Militia under command of Russian Army guilty of war crimes in Ukraine's Izium: CIR

Several militia units that were under the command of Russia’s Armed Forces, earlier last year, were involved in committing human rights abuses during the occupation of the Ukrainian city of Izium. Russian military units captured the city located in Ukraine's northeastern Kharkiv region in April 2022, and at the time, at least four militia units from Donbass’ ‘People’s Republics’ abused and tortured the Ukrainian civilians, an investigation conducted by the Centre for Information Resilience has found. 

The Ukrainian city, where mass graves were discovered, was occupied after a month-long battle but was later recaptured by Ukraine’s armed forces during the Kharkiv counteroffensive, combined with a parallel offensive launched in the South. 

Approximately six months before the Ukrainian troops liberated the city in the north-east, investigators found that at least four militia units from ‘Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics’ grossly abused the civilians as well as the Ukrainian Prisoners of War [POWs].

Secret torture chambers, mass graves, bodies of soldiers hastily buried 

Ukraine’s military found secret torture chambers, and mass graves that contained 447 unidentified bodies and the remains of 22 Ukrainian soldiers. The militia soldiers behind the war crimes largely based themselves in the schools and kindergartens in the occupied regions.

Back in the month of April and July, last year, the Luhansk People’s Republic [LPR] 5th battalion, a part of the 204th infantry regiment, was housed in the Izium’s school number six. These militiamen were used by the Russian soldiers as auxiliaries, and they were poorly trained, ill-equipped and frequently drunk as they patrolled the streets, the locals told CIR, the non-profit organization dedicated to exposing human rights abuses and war crimes. 

Russian troops take over Yablunska Street in Bucha, Ukraine. Credit: AP

Tasked mostly with manning military checkpoints, and surveilling the Ukrainian captives and POWs, the soldiers from Russia’s militia units had a pattern of creating terror and threatening the local civilians with their guns, according to the results of the investigation. The LPR soldiers often coerced the civilians to kneel at gunpoint, halting the cars and launching searches and warned of shooting at sight in case of curfew breaches.

Investigators at the site have found evidence of torture, including bodies with hands tied, and accused Russian troops of committing war crimes. Children and adults. Civilians and military. Tortured, shot, killed by shelling,” Zelenskyy said. “Even entire families are buried there: mother, father and daughter"—President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Izium mass graves. 

“They drank a lot,” the civilians from Izium told the investigators, adding that the militiamen also occasionally swapped humanitarian aid for homemade vodka. They stole “everything,” one survivor said, adding that when they barged into homes, they forced the homeowners to scrap the double glazing from their windows. 

“Drunken LPR fighters shot dead two children – aged 12 and 13 – as they ran to a basement, just before a 6pm curfew,” a survivor said. 

Image from EU report of testimonies of victims on places of illegal detention in Donbass. Credit: EU/Matviichuk Report Koalition

'Russian soldiers used airgun or a gas gun I don’t know – I was in a bag': Survivor

In separate findings, the Security Service of Ukraine [SBU] said that during the occupation, Russia’s Federal Security Service [FSU] officers tortured residents in Kupiansk, a city located on the outskirts of the Kharkiv region. When FSU officers were in then-occupied Kupiansk, they tortured residents and threatened to send them to minefields and kill their families,” the SBU said in its investigative report. “For over 40 minutes, they [Russian militia soldiers] had been using a stun gun on me, then they shot at me with either an airgun or a gas gun, I don’t know – I was in a bag,” a survivor said. 

“It’s the same scenario as in Bucha. It’s a lie, and of course we will defend the truth in this story"—Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov during a briefing.

Police recovered nearly 40 bodies along Yablunksa after Russian forces withdrew. Credit: AP

In Izium, according to the satellite images released by the Maxar Technologies, hundreds of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers were “hastily buried” by the militia unit men in the “Forest Cemetery.”  At least 30 emergency service officers from Ukraine unearthed the bodies at the wooded burial site in Izium using shovels. They were exhumed, as the police and forensic experts. and investigators documented the findings and inspected the bodies to establish their identities on camera. 

In October, last year, weeks after the Izium city fell to the Russians, a 48-year-old electrician who identified by only his first name—Ihor— said that the Russian soldiers detained him in his flat. They tortured him by putting a bag over his head, thrashing him, and at times dragging him to their car and beating him up more. They also drove him to school number six sometimes, where other soldiers were housed and locked him in a storage cupboard for up to several hours. After he was taken out of the cupboard, he was kicked, slapped, and punched, as well as called expletives and names such as ‘a fascist.’

The bodies of people killed during Russian shelling lie covered in the street. Credit: AP

A commander of the LPR militia unit then tortured him as he demanded that he identifies the members of Ukraine’s territorial defence forces who fought against the Russian forces in the eastern Donbass region. Another resident from Izium, a 19-year-old Ukrainian boy identified as Zhenia said that the Russian soldiers hit him on the head as they beat him up on the street. An image of the LPR soldiers was published by the CIR investigators from the footage published by pro-Russia Luhansk-born propagandist Roman Razum, who has been affiliated with the LPR since 2014. 

'Worst, most cruel and most sadistic more than the Chechens or Russian Army'

Another militia unit called the LPR’s Russia Legion from Russia’s 20th Combined Army was housed in Izium’s school number two, which their soldiers used as the military command and detention centre. The outfit was found to be associated with pro-Kremlin nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin, whose car was blown up in May, last year. Soldiers of the Russian legion “repeatedly beat the Ukrainian POWS” who were captured during the battle of Izium.

At least two civilians died there due to torture inflicted by the LPR Russia Legion, survivors said. Investigators identified the third torture site in a compound next to Izium’s municipal boiler plant which was controlled by soldiers from the Donetsk People’s Republic [DPR] unit known as ‘Oplot ZP’ belonging to the 60th Brigade. Another unit from the same brigade identified as ‘veterans’ runs another site in the nearby building. Survivors reported being imprisoned tortured, and electrocuted by the Russian militia unit soldiers inside the buildings. 

Soldiers walk on a path as smoke billows. Credit: AP

The 25-year-old son of Izium’s mayor, Valerii Marchenko, said that the soldiers from DPR and LPR were exacting revenge on the local population. The men from the militia units under the Russian command were “the worst and most cruel among them all,” he stressed.  

“According to the people who lived here during the occupation, the DPR and LPR were the worst and most cruel and the most sadistic more than the Chechens and more than the Russian [Army] themselves,” Marchenko told the war crime investigators. This group of soldiers had “very unique hatred towards the Ukrainians,” the Izium mayor’s son said, adding that they were the first ones to enter Izium as the city fell.

A field hospital visited by the reporters that were used by the Russian and LPR/DPR forces had a secret ground-floor room with a caged inner door that was used for the torture of the POWs and Ukrainian citizens. Before the conflict, it used to be the building’s storeroom. 

Bodies lie scattered in a mass grave. Credit: AP

A police officer, who stayed there the entire time during the Russian occupation, told Marchenko requesting anonymity, that the Russian soldiers used brutal and inhumane tactics to punish and torture the Ukrainian men. They were tied to the bars found in school gyms and electric wires were attached to their scrotums, Marchenko quoted the officer as saying. 

“Many of the victims and survivors of human rights abuses perpetrated during the Russian occupation do not know exactly which units were responsible for the abuses committed against them. Victims were often kept blindfolded, held captive in cellars or similar places, or simply never heard their captors identify themselves by name, rank, or unit,” the investigative report by Centre for Information Resilience said.