War crimes in Ukraine: reports of executions and rapes

According to Ukrainian refugees, Russian soldiers have killed defenseless civilians and raped women in the Kyiv suburbs. RBB24 research there are eyewitness reports.

Tatjana S.*’s face on the smartphone display looks exhausted. The 46-year-old experienced terrible things. She reports via video call RBB24 research of her husband’s execution by Russian soldiers. When we reach her, she is somewhere in western Ukraine. She doesn’t want to say where exactly. She’s still scared. Here is her story:

Horrifying story of the S family.

Tatjana and Juri S.* lived with their ten-year-old daughter Alina* in Kyiv. When war broke out at the end of February, they wanted out of the capital. The family picks up 81-year-old grandmother Olga* and drives to Bohdanivka, a small village north-east of Kyiv, 40 kilometers away. They had built a dacha here a few years ago.

On March 3, Russian troops enter the town. “The soldiers raged and shot wildly. They went from house to house, demanded alcohol and robbed people,” says Tatjana S.. On March 9, the Russian soldiers arrived at their dacha. It’s 9:30 p.m. when shots hit the kitchen window. “We shouted: ‘We are unarmed! Here are children!’ Then they asked us to open the door,” reports Tatjana S.

Two soldiers with machine guns break into the house. They order the family to climb into a two meter deep pump shaft. But the grandmother is too old, she can’t make it. The soldiers leave them in the house and pay no further attention to them. But Tatjana, Juri and their daughter have to go down into the shaft.

Executed for not having cigarettes

“Then they asked for cigarettes. My husband replied that he hadn’t smoked himself for four days. Then one of the soldiers ordered: ‘Get him down!’ Then he shot my husband first in the arm and then in the head.”

The shot Juri S. collapses. He’s bleeding profusely. The soldiers put a lid on the shaft and go into the house. Tatjana S. remembers hearing that they were searching the house. Mother and daughter sit locked in the pump shaft for several hours. Juri S.’s breath is getting weaker by the hour. He dies at around 2:30 a.m.

At some point, Tatjana and Alina S. free themselves from the shaft. The soldiers have since moved on. In the house they find the grandmother unharmed. The family is in shock. As dusk falls, a neighbor knocks. The neighbor heard the shots. Tatjana S. tells him what happened. The neighbor takes in mother and daughter.

In his house they meet other victims, young women. One of them is Natalya*. The British Times reported extensively on her case. Natalya comes from a neighboring town and lives in a secluded house on the edge of the forest. She reports that soldiers murdered her husband after finding a camouflage jacket in his car

The killer reportedly said, “I shot him because he was a Nazi.” Natalya* herself was repeatedly raped by the perpetrators while her four-year-old son was crying in the boiler room next door. After the drunken men let go of her, she seizes the chance to flee with her child.

“We just wanted to get out of this hell!”

On March 10, the women decide to leave Bohdanivka by car. On secondary roads they drive in the direction of Brovary, the next larger town. “Sometimes there were signs warning of mines. But we still took this route. We just wanted to get out of this hell,” recalls Tatjana S.

Meanwhile, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine Iryna Venediktova has announced that she has launched an investigation into the events. The investigations relate to the case of Natalya, whom Tatjana S. met at her neighbor’s house the next morning. The charge is murder and rape.

A few days ago, the human rights organization Human Rights Watch published several eyewitness reports of executions of civilians and rapes. Even RBB24 research was able to speak to a refugee in Berlin who had observed how Russian military personnel shot civilians in Irpin.

Yusuf M. reports: “There was a shop downstairs in a nine-story house. The Russian soldiers broke down the door and wanted to loot the groceries. Then they heard a voice from the basement,” Yusuf M. recalls. “The occupiers came in and dragged the people, there were eight or nine people, out of the basement. And they shot everyone immediately.”

Experts confirm war crimes

These reports are eyewitness testimonies that have yet to be independently verified. If they are confirmed, then rape and the shooting of civilians are clearly war crimes, explains Professor Kai Ambos, Chair of International Criminal Law and International Law at the Georg-August University in Göttingen.

Ambos is a judge at the Kosovo Special Tribunal in The Hague. “In cases where civilians are victims of violence, be it direct killing, cruel treatment or sexual violence, we clearly have a violation of the ironclad principle of protecting the civilian population. And with that we have war crimes,” says the international law expert.

Sönke Neitzel, professor at the Institute of Military History at the University of Potsdam, agrees. After the first weeks of the war, the shelling of civilian infrastructure such as hospitals or the Mariupol theater showed that civilians were not spared.

“It was clear to everyone that with the actions of the Russian army, with the shelling of the cities, a limit had already been crossed,” said the historian. “For all we know, civilians and civilian entities are a target and there is a radical bias.” However, it is not yet clear what the dimensions of these individual cases of war crimes are.

Systematic war crimes?

From the point of view of the experts, it is unclear whether an indictment could also include crimes against humanity. This requires a certain systematic violation of human rights. “You would have to accuse the Russian government of not only waging a war of conquest with the aim of being able to conquer either the whole of Ukraine or at least eastern Ukraine,” explains international law expert Kai Ambos, “but it’s also about Violating humanity by systematically violating human rights as a policy. And of course that’s very difficult to prove.”

Julia Duchrow, deputy secretary-general of Amnesty International in Germany, sees signs of a systematic approach to Russian warfare. “We have seen that the military really does choose civilian locations to drop bombs on: schools, kindergartens, medical centers such as a maternity hospital.”

Amnesty International staff are now gathering evidence of war crimes on the ground and documenting it for prosecution before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In Germany, the Federal Criminal Police Office, the Federal Intelligence Service and the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office are dealing with the allegations.

The shooting of Yuri S. could also play a role in international criminal justice. Tatjana S. fled to western Ukraine with her daughter Alina. She hopes to return to Bohdanivka soon – so that she can recover her husband’s remains and bury him.

* Names changed by editors