BUCHA, Ukraine — Ihor Yushenko, 61, a former colonel in the Ukrainian Armed Forces who once served as deputy chief of staff for the ground forces in Donbass in eastern Ukraine, watched in horror as a war crime unfolded right outside his window in broad daylight.
According to Yushchenko, on February 27, a column of Russian troops advancing through the city stopped in his street in central Bucha and opened fire, killing two pedestrians. This column featured Chechen fighters known as Kadyrovtsy, members of various military factions loyal to Chechnya’s local strongman, Ramzan Kadyrov, known as “Putin’s soldier.” Yushenko said he could identify them by their black clothing, use of Islamic slogans and Kadyrov’s name on their body armor.
About an hour later, their column was decimated by the Ukrainian army in another part of the city – but the Kadyrovtsy returned. “Many Chechen soldiers entered this street to kill Ukrainian civilians,” Yushenko told The Daily Beast.
He described how Chechen militants, also dressed in black, fired at least “thirty bullets,” according to Yushchenko, at a car driving down the street, killing its occupants and causing it to stop at the side of the street next to it house in which he lived. The Kadyrovtsy are said to have dragged the two dead bodies out of the car, left them on the side of the road and drove away in their own car.
Yushenko’s mother, Zina Yehorovna, his friend Pavel Kondratyev and his neighbor Bogdan each confirmed these events to The Daily Beast. However, according to Bogdan, the Chechens then beat a civilian who had tried to flee the scene by car and hung him from the hood of the car before sliding onto the street.
“They just shot her.”
“What they did here is simply a war crime,” said Yushchenko, standing next to the bank where the car crashed after the Kadyrovtsy allegedly attacked it. “This is not a war.”
Artem Hurin, a member of the city council of the neighboring city of Irpin who also serves as deputy commander of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces, was one of the first to visit Bucha after the Russians withdrew. There he heard numerous reports from local residents about life in areas such as Yablonska Street, where a group of Kadyrovtsy was stationed, which was to advance to Kyiv.
According to Hurin, Ukrainian civilians weren’t the only people Kadyrovtsy allegedly brutalized in the city. Hurin said residents he spoke to in Borodyanka, northwest of Bucha, told what the Kadyrovtsy did to injured Russian soldiers who brought them there from Bucha. “They took badly wounded Russian soldiers to a big hospital they had there and those who were very badly wounded they just shot,” he told The Daily Beast. “And none other than the Kadyrovtsy did that.”
Locals mourn as a mass grave is exhumed. Local authorities tried to identify the bodies of civilians who died during the Russian occupation in Bucha, Ukraine.
Photo by Wolfgang Schwan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
eyewitnesses have claimed that Kadyrovtsy had already executed people on March 5, and the Mayor of Bucha Anatoliy Fedoruk stated that Chechen units had tied white ribbons around the arms of prisoners similar to those found on the bodies of executed civilians. Hurin said he saw evidence of executions and torture on bodies he found on the street and spoke to a woman who was tortured by a Kadyrovtsy militant and a Belarusian soldier for four days before killing her husband in shot his head.
“They didn’t allow them anything. There they would just kill people through binoculars, for example,” Hurin said, describing what happened to people trying to leave their homes to get food and water. “They just shot her.”
He also confirmed earlier reports of a local base at a glass factory on Yablonska Street reported by Ukraine’s Human Rights Ombudsman Lyudmila Denisova called served as a torture chamber operated by Russians and Chechens.
According to the Kyiv region police, the bodies of about 1,150 civilians have been found across the Kyiv region since the withdrawal of Russian forces in late March and early April. So far over 400 people have been found dead in Bucha alone, most of whom were killed by the city’s Russian occupiers over the course of several weeks in March before their April 1 withdrawal from the city.
Reports like Yushchenko’s, however, show that indiscriminate violence against civilians has been part of the Russian army’s playbook in Bucha almost since the beginning of the war, with Chechnya’s Kadyrovtsy playing a key role in the brutality early on – against local residents and their own comrades alike. Much is still unknown about Chechen activities in Bucha, but new details and testimonies from residents and local authorities allow for a clearer picture of the brutal presence of Chechen forces in the city and their involvement in the weeks-long war crimes against Bucha residents.
