the times | Thursday April 28 2022 2GM 9
News
The faces in the screengrabs are grim
and unsmiling, and many are strikingly
young. The men walk with a swagger, in
bulky body armour and holding rifles.
They are Russian soldiers, filmed in the
act of invading Ukraine, and if Ruslan
Kravchenko has his way this will be the
evidence that sends them to prison.
Kravchenko is chief prosecutor in
Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, a place
that has become a symbol of the
brutality of the Russian forces. Since
the invaders withdrew at the end of last
month, hundreds of bodies have been
recovered in the town, many of them
tied up and shot in the head.
The Russians in Bucha looted and
burnt property and tortured and raped
men and women before giving up on
their attempt to take Kyiv and retreat-
ing across the border.
An intense effort is under way to
bring them to justice, drawing on inter-
national expertise and using DNA
analysis, security cameras, satellites,
drones and facial recognition software.
“The history of the Second World
War shows us that war criminals can
still be found and prosecuted even in
our own generation,” Kravchenko says.
“My principal goal and that of my
colleagues is to find and punish all of
them. The first thing we have to do is
identify them.”
In Bucha alone, a town of 40,
people, 300 prosecutors, police officers
and agents of the intelligence agency,
the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU),
are working on the case. They are
assisted by police forensic experts from
France and Slovakia and the latest
investigative technology.
The task of identification is made
urgent by the need to return the dead for
burial by their families. A refrigerated
lorry stands in the centre of Bucha,
where people missing their loved ones
come to view unidentified remains.
Half of the 350 bodies recovered so
far have undergone post-mortem
examinations. Crime scenes, including
sites of torture and rape, have been
sifted by forensic investigators. Satellite
photos taken by the commercial
company Maxar are being scrutinised
for images showing the digging of mass
graves and the dumping of bodies in the
street.
Thirty drones have been used to take
aerial images of the town to map the
physical damage done to it. “Crimes
against people and crimes against prop-2,000 people, has been completely destroyed by missile and artillery strikes launched by invading Russian forces
However, an official said that joining up
with Transnistria risked “overextend-
ing Russian supply lines and their
capabilities once again” and would
involve Russia taking the heavily de-
fended city of Odesa.
He said Russia’s “military ability to
tackle that as a target is limited”.
He added: “In order to progress to
Transnistria, the Russians would need
to get back Kherson, past the river, and
have land forces progressing down to
Odesa and ideally link up with amphib-
ious forces coming from the coast.”
Odesa, Ukraine’s biggest port, would
be a “tough target”, with the Ukrainians
having taken full advantage of Russia’s
slow progress to build up reserves and
capabilities, he said.
The sinking of Russia’s flagship, theRussia lacks the firepower to create a
land bridge to the breakaway region in
Moldova and is wary of moving ships
closer to the coastline because it fears
attacks, according to western officials.
Tensions are rising in the unrecog-
nised Transnistria region, which
borders southwest Ukraine and is
under the control of pro-Moscow offi-
cials, raising fears that the conflict may
be spreading.
The region has reported a series of
explosions in recent days that it called
“terrorist attacks”, leading Kyiv to
accuse Moscow of seeking to expand
war further into Europe.
Yesterday Transnistria's internal
ministry accused Ukraine of launching
drones and firing shots on its territory,
“in the direction of the settlement of
Kolbasna”, the site of the largest ammu-
nition depot in Europe.
Sibylline, a risk intelligence com-
pany, said in its daily briefing that the
incidents were “highly likely to have
been false-flag attacks”.
Western officials believe that Russia’s
long-term objective could be to create a
land bridge from Russia, along
Ukraine’s coastline, to Transnistria,
cutting off Ukraine from the Black Sea.
Victims of Russian soldiers are moved from a temporary burial plot in BuchaTransnistria ‘a land bridge too far’
Moskva, this month meant the Russian
navy was “wary of approaching the
coastline for fear of a subsequent
attack”, the official said. As a result, its
ships had moved away from the coast.
Russian troops near Kherson, the
first big city to be captured in the war,
had failed to make any meaningful
progress in recent days and in some
surrounding towns and villages the
Ukrainians had been able to make
counterattacks, he said.
The Russians have achieved their
early objective of creating a land bridge
from Russia to Crimea, with the excep-
tion of a small band of Ukrainian troops
who are holding out in Mariupol.
Fighters from the 36th Marine Bri-
gade and the Azov Battalion are still
trying to defend the Azovstal steel plant
— the last part of the city not under
Russian control — after weeks of fight-
ing. There are hundreds of civilians
holed up in the factory.
A Ukrainian woman who has friends
in the plant told the BBC they were sur-
rounded with no chance of getting out,
and have supplies for only a “few more
days”.
Lyuba Shipovich said President
Putin was “the only person who knows
the answer” about when they would get
out of the plant.Larisa Brown
BLACK
SEAMOLDOVAUKRAINEROMANIA50 milesTransnistriaOdesaChisinauKolbasnaStep by hi-tech step,
the Bucha killers are
being hunted down
erty,” said Kravchenko, who has inves-
tigated Russian war crimes in the Rus-
sian-occupied regions of Crimea and
Donbas. “We are looking at all of them.”
Now the investigators are attempting
what seems on the face of it an impossi-
ble task — to identify and track down
individual soldiers.
They have been helped by the
carelessness of the men they are
hunting. The investigators have come
upon lists of personnel that were left
behind. The Russians did not think to
disable the town’s 30 government
security cameras.
Surveillance footage from a glue
factory used by the occupiers has been
downloaded. The investigators have
more than 30 terabytes of data.
It is from these that the screengrabs
are taken, producing high-quality
images of Russian faces. These are filed
in what Kravchenko calls his “album”, a
database of some 500 people.
“Every day we are adding to it with
more and more pictures,” he said.
“When witnesses come forward, we
show it to them so they can point to the
ones who carried out the war crimes.”
The SBU is providing intercepts of
communications among Russians whorelied on unsecured civilian mobile
phones, vulnerable to tapping by the
Ukrainian eavesdroppers.
Kravchenko is reluctant to go into
detail about the most striking tool of all
— facial recognition software that
scans the internet, including social
media pages, and puts names to the
faces in his album.
Then there is the video evidence
gleaned by brave Ukrainians. He shows
a video shot by a man on his mobile
phone through a rain-streaked window
at the meeting point of Yablunska and
Yaremchiuka Streets on March 18. It
shows four human forms, bound and
kneeling, and soldiers nearby. The man
who took it said that after he stopped
filming, the prisoners were shot.
“Ukraine today is a slaughterhouse
right in the heart of Europe,” Amal
Clooney said at a meeting of the UN
security council last night. The human
rights lawyer, who is adviser to Karim
Khan, the chief prosecutor of the Inter-
national Criminal Court, called for war
criminals to be brought to justice.
Russia’s casual savagery is seared into
its soul, David Aaronovitch, page 27Ruslan Kravchenko
says he is adding
pictures to his
database dailyRichard
Lloyd Parry
in BuchaNews
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JACK HILL