Ukrainian prosecutors are currently investigating more than 135,000 war crimes committed by the Russian army since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Investigating these atrocities while the war is ongoing forces the Ukrainian prosecutors to work under shelling, at times becoming victims of Russian aggression themselves. In February 2024, one of Kharkiv’s regional prosecutors was killed by a Russian missile attack together with her husband and their three small children.
Ukrainian journalist Svitlana Oslavska documents war crimes testimonies for The Reckoning Project, which comprises a team of Ukrainian and international journalists and legal experts established in 2022 to record, collect, and conserve witness testimonies of Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine. She spent a day with one of the local war crimes prosecutors who investigates the Russian army’s misdeeds in the south of Ukraine.
One woman among the bombardments
In the city of Mykolaiv in July of 2022, Viktoriia Shapovalova drove to work as usual, parked, got out of the car, and immediately realized there was complete silence all around her. It is said that you don’t hear anything when you are in the epicenter of an air strike. And that was exactly what was happening. A missile hit a building some 150 meters away from her. The houses that stood between Shapovalova and the explosion attack saved her life. Remembering the feeling she had when a shell exploded nearby, she said it is “like your soul is being turned inside out”.
Shapovalova witnessed most of the bombardments and missile attacks on Mykolaiv, a city that, before 2022, had a population of 470,000. She was there during the hardest days the city experienced during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In the spring of 2022, the Russian army struggled to capture Mykolaiv, a regional capital located between Odesa and Kherson. Failing to seize the city, it started attacking its residential quarters with artillery and missiles.
There was a period when artillery shelling occurred every two or three hours. Residents who stayed in the city adapted to this routine. Shapovalova spent nights in a shelter; a basement of a nine-storey block, with her teenage daughter. But life had to go on, so after the morning shelling attacks–which usually happened around six or seven in the morning– she prepared breakfast, walked her dog, and hurried to work. She knew there would be two or three quiet hours before the next shelling and, during that time, she could work.
In the spring of 2022, at age 37, Shapovalova was appointed chief of the war crimes department at the Mykolaiv regional prosecutor’s office. Before that, as was the case with most of the Ukrainian prosecutors, her work was not connected with war issues. After her appointment, she, like thousands of her colleagues, had to re-train as a war crimes investigator, diving into the topic of international humanitarian law. As part of the war crimes prosecutors training, Shapovalova had a chance to visit the Hague and the International Criminal Court.
During the first two years of the full-scale invasion, Russia conducted more than 2,500 civilian infrastructure attacks in the city of Mykolaiv and the surrounding region, according to The Tribunal for Putin initiative. After an attack, the prosecutors team, together with the war crimes investigators from the Ukrainian security service and the police, as well as the emergency services, all go to the site to document what happened. The attacks often take place at night, which means Shapovalova would often work without sleep for the 24 hours after an attack. She must stay at the site of an attack until the last body is taken from under the rubble.
Shelling of residential neighborhoods and other civilian infrastructure of Mykolaiv comprises about 70% of the 2,500 war crimes Shapovalova and her team is now investigating in the region. She says her experience of living in the city during all the attacks helps in her job: “I was there, I remember a lot.” But nearly every week, she spends at least one or two full working days out of her office, in the field.
Witnesses are both eager and afraid to talk
The east and south of the Mykolaiv region were occupied in the spring of 2022 and liberated after eight months, in November of the same year, together with the right bank of the Dnipro and the city of Kherson. Since then, Shapovalova’s team of 10 war crimes prosecutors investigates atrocities in the once-occupied towns and villages.
On the day I joined Shapovalova and her two colleagues, they met at an agreed-upon spot at 9am and headed to the north of Mykolaiv, to a small village that was occupied during the first half of March in 2022. The plan is to collect and document as many witness statements as possible. A team of lawyers from the not-for-profit Global Rights Compliance accompanies the prosecutors on this trip. GRC is specialized in international humanitarian law, and Ukrainian prosecutors need support to deal with thousands of war crimes cases. The lawyers are present during the interviews with witnesses, they read interrogation protocols, and advise Shapovalova’s team of war crimes prosecutors where exactly violations of international humanitarian law lie and what evidence has to be collected. In Shapovalova’s words: “They help us with the quality of justice.”