Evidence from social media, statements from local residents and materials seized by the Kyiv region police indicate that the Kadyrovtsy regiments in Bucha most likely belonged to the Special Rapid Response Unit (SOBR) and (Special Purpose Mobile Unit) OMON and that these Units along with other Russian troops were probably responsible for a significant part of the massacre that took place there.
According to independent security analyst Harold Chambers, who specializes in the North Caucasus, this type of personal violence by Kadyrovtsy in Bucha comes as no surprise.
“What they’ve experienced in terms of military operations is really these zachistki, these clean sweep operations,” Chambers said, speaking of a brutal style of house-to-house searches and assassinations that Russian forces perfected during the Chechen wars in the 1990s and early 2000s. “It plays into their specialty to attack civilians, and according to the stories we’ve already heard from Bucha, that’s exactly what happened.”
Despite their presence in Bucha in late February, Russian forces were only able to take full control of the city several days later, on or after March 2. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry has identified the 64th Motorized Infantry Brigade as part of the Russian military groups responsible for the massacre that took place in Bucha in March, but evidence suggests they were not the only ones involved.
According to Andriy Halavin, the priest of the Church of the Holy Apostle St. Andrew the First-Called in Bucha, where a mass grave for about 280 people was dug during the Russian occupation, regiments that included SOBR and OMON units began to replace the original ones Occupation troops later in March.
“Although they were, shall we say, strict at the beginning, they were fair. At the very beginning, they just searched my car and told me to just get on with my work and so on,” Halavin said. “But then the others came.”
Andriy Nebytov, the head of the Kyiv Oblast Police Department in charge of Bucha, confirmed that SOBR and OMON units were present in the Kyiv region, citing documents confiscated by his police station showing lists of members of the regiments serving in arrived in the region. Because the information will be used in future criminal cases against Russia, his office could not provide The Daily Beast with the list, but the documents can be seen in a video Nebytov released recently.
On February 27, Ukrainian forces destroyed a large column of vehicles, including Kadyrovtsy, on Voksal’na Street near the Bucha railway station, consistent with Yushenko’s report of the same day. The column had entered the city from Hostomel, just north-east of Bucha, where Hussein Mezhidov, the Chechen commander of the “Jug” battalion of the 141 Video on February 26.
“This situation was the greatest horror of my life.”
According to Chambers, the most likely Chechen unit present in Bucha on February 27 was the SOBR group “Akhmat”. Nonetheless, Chambers noted that the organizational pattern of Kadyrovtsy units around Kyiv made it particularly difficult to identify specific combat groups that had fought on that front.
“The Kadyrovtsky don’t seem to fight as much in separate units, they seem to work more in combined groups,” Chambers said. “They have many commanders that overlap, so it seems less clear how the units actually got separated.”
Militarily and strategically, Kadyrovtsy served multiple purposes in Kyiv Oblast — some groups were designed as assault teams designed to assassinate Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and his family if they made it to Kyiv, but according to Michael Kofman, director of the Russia Studies Program at CNA, the main purpose of these units was a broader one.
“The Chechens have a real purpose. The Russian military needs manpower,” Kofman said. He added that the Kadyrovtsy were to be deployed in the cities, particularly Kyiv, to support Eastern Military District soldiers who were tasked with holding the blockade of the capital and to fight alongside airborne units within the city limits.
“So these Chechen units and these auxiliaries were really important to the urban struggle because a lot of the other units they sent were very understaffed,” he said.
A Ukrainian soldier looks on as workers exhume bodies from a mass grave in Bucha, northwest of Kyiv. Ukraine says it has discovered 1,222 bodies in Bucha and other cities.
AFP via Getty Images
Ultimately, none of this happened, and the Kadyrovtsy, along with other Russian units, were left to their own devices and given carte blanche to spend weeks allegedly abusing and massacring the population of Bucha, as the likes of Yushchenko witnessed firsthand. Yushchenko said all his years of military service paled in comparison to his experiences in the city.
“There you know where the front is, you know where threats can come from,” Yushchenko said of his time fighting in eastern Ukraine. “It was much scarier than the Donbass. From Lieutenant to Platoon Commander to Deputy Chief of Staff, this situation was the greatest horror of my life.”