Thousands of kilometres from home, with their real names hidden behind call signs, and with total control over people their leaders deride as bloodthirsty Nazis, the Russian soldiers who brutalise civilians in Ukraine probably believe that they act with impunity.
Serhiy Bolvinov, the chief police investigator in the eastern Kharkiv region, sees it as his job to prove them wrong.
Kharkiv is one of Ukraine’s biggest regions, covering an area equivalent to more than a third of the island of Ireland, and about four million people lived here before Russia launched its full invasion on February 24th, 2022.
With Ukraine’s second city as its capital, a long border with Russia, and Moscow-led militants in control of parts of neighbouring Donetsk and Luhansk regions since 2014, policing Kharkiv was demanding even before Moscow poured troops, tanks and missile systems over the frontier and occupied about 30 per cent of the province.
“The size of our staff hasn’t changed but the scale of the challenge has changed completely,” Bolvinov says in police headquarters in Kharkiv city.
“We have now registered more than 17,000 cases connected to breaches of the laws of war. This includes artillery, bomb and missile attacks on civilian buildings, and beatings, torture and rapes. Sometimes we work with the SBU [domestic security service], such as on cases related to the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia,” he adds.
“Take a city like Izium – when it was liberated, we discovered 449 bodies in a mass grave. That is just one case, but it involves the deaths of 449 people. So we’ve had to change the way we work . . . and we’ve established a special department to work solely on war crimes.”
The burial pits were found in a pine forest on the outskirts of Izium when Ukrainian forces retook it in September 2022 following five months of occupation.
“Most of the people buried there had suffered injuries from shelling. But some had their hands tied and had gunshot wounds to the head. Some had very bad damage to their extremities, which suggests they were tortured. It was hard even to establish the exact number of bodies, because the Russians had buried them without coffins or even any plastic wrapping, so they were in a very bad condition,” Bolvinov says.
“There was also a separate grave where 22 soldiers were buried. They had been shot in the head. The SBU is handling that case.”
The liberation of small cities such as Izium, Kupiansk, Balakliya, Vovchansk and surrounding areas of Kharkiv region brought the rule of law back to places that had been controlled for five months by Russian soldiers and militiamen, often with extreme brutality.
“More Russian torture chambers have been found in Kharkiv than in any other region thus far. We know of about 28 and we have examined the 25 that we can access. Of course, we don’t know what’s going on in areas that are still occupied, but in liberated areas we have shown the world what goes on under Russian occupation,” says Bolvinov.
In a report on Izium, Human Rights Watch said “survivors described being subjected to electric shock, waterboarding, severe beatings, threats at gunpoint, and being forced to hold stress positions for extended periods. They identified at least seven locations in the city, including two schools, where they said soldiers had detained and abused them”.
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After speaking to more than 100 people in Izium shortly after it was liberated, the group said: “Almost all said that they had a family member or friend who had been tortured, and 15 people, 14 men and one woman, described being tortured themselves. One of the men had ties to the armed forces but the rest were civilians.”
The Russians fled Kharkiv region in extreme haste and sometimes disarray, leaving behind weapons and other equipment and troves of documents that have helped police piece together cases and identify suspects.
“We took all those documents and digitised them and are working with them,” Bolvinov says.
“We have a list of Russian soldiers identified by their face, call sign and other details, and we can show local people these pictures and ask if they saw these soldiers and what they did. So far, we have the faces of 5,500 Russians who were in Kharkiv region,” he adds.
“Our big challenge is to put together this huge puzzle from many tiny pieces, gather all the evidence we can and give it to prosecutors so that a court can find these Russian soldiers guilty according to the law, as in any civilised country. And we already have such verdicts.”
A few captured soldiers have appeared in Ukrainian courts, but most have been tried for war crimes in absentia – Russia denies that its troops have committed crimes in Ukraine and its constitution forbids the extradition of its citizens. Ukraine’s prosecutor general Andriy Kostin said last month that it had identified 511 people suspected of war crimes since February 2022 and delivered 81 convictions.
Bolvinov mentions the case of Klim Kerzhaev, a Russian officer who last December was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in jail for badly injuring a Ukrainian civilian who was shot while driving with his wife near Izium in June 2022.
Technology played a big part in the case: a Ukrainian military drone filmed the shooting and then led the injured man’s wife to safety after returning to the area carrying a piece of paper saying, “Follow me.”
Evidence included an intercepted phone conversation allegedly between Kerzhaev and his wife, in which he tells her that he shot at a car from his armoured vehicle, killing the man inside. The victim survived, however, despite being left for dead in a roadside ditch by Russian soldiers.
Western states are helping Kharkiv and other regions amass the skills and technology needed to tackle complex crimes, including DNA testing equipment that helped identify the people in the Izium mass grave. They included poet and children’s writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, who was allegedly killed by two Ukrainian-born members of the Russian forces who have now been indicted for four murders.
The Kharkiv region’s DNA lab was also a grim necessity in the aftermath of a Russian missile attack on the village of Hroza last October, which killed 59 people gathered in a cafe for a memorial service for a soldier. It was needed again last month when a Russian drone hit a fuel depot in Kharkiv city, incinerating a nearby street and killing seven people, including three children and their parents.
Croatia has shared its recent experience of investigating war crimes committed during the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, but Bolvinov says Ukraine is unique in launching cases and achieving prosecutions while fighting rages on.
“Police officers were in Saltivka [a Kharkiv city district] when it was first bombed and they helped drag out people who had been killed and injured. Then they started taking photos and video and gathering testimony from the scene. The first [war crimes] case of the 17,000 we have now was launched on February 24th, 2022.” he says.
Bolvinov is confident that Russian war criminals will face justice and says “the only question is when”. This week, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued arrest warrants for two senior Russian officers for allegedly launching indiscriminate missile strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure; the court issued the same last year for Russian president Vladimir Putin over his alleged role in the deportation of Ukrainian children.
“We are doing our work exclusively to the letter of the law . . . observing the rights of all defendants and prisoners of war. Because no one wants any of these Russians to have the slightest chance – even 20 or 50 years from now – of evading responsibility because a lawyer shows that we did something wrong,” Bolvinov says.
Some suspects will probably die on the battlefield, and others may live for many years in the belief that they will never answer for what they did in Ukraine.
“But maybe one day, when he is old or perhaps not so old, a suspect will leave Russia and visit another country,” Bolvinov says. “And there he will be arrested and finally face punishment. That’s the only legal way to punish war criminals.”
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