In the front seat of the car, Shapovalova makes several calls to invite colleagues to a training session about OSINT investigations. “Good morning, how are you doing?” she starts every conversation with these simple words. In the context of possible night attacks, the question and the answers become meaningful.
The cars turn from the motorway onto a dirt road. A herd of sheep with a shepherd crosses the road. We drive slowly between empty fields. “We’re going to meet the village’s head first. He and his family were abducted by the Russians.” Shapovalova explains the plan for the day, adding that such field trips are often unpredictable.
And she is not wrong. The car suddenly stops having come upon an impassable stretch of road. The driver must walk around to find a detour. It’s a cloudy day, several degrees above zero, and we see no other cars on this village road. Finally, the driver finds a bypass across a forest strip nearby, but before we go, he has to uproot several small trees.
But we are fortunate. Such an off-road maneuver wouldn’t have been possible in the southeast of the region, which was under occupation for eight months and where Russians left mines all over the fields. In the first weeks after liberation, the war crimes prosecutors started visiting towns and villages. “We called the mine clearance service, asked them to clear, for instance, a police building,” Shapovalova explained. “And after that, we went there to collect evidence.” Humanitarian mine clearance teams are working every day, but still, many fields and forests are surrounded by red signs that read “Stop! Mines.”
The village head is a thin man of around 50. The skin on his face suggests he works a lot in the open air. Shapovalova starts with some informal questions about realities under the Russian occupation. She already knows that this man had been abducted by the Russians and beaten, but he did not report this incident to the police after the village was liberated.
“What for? We’re alive, and that’s enough,” he replies to Shapovalova’s argument that this was a violation of laws and customs of war. “Are you going to investigate this?” the man goes on in a skeptical tone. “That’s why we’ve come here.” Shapovalova is patient. She understands the man needs more time to trust her. She is also aware many people don’t want to discuss publicly what happened to them because they are afraid Russia may occupy the region again.
Thus, Shapovalova changes the topic to the situation in the village in general. Several houses were destroyed by shelling, their owners have no ownership documents on those buildings, and that’s why they have trouble getting aid to rebuild them. Shapovalova promises she will look into it and see how she can help.
Finally she comes back to the reason for our visit. “We have to document these crimes even if you don’t believe we will investigate them,” she says. The village head goes outside to smoke a cigarette, when he returns he agrees to give a formal interview. One of the prosecutors stays to record his testimony on video, and Shapovalova goes on to meet the next witness–a woman whose son was shot by the Russian soldiers.
The woman starts talking almost as soon as we step over the threshold. “They came to the house, tied him up, took him away, and abused him for two days. Then they took him to a forest, tied his hands with a wire, and shot him. He survived and crawled to a nearby village.” Her words show that she shares the confidence of many Ukrainians who lived through the occupation: that the perpetrators must be identified and punished. “Of course, I’ll testify. Why not when this happened?”
The array of Russia’s war crimes
What happened to the village head and the woman’s son is not unique but common during the Russian occupation.
According to international humanitarian law civilians are under the protection of the occupying force. But while talking to the people from the occupied territories, Shapovalova routinely recorded incidents of abductions, arbitrary detentions, and tortures.
In one village, a local man was killed and his wife was abducted. A bag was thrown over her face, and she was brought to a trench where soldiers harassed and taunted her, at some point even pouring liquid on the 50 year old woman saying: “We’ll burn you and we will be looking at how Ukrop’s mother is burning.” Ukrop is a derogatory term for Ukrainians and the soldiers used it to refer to her son who fought in the Ukrainian army. She spent five days in detention. During the first days, interrogations took place every hour. The same questions were repeated again and again, asking her about things she had shared on her social media pages and about her son. And then, as suddenly as she was detained, she was released. No one provided any reason for her detention.
In another village of the region, a local mayor was abducted when he was trying to deliver 300 loaves of bread to people in the village. He was tortured with electric jolts and beaten. He spent three months of unlawful detention in several detention centers.
And in another village, the Russians murdered an elderly local school teacher. Soldiers took him from his house. The teacher’s wife looked for him everywhere in the village and nearby, riding a bicycle from one building where the Russian military were stationed to another. Finally, his mutilated body was found. It lay covered with a mattress in a shallow pit near one of the buildings known to the villagers as occupiers’ headquarters.
