The New York Times has published a video with the results of its 8-months long investigation of the war crimes committed by Russia’s servicemen in Ukraine’s town of Bucha.
The NYT spoke with numerous local residents, studied CCTV footage, as well as intercepted radio communications and phone calls.
The locals told the NYT that Russia’s servicemen would take cell phones off them by force. The American media outlet studied data on calls made from the Bucha district and identified the names of 22 Russian servicemen of the 234th Air Assault Regiment who used the phones of their victims. It is evident that Russian soldiers routinely used the phones of victims to call home to Russia, often only hours after they were killed.
Two paratroopers have confirmed that they served in the 234 Regiment and were in Bucha as they spoke to the NYT.
Names of teh soldiers who used phones of murdered civilians to make calls / The New York Times
Lt. Col. Artyom Gorodilov, the regiment commander at the helm of the 234th, oversaw operations of the paratrooper unit in Bucha, the NYT says. After the Russian troops had retreated from the Kyiv region, he received a promotion to colonel.
The NYT has also identified 36 of the Ukrainian victims killed in Bucha. Almost all of those people were civilians, some of them were POWs. The evidence shows that the killings were part of a deliberate and systematic effort to ruthlessly secure a route to the capital, Kyiv.
People murdered in Bucha / The New York Times
“Soldiers interrogated and executed unarmed men of fighting age, and killed people who unwittingly crossed their paths — whether it was children fleeing with their families, locals hoping to find groceries or people simply trying to get back home on their bicycles,” says the investigation.
Russian soldier Nikita Chibrin, 27, member of the 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade — the unit accused of committing war crimes in the Kyiv region in March 2022 — fled to the West and asked for political asylum in Spain, The Guardian reported in November.
Chibrin spent over four months in Ukraine as part of the brigade, however, he claims that he took no part in the war crimes that his unit is accused of committing and says that he did not fire a gun even once. He adds that he is ready to testify in an international court about everything he saw in Ukraine.
