Russia systematically targeted influential Ukrainians, nationally and locally, to neutralize resistance with detention, torture and executions, an AP investigation finds. The strategy appears to violate laws of war and could help build a case for genocide.
Russian leaders who had expected to sweep into Ukraine and seize control of a docile population quickly discovered they were wrong. One list begat another as Russia expanded its dragnet to ever-wider swaths of Ukrainian society, incorporating additional names from collaborators and seized government records and torturing captives into giving up other people.
Oleksandra Matviichuk the head of the group, emphasizes that these are the tip of the iceberg. Matviichuk recorded similar targeting of local elites by Russian-backed forces in Crimea and Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region dating back to 2014. Surrounded by soldiers, his son went out to the garden and hollered “Andrii! Andrii! Andrii!” as loud as his voice would carry.Three weeks later, Russians again came for Kuprash at his home. A commander sat him down at his kitchen table and, at gunpoint, promised him “a great life” in exchange for information about Ukrainian positions, as well as names of Ukrainian veterans and patriots. Kuprash insisted he didn’t have access to that information.
When they got to the forest cemetery, dozens of Russian soldiers forced Kuprash to strip and shoved him around in a circle, jeering and insulting him, he said. The commander pointed at another man being beaten near a tree, who he said had fingered Kuprash as the head of the local Territorial Defense, a volunteer military group. Kuprash denied it.
The Russians wanted the names of other spotters. They told him their friends had died because of people like him.Soldiers hauled Dibrovskyi to a basement, then to a garage, and then to a detention center near a military airport. They stuck a gun in his mouth and shot their rifles close to his ears. He said he was blindfolded and beaten so badly he urinated on himself.
The logic Russians used to sort people at the filtration center was never fully clear to Dibrovskyi. Those who made it through were searched, interrogated, photographed, fingerprinted and allowed to leave.On April 14, he was herded on a Russian KAMAZ truck with 90 other people who had failed filtration. They drove through the night. In the morning, they boarded an airplane.
“After torture, I was given paper and a pen. I was told to write down what they say,” Dibrovskyi said. “I realized only later what I had signed.”Russia’s targeting of local leaders like Dibrovskyi and Kuprash is not new. The security forces of the Soviet Union had a long history of drawing up lists of “subversives” in Russia and beyond to be detained, disappeared, sent to labor camps or executed.
“The sort of people who were selected for this were those who were community leaders, teachers, clergymen — anyone with a political background,” Jānis Kažociņš, the national security advisor to the president of Latvia, told AP. “Society doesn’t have any compass any longer. It’s been deprived of its leaders.”
“This is where the investigation of genocide should start,” said Wayne Jordash, director of Global Rights Compliance, a law firm and NGO, who helps lead the work of the Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group, a multinational effort to support Ukrainian war crimes prosecutors. “It’s how the Russians intended to take over and extinguish identity.”
Tsyhipa’s family has spoken with lawyers, NGOs, international organizations, Ukrainian intelligence and journalists. Nothing has brought him home. She managed to get a ride to her sister’s house in Donetsk, a city in eastern Ukraine that has been under de-facto Russian control since 2014. “I understood it was dangerous,” she said. “I was getting ready for the worst -- for arrest, or to be forced psychologically because of my children…I was afraid I’d be forced to collaborate.”
On May 24, Lidiia and her girls crammed on a bus with 50 people. When they reached the Russian border, her children passed through passport control first. Then it was Lidiia’s turn.“You have to wait here,” he told her. “Someone will come for you.”Another busload of people arrived, and she was afraid she’d lose her girls in the chaos. She strained to keep her eyes on her children as they sat, alone, in enemy territory.
They headed back towards the village. The commander cursed Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Kuprash kept his mouth shut and prayed.“Live,” the commander said. He turned and drove away. Early the next morning, Dibrovskyi waited as 59 names were called out. His was last, the 60th name. They all climbed onto KAMAZ trucks and headed north.
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