The invading Russian forces carried out mass killings of Ukrainian civilians, as part of a planned extermination of the socially active sphere of Ukrainian society.
The "enthusiasm" with which Russians carried out these purges, is a key consequence of the many years of Russian state propaganda, and their unchanging modus operandi1 in Ukraine (see below).
The consistency and similarity of the manner in which different people were executed in different populated areas, suggests that all of them share the same approach and methodology.
A few patterns can be found among the mass killings of civilians in the Kyiv region:
- the vast majority are military-age males;
- with their hands tied behind their backs and shot in the back of their heads.
Considerations:
- a relatively humane method of execution (the brain is destroyed before any pain is felt by the person),
- the fact that the method is widely used by the NKVD,
- the method is still used in Belarus
there is every reason to believe that relevant literature about this may exist in classified archives of the USSR which are still used by officers of various security forces of the Russian Federation.
In the Russian Federation, a new Government Standard R 42.7.01-2021 about mass burials was adopted in September 2021 and entered into force on February 1st 2022, little more than 3 weeks before the start of the full scale war: National Standards of the Russian Federation. Urgent corpse burial in wartime and peacetime ( Web Archive ).
According to Russian Federation standards, a mass burial pit must have the following dimensions:
- 20m - length along the bottom,
- 3m - wide,
- 2.3m - deep,
- 32m - along the top, to account for a slope required for a bulldozer.
Coordinates: 50.548338967408654, 30.205741390181334
Length - 13.15m, width varies - between 3.2m to 2.4m. Depth can only be established after a full exhumation, as currently the pit is still full of bodies.
Coordinates: 50.5502094, 29.8330253
Length - 10.5 meters, width - 4m, depth - 4m. No bodies in the pit. Information that the purpose of the pit was for the bodies of the local villagers, was via the land owner, provided by the soldiers themselves who were digging the pit.
37 people disappeared in the village during the occupation. As of March 8, 2022, the burial places of 9 killed have been found or are known. Three of them were killed in a characteristic way: hands tied behind his back and a bullet in the back of the head.
Russians have been creating lists of Ukrainians intended for extermination and solitary confinement.
A few days before the invasion, a US Representative to the Office of the United Nations in Geneva wrote a letter to the OHCHR (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights), expressing concern regarding this information.
Mobile crematoriums were intended to avoid burials of activists and Ukrainian public figures, as publicly known burial places eventually turn into "places of pilgrimage" (the modus operandi is similar to the murder of Roman Shukhevych, see below ).
UK Secretary of State for Defence, Ben Wallace, announced Russian troops preparing their mobile crematoria a day before the invasion. This fact has been published, in particular, in The Telegraph (Web Archive). However, Mr. Wallace suggested that Russian army intended to use them to obscure its own losses while the invasion.
The following facts can serve as proof of the thesis that the crematoria were not intended for Russian soldiers:
- in the areas where Russian soldiers actually collected the corpses of their own soldiers, they set up transport routes to move bodies out of Ukraine;
- the use of mobile crematoria for mass burning of bodies is not practical due to the characteristics outlined by the manufacturer ( Web Archive ):
[translated from russian] When used for cremation ritual purposes:
- full cremation time for a single object: approx. 1 hour
- automated ash unloading
- cremation
- an additional dust cleaning system
- 15-16 liters of diesel fuel or 20 m3 of natural gas for single object cremation
The bags were intended for Ukrainian citizens.
If the bags were intended for corpses of Russian servicemen, it would suggest that the Russians, having gathered 200,000 soldiers for the invasion, planned irretrievable losses of 22.5% and total losses (including wounded) of up to 90% of the total number of the group, which is unrealistic 2.
Hence, if the body bags were actually intended for Russian soldiers, the estimated percent of the killed would be 45,000 / 200,000 x 100% = 22.5%. According to the statistics, the number of wounded soldiers is usually 3 times higher than the number of killed ones, which means that the number of wounded Russian soldiers would be 3 х 22.5% = 67.5%. Having that in mind, the total loss rate (both killed and wounded) would be : 22.5% + 67.5% = 90%.
Common sense suggests that starting a war of aggression and expecting personnel losses reaching 90% is simply absurd.
The following public materials contain calls for the forced division/redistribution of the territory of Ukraine, as well as for the killing of Ukrainian citizens.
- Vladimir Putin's article (rus) "About the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians", July 12, 2021 (Web Archive),
- "The Foggy Future of the Obscene World", February 15, 2022 (Web Archive) (rus),
- "Where has the chaos gone? Stability unpacking", November 20, 2021 (Web Archive) (rus),
- "The Russian invasion and the New World", a very interesting case: the article was automatically published on ria.ru 26th February at 8:00 and deleted after a couple of hours, which provides proof that the military and political leadership of the Russian Federation were confident in capturing Kyiv in two days.
- "What Russia must do with Ukraine", 03.04.2022 (Web Archive), (english translation)
- A fragment of M. Khazin's speech at the meeting of the "Russian Horizon" club on December 23, 2016 .
The last 8 years summarise Russians' constant modus operandi towards Ukraine for the whole the last century:
- Creation of "people's republics" on the territory of Ukraine in 1917-1918 ( Web Archive ).
- Mass murders of Kyiv citizens by Muravyov's troops ( Web Archive ), Red Terror ( Web Archive ).
"The crime committed by the Bolsheviks in Kyiv - defendentless victims extermination, not for their deeds, but for who they were – called a genocidal strategy: the aim is to destroy a specific group of people. In this case, there were two groups: "old order" representatives - the aristocracy, officials, military generals and officers - and supporters of the UPR (Ukrainian People's Republic, 1917-1920) - politicians and soldiers. After a thorough analysis of this data we may also distinguish a third group, consisting of young men."
- Murder and destruction of Roman Shukhevych's body ( Web Archive ) (rus)
(From Russian) According to the former KGB officer memoirs, who took part in the Shukhevich capture operation. On March 9, 1950, there was and order to transport the body of General "Taras Chuprynka" – Roman Shukhevich, outside of the western Ukraine, burn the body down and scatter the ashes. It was done on the left bank of the Zbruch River, across the Skala-Podolskaya town."
The Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) Twitted that they had information about planned extrajudicial killings before the invasion:
We knew Putin’s invasion plans included summary executions by his military and intelligence services. The reports of execution-style killings of civilians emerging from liberated areas are horrifying and chilling.
https://twitter.com/ChiefMI6/status/1510629183365517326
Footnotes
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Modus operandi - a Latin phrase, meaning "method of action". In plural it is called modi operandi ("methods of action"). The term is often used in police work when discussing crime and addressing the methods employed by criminals. It is also used in criminal profiling, where it can help in finding clues to the offender's psychology. (wiki) ↩
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Usually, when planning a military operation, a percentage of tolerable irreversible losses (in other words, percentage of troops killed) is set, based on which, needs for evacuation transport, medicine, hospital places and body bags are calculated for the future. Irreversible losses of more than 5% are very rarely planned for, since statistically the rate of wounded is three times more than killed. So in other words, if you plan for example, for 10% killed, then 30% wounded will have to be added to that, which will give you a total of 40% of fighters who will lose their fighting capacity during the operation. ↩