At the edge of a remote road in Ukraine’s northern Chernihiv region, Mykola shows the unmarked grave where he and his two brothers were buried three and a half weeks after war began in land confiscated by Russian forces. All three had been shot; he was the only one who survived.
“It’s like a resurrection,” Mykola, 33, told CNN.
By March 18, the life of the Kulichenko family had changed little, although the Russians had occupied their village of Dovzhyk since the beginning of the war. When a Russian column was then bombed, Russian soldiers swarmed out and looked for those responsible. They reached the wooden plank house where Mykola lived with his two brothers Yevhen and Dmytro along with their sister Iryna – who still hasn’t forgiven herself for not being at home that day.
Three soldiers told the brothers to kneel in the front yard while they searched the house for anything that might link them to the bombed convoy, Mykola said. According to Mykola, the soldiers were convinced they had something to hide after finding her grandfather’s military medals and a military bag of 30-year-old Yevhen, who had been a paratrooper.
Mykola, Yevhen and Dmytro were driven to a basement where they were interrogated for three days, he said. Mykola still hoped the Russians would release them, but by day four, he said, their mood changed.
“They hit me all over my body with a metal rod and put the barrel of a gun in my mouth,” he said.
Along with his brothers, Mykola was tortured until he lost consciousness. He says they were blindfolded, hands and legs tied with tape, and driven in a military vehicle to a desolate piece of land by five Russian soldiers. They were made to kneel blindfolded while a pit was dug, Mykola said.
First he heard a shot behind him and 36-year-old Dmytro, the eldest of the three, fell to the ground. Next he felt Yevhen, the youngest, fall down at his side.
“I thought I was next,” he said. But the bullet entered Mykola’s cheek and exited near his right ear. He knew his only chance of survival was to play dead.
The soldiers pushed the brothers’ bodies into the pit, covered them with earth and disappeared, according to Mykola. He can’t say how long he was buried alive, only that with his hands and legs still bound, he somehow managed to maneuver himself out from under his older brother’s body and back into the land of the living.
“It was hard for me to breathe with Dima (Dmytro) lying on top of me, but using my arms and knees I was able to push my older brother to the side of the pit and then I climbed out. ”
In the dark he staggered through fields to the next house, where a woman took him in and looked after him overnight before he could return to his sister, who had been waiting anxiously at his father’s for days.
“I came home and there was Mykola. I looked him in the eye and asked where the others are? He said there aren’t any others,” Iryna recalls, sobbing.
Mykola says it’s a miracle he survived. Scars on his cheek and behind his ear are still visible today.
“I got lucky … and now I just have to get on with my life,” he said. “This story needs to be heard by everyone, not just in Ukraine but around the world because things like this happen and it’s only one in a billion.”
The public prosecutor of the Chernihiv region has now launched an investigation into war crimes. Investigators confirmed to CNN that the brothers’ hands and legs were tied and they were blindfolded. According to local authorities, more than 11,600 suspected war crimes have been registered across Ukraine so far. CNN also reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry, but received no response.
As with so many other alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces, the story of Mykola and his brothers could not be told until the Russian withdrawal from the Chernihiv region began in early April.
Only then was Mykola able to search for the pit from which, against all odds, he had escaped with his life. He knew he had to find his brothers to give them the proper burial they deserved.
On April 21, exactly a month to the day after Mykola said his brothers had been executed, Dmytro and Yevhen were finally buried under ornate headstones in a neat grave, on land that was back in Ukrainian hands.