”

In the middle of April, things started to change.

Boris, stripped naked, was assessed for injuries by a doctor who gave him pills and injections. A few days later, the prisoners were allowed to go for short walks. Boris suspected the Russians might be preparing them for release.

On April 29, soldiers told Boris and his cellmates to get ready to be exchanged.

They were flown to the town of Taganrog in the north of Russia, where more Ukrainian prisoners boarded the plane, which then headed to Crimea, a region in southern Ukraine illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.

There they were put in a farm truck and driven to the Ukrainian region of Zaporizhzhya. At a bridge, he and 14 other Ukrainians were exchanged for five Russian soldiers.

As he crossed the bridge, Boris said the “sun began to shine brighter to me, the sky was bluer and everything was simply better”.

Natalia Popova embraces Boris Popov. Credit:Kate Geraghty

The Russian soldiers headed in the other direction appeared to be in good condition, Boris noticed, while he weighed 57 kilograms and was severely injured after almost two months of beatings.

“The Russians had clean clothes, were well fed, fresh-faced and were looking at us with contempt,” he says.

“But later I analysed it all and realised that we would be taken home in a comfortable van while these clean and tidy Russians will have to get in a truck used for pigs,” he says. “This is the difference between us.”

When Boris returned to Vorzel, neighbours didn’t recognise him.

“They hid behind the curtains in their house because they didn’t want him to see them crying over the poor state he was in,” his wife Natalia says. “He didn’t look like himself.”

Boris still doesn’t know what happened to his friend Serhiy.

With Fedir Sydoryk

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