These are just some accounts recorded by The Reckoning Project team in the Mykolaiv region. Its researchers documented hundreds of similar cases in various parts of Ukraine that were under Russian occupation. Male and female village heads, volunteers and activists, former soldiers, or anyone who owned a weapons even just for hunting were often the first victims of arbitrary detentions, torture, and murder.
“The occupying Russian forces neglected their obligations to safeguard the Ukrainian populace. Instead, they viewed Ukrainians under occupation solely through a security lens,” says Raji Abdul Salam, The Reckoning Project’s chief legal data archivist. They categorized, he explains further, civil and humanitarian actions, such as the right to access information, freedom of movement, and adequate housing, as potential security threats. This approach of prioritizing security-based measures over humanitarian considerations deprived Ukrainians of their fundamental human rights and exacerbated the suffering caused by the conflict.
Justice is slow, and the prosecutors must work fast
To determine who was responsible for any given bombardment isn’t easy as it’s necessary to prove who gave an order. Investigating tortures and arbitrary detentions is difficult for another reason: survivors often don’t know a lot about the identity of their abductors and torturers.
In most of the incidents documented by the researchers of The Reckoning Project, the Russian soldiers tried to conceal who they were: they did not provide their names, wore no insignia, and covered their faces with masks. They tied blindfolds around the eyes of their captives or put bags on their heads so that people would not be able to recognise who was torturing them.
“The soldiers deliberately obscure their identities to evade accountability for their actions, including looting, extrajudicial killings, and unlawful detentions”, says Abdul Salam, adding that in over 90% of testimonies the researchers of The Reckoning Project collected state that the Russian soldiers were hiding their identity.
“This underscores the complicity of the Russian military leadership, as their failure to take disciplinary measures on the ground condoned and facilitated these grave breaches of international law,” Salam explained. “The consequence of this unchecked misconduct was a relentless onslaught on the Ukrainian populace, inflicting untold suffering and trauma.”
On our way back, Shapovalova reflects on the mistrust many people have on perspectives of justice and punishment for Russian war criminals: “I understand this. Justice is a long process, and the victims want it right now. But the main task for the prosecutors is to collect the highest quality evidence.”
It’s almost 6pm when we come back to her office. Shapovalova is planning to stay at work for several more hours. She says 10 minutes of rest was enough to continue with a lot of paperwork after a day in the field.
There is a large map of Mykolaiv on the wall of her office, with a small piece of paper pinned to it. A date is printed on it, “October 13th, 2022”. On this day, Russia allegedly attacked Mykolaiv with S-300 missiles that hit a residential block. Seven people died in that attack, one of them a child. The attack happened at night, when people were in their beds. When I Google this incident, I find images of a five-storey residential building. Its destroyed upper middle part looks like it was bitten away by some monster.
This case is already in the courts. The investigators found a man, a resident of Mykolaiv, who passed information about this civilian building with no military objects nearby to the Russians. Besides this there are several other incidents of war crimes Shapovalova’s department has now passed to the court. They are about the inhuman treatment of civilians: imitation of shooting to death, and about the organizers of a detention center in one village of the region, where people were kept for several days in horrible conditions. The trials are ongoing.
According to Shapovalova, those incidents have enough evidence for prosecutors to charge the Russian combatants with committing war crimes. Investigations of all the crimes, Shapovalova explains, will take years. This understanding, she continues, along with the fact that tomorrow may simply not come, motivates her to accelerate her work.
Besides that, she adds, important online evidence, like Russian channels on Telegram, are deleted since they understand those posts and videos could one day also be used as evidence.
Most of the trials for Russian war criminals in Ukraine are now conducted in absentia. The victims may not be satisfied with this result, but the prosecutor explains that it is not only important a particular soldier would be punished. “By proving a particular crime, we prove the guilt of the main perpetrator. For proving his guilt at the Tribunal, not only our verdicts would be taken into account, but also our evidence base,” says Shapovalova.
The day after I left Mykolaiv I read the news about another Russian attack on the city and in the region. I go to the page of the Mykolaiv regional prosecutor and see the photos of war crimes prosecutors working on the site of the attack, Shapovalova among them.
