World News | ''They Took My Big Love'': Ukraine Woman Searches for Answers
Get latest articles and stories on World at LatestLY. Tetiana Boikiv peered from the doorway of the cellar at the Russian soldiers questioning her husband about his phone.
Ozera (Ukraine), Oct 25 (AP) Tetiana Boikiv peered from the doorway of the cellar at the Russian soldiers questioning her husband about his phone.
“Come up,” her husband, Mykola Moroz, called to her. “Don't be afraid.”
Moroz — Kolia to his friends — was trying to explain that the surveillance video they'd found was from his job as an electrician, all taken before the February 24 invasion.
“I am a religious person,” Kolia said. “I haven't hurt anyone.”
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But the two soldiers and their commander weren't listening. They put a bag over his head. Despairing, Boikiv demanded to know what they would do with the man she called her big, big love.
“Shoot him,” one of the soldiers replied. They took him away.
She would never see Kolia again.
While atrocities in the nearby town of Bucha have captured the world's attention and become case number one for Ukraine's prosecutors, the slaughter there was not an aberration.
Rather, it was part of a trail of violence that spread far and wide, often under the radar of prosecutors, to ordinary villages like Zdvyzhivka, a half hour north of Bucha, where Kolia lived.
Much of the violence was systemic, not random, conceived and implemented within the command structures of the Russian military, an investigation by The Associated Press and the PBS series Frontline found.
Troops were instructed to block and destroy vestiges of “nationalist resistance”, according to Russian battle plans obtained by the Royal United Services Institute, a prominent defense and security think tank in London.
They did so with consistent brutality, hunting potential enemies on Russian intelligence lists and torturing and killing volunteer fighters, veterans and civilians suspected of assisting Ukrainian troops.
The AP and Frontline interviewed dozens of witnesses and survivors, and reviewed audio intercepts and surveillance camera footage to document what happened.
These cleansing operations — zachistka, in Russian — took on a sharper edge as the line between civilians and combatants blurred.
Ukraine has made it breathtakingly easy for anyone with a cell phone connection to report the position of Russian troops, and many civilians do. As Russian soldiers fought to suppress what has effectively become a crowdsourced resistance, they've swept up many civilians who have done nothing at all.
Ukrainian prosecutors say they will address every crime committed in this war, but they are scrambling to triage more than 40,000 war crimes investigations.
Right now, their most pressing priorities are cases with promising evidence and high body counts, places like Bucha that gripped the public imagination.
Kolia would die in a garden not far away, possibly at the hands of troops commanded by the same man who led the Bucha operation, but his death has gone largely unnoticed.
That left Boikiv on her own to find her missing husband and struggle to make sense of his death.
Each time a new body turned up in Zdvyzhivka — a bucolic village an hour north of Kyiv that Russians turned into a major forward operating base for their assault on the capitol — Father Vasyl Bentsa's phone would ring.
The village priest had taken it upon himself to document the deaths.
On March 30, as Russian troops withdrew, the bodies of two unknown men, marked by torture, were found in the back garden of one of the biggest, ritziest houses in town.
Bullets had ripped through the red wood fence nearby and casings littered the ground. By the next morning, when Bentsa arrived, three more bodies had appeared in the same spot.
There were no police, no prosecutors, no ballistics experts, no Ukrainian military around to call for help. There were just five men who needed names.
“We did not know at all who to contact,” Bentsa said. “To leave the bodies like that for a long time was stupid. Clearly, we all know physiology — the human will decompose and smell. What would we do with them?”
Father Bentsa put on medical gloves and searched through the pockets of the corpses, looking for identification. He found none.
It didn't seem like the men had been dead very long. A woman from town who helped remove the blindfold from one of the corpses got fresh blood on her hands.
Bentsa snapped photographs and helped haul the bodies to a graveyard at the edge of the forest. He buried them together in a sandy pit, taking care to mark the spot with a rough wooden cross. “March 31, 2022,” he scratched into the wood. “5 unknown men.”
“It's a good thing someone had a pen,” he said.
Under the laws of war, civilians who pose a security threat can be detained, and soldiers could target civilians actively participating in hostilities, international human rights lawyers say. But under no circumstances is it legal to torture and kill civilians or combatants held as prisoners of war.
The degree of crowdsourced intelligence in Ukraine presents new legal questions.
“This really is a novel kind of issue,” said Clint Williamson, a former US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues. “It's not contemplated under international humanitarian law.”
But, he added, the Ukrainian government has every right to mobilise the population.
“It is still the choice of each individual as to whether they participate,” he said.
Russian soldiers were sloppy about deciding who would live and who would die. Perhaps fear or rage clouded their judgment. Perhaps they didn't really care that much.
The day of the funeral, friends from church trickled into the yard and stood around Kolia's coffin. The sky threatened rain.
“We will meet again, Kolia,” Boikiv said, running her work gloves along the top of the casket. “I will give him a hard time for not listening to me, and not leaving when we had a chance. And how much time was I searching for him? How much I've travelled.”
She felt a stab of panic. “I double-checked if it's him or not,” she said in a low voice. “I am calm. I am calm.”
The mourners sang, deep and slow, about coming closer to God, finding a place without sorrow. Under low slate clouds, they walked in a short procession to the cemetery behind the church.
Overhead, majestic storks circled instead of warplanes. As Boikiv went back home, neighbours embraced and sat together in front of their fences. They had survived, so far. They would bury their dead and life, somehow, would begin again.
“Everything is beautiful here. But Kolia is gone,” Boikiv said, looking at a row of tall red tulips her neighbour had planted. Fat, warm drops of spring rain splattered the dirt.
“They took my big love,” she said.
All that's left now is the search for justice. For those who have lost loved ones, it is everything, and it is also nothing.
All across Ukraine, gardens and courtyards and basements were filling up with bodies. It was far from clear whether Kolia's would count. (AP)
(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)