Proof of a war crime

A hard-to-watch video from Ukraine.

I took this in a graveyard of civilian cars riddled with bullet holes near Irpin and Bucha.

I never start my stories with a trigger warning. If you read my journalism, you know that any and all of it can get pretty heavy, so I’d like to think that there is a virtual trigger warning on everything I write. But I needed, and received, a kind of caution for this video that my fixer, Dima, just sent me. 

“The video is chilling,” he warned. This came from a guy from Kyiv who has worked with journalists as a witness to some of the most horrific fallout of this surreal war, so I knew it had to be bad. Very bad.

Even so, I still wasn’t ready for the tightening in my chest and sickly gasps I made while watching. Dima sent this because it had happened in Hostomel, the location of the Antonov Airport, where the Russians had landed hundreds of vehicles in February in their attempt to take Kyiv. Hostomel (also spelled “Gostomel”) is a suburb northwest of Kyiv, and just minutes from towns like Bucha, Irpin and Vorzel, the village where  I spoke to the saddest woman I have ever met.

Natalya Liulchuk, 42, and her three children and her husband, Oleg, 47, had finally decided to flee Vorzel on March 3. Their three sons, Andriy, 15, Misha, 13, and Nicholai, 3, were in the back seat.

“We headed by car to the Zhytomyr highway,” she said, “but had to wait because there was a fight up ahead and we heard that the Russians were shooting at cars.” She and her husband decided to turn back toward home.

The graveyard of shot-up cars.

“We were just trying to escape,” she said, “but they just shot all the cars. My husband was shot. And my children. They just were dead at once.” Both the oldest and the littlest were killed.

This video, from the National Police of Ukraine, shows Russian soldiers targeting and shooting directly at civilian cars. Dima thought that perhaps this would coincide with the Liulchucks’ story. But it turns out to have been filmed on Feb. 25, he discovered, so it was just yet another horrific attack on civilians.

At the end, you’ll see photos of five soldiers. Dima told me that the video says: “The State Security Service of Ukraine has identified the soldiers of the Russian National Guard who shot the cars of civilians attempting to evacuate from Hostomel.”

So while this particular nightmare happened a week or so before Natalya and Oleg left Vorzel, it is pure proof that the Russians, yes, were aiming and shooting at civilians in cars in that area — pure proof that this is yet another unthinkable war crime the Russian military has perpetrated upon the citizens of Ukraine.