‘Such Bad Guys Will Come’: How One Russian Brigade Terrorized Bucha

[(David P.)]

‘Such Bad Guys Will Come’: How One Russian Brigade Terrorized Bucha
By Carlotta Gall, May 22, 2022, NY Times

Based in Russia’s far east, near the border with China, the
64th Brigade belongs to the Eastern Military District, long
seen as the part of the Russian Army with the lowest levels
of training and equipment. The brigade has ethnic Russian
commanders but consists largely of soldiers drawn from minority
ethnic groups and disadvantaged communities, according to
Col. Mykola Krasny, the head of public affairs of Ukrainian
military intelligence. In radio conversations that were
intercepted by Ukrainian forces, some of the Russians expressed
surprise that village roads in outlying areas of Kyiv were
paved with asphalt, he said. “We see it as a deliberate policy
to draft soldiers from depressed regions of Russia,”
Colonel Krasny said.

Not a lot is known about the brigade, but Colonel Krasny
claimed that it was notable for its lack of morality, for
beatings of soldiers and for thieving. Drawn from a regiment
that had served in Chechnya, the brigade was established on
Jan. 1, 2009, shortly after Russia’s war in Georgia, Colonel
Krasny said. The goal was clear, he added: to build up a
fearsome army unit that could instill control. “The consequences
of these politics was what happened in Bucha,” he said. “Having
no discipline, and these aggressive habits, it looks like it
was created to scare the population.”

He claimed that the Russian soldiers’ disadvantaged backgrounds,
and the fact that they could act with impunity, prompted them
“to do unspeakable things.” It was not only the enemy who
suffered their brutality. The Russian Army has long had a
reputation for hazing its own soldiers, and on a cellphone
left behind in Bucha by a member of the 64th, investigators
found recent evidence of the practice: a video in which an
officer is talking to a subordinate and then suddenly punches
him in the side of the head while other soldiers stand around
talking. The Russian government did not respond to a request
for comment on the accusations against the 64th Brigade but
has repeatedly claimed that allegations of its forces having
committed atrocities in Bucha and elsewhere are false.

Western analysts who have studied the Russian Army said that
the behavior of troops in Bucha was not a surprise. “It is
consistent with the way they consider responding,” said Nick
Reynolds, a researcher of land warfare at the Royal United
Services Institute, a military research organization in London.
“Reprisals are part and parcel of how the Russian military does
business.”

The ‘Bad Guys’ Will Come
----------------------
Killings occurred in Bucha from the first days that Russian
troops appeared. The first units were airborne assault troops,
paratroopers and special forces who fired on cars and civilians
in the streets and detained men suspected of being in the
Ukrainian Army or territorial defense. The extent of the
killings, and the seeming lack of hesitation among Russian
soldiers to carry them out, has led Ukrainian officials to
surmise that they were acting under orders. “They couldn’t
not know,” Bucha’s prosecutor, Mr. Kravchenko, said of senior
military commanders. “I think the terror was planned.”

Many of the documented killings occurred on Yablunska Street,
where bodies lay for weeks, visible on satellite images. But
not far away, on a corner of Ivana Franka Street, a particular
form of hell played out after March 12. Residents had already
been warned that things would get worse. A pensioner, Mykola,
67, said that the Russian troops who first came to the neighbor-
hood had advised him to leave while he could. “‘After us, such
bad guys will come,’” the commander told him, he recalled.
“I think they had radio contact and they knew who was coming,
and they had their own opinion of them.” Mykola left Bucha
before the 64th Brigade arrived.

The spring flowers are pushing up everywhere in Bucha, fruit
trees are in blossom, and city workers have swept the streets
and filled in some of the bomb craters. But at the end of Ivana
Franka Street, amid smashed cars and destroyed homes, there is
an eerie desolation. “From this house to the end, no one is
left alive,” said Ms. Havryliuk, 65. “Eleven people were killed
here. Only we stayed alive.” Her son and son-in-law had stayed
behind to look after the house and the dogs, and were killed on
March 12 or 13, when the 64th Brigade first arrived, she said.
The death certificates said that they had been shot in the head.

What happened over the next two weeks is hard to fathom. The
few residents who stayed were confined to their homes and only
occasionally dared to go out to fetch water from a well. Some of
them saw people being detained by the Russians. Nadezhda
Cherednychenko, 50, pleaded with the soldiers to let her son go.
He was being held in the yard of a house and his arm had been
injured when she last saw him. She found him dead in the cellar
of the same house three weeks later, after the Russians withdrew.
“They should be punished,” she said of his captors. “They brought
so much pain to people. Mothers without children, fathers,
children without parents. It’s something you cannot forgive.”

Neighbors who lived next door to the Havryliuks just disappeared.
Volodymyr and Tetiana Shypilo, a teacher, and their son Andriy, 39,
lived in one part of the house, and Oleh Yarmolenko, 47, lived alone
in the other side. “They were all our relatives,” Ms. Havryliuk said.
Down a side alley lived Lidiya Sydorenko, 62, and her husband Serhiy,
65. Their daughter, Tetiana Naumova, said that she spoke to them by
telephone midmorning on March 22. “Mother was crying the whole time,”
Ms. Naumova said. “She was usually an optimist, but I think she had a
bad feeling.” Minutes later, Russian soldiers came in and demanded
to search their garage. They told a neighbor to leave, shooting at
the ground by her feet. “By lunchtime they had killed them,”
Ms. Naumova said.

She returned to the house with her husband, Vitaliy, and her son
Anton last month after the Russian troops withdrew from Kyiv. Her
parents were nowhere to be found, but they found ominous traces —
her father’s hat with bullet holes in it, three pools of blood and
a piece of her mother’s scalp and hair. There was also no sign of
the Shypilos or of Mr. Yarmolenko, except trails of blood where
bodies had been dragged along the floor of their house. Eventually,
French forensic investigators solved the mystery. They examined
six charred bodies found in an empty lot up the street and confirmed
that they were the missing civilians: the Sydorenkos, the 3 Shypilos
and Mr. Yarmolenko. Several bore bullet wounds but three of them had
had limbs severed, including Ms. Naumova’s mother, the investigators
told the families. Her father had multiple gunshot wounds to the
head and chest, her mother had had an arm and a leg cut off, she said.
“They tortured them,” Ms. Havryliuk said, “and burned them to
cover their tracks.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/22/world/europe/ukraine-bucha-war-crimes-russia.html