KUPIANSK-VUZLOVYI, Ukraine — A pink children’s hat lay on the gravel beside the metal chassis of an incinerated minibus and the frames of five burnt cars.
Twenty-six Ukrainians died on this backroad southeast of Kharkiv city when a convoy of civilian vehicles was targeted on Sept. 25. Nine of the passengers were children.
Andrii Checheniv said he arrived an hour after the attack and saw their bodies, some of them decapitated.
Russia’s notorious state-controlled press was quick to blame Ukraine‘s forces. But a Ukrainian war crimes investigation has determined the shooting came from a Russian-controlled area.
Shell fragments found at the scene were also the same type used by heavy guns mounted on Russian armoured vehicles, said Oleksandr Filchakov, the prosecutor for the Kharkiv region.
Abandoned vehicles shelled by Russian forces on sept. 25, 20200,.
Anna Vlasenko/Global News
Seven of them made it home. One was too badly wounded. The others tried to bandage him, so he wouldn’t bleed out. But he couldn’t walk, and they had to leave him behind.
“Sorry,” said Tamara Halishnikova, Liudmyla’s mother.
When he came across the scene at 10 a.m., Checheniv said he found children crawling over bodies inside the minibus. In the cars, he saw one man still alive. Otherwise, there were only corpses.
He said the minibus was not burned at that time, meaning it was set aflame later, possibly in an attempt by Russian forces to hide the evidence of their crime.
Checheniv said he loaded the kids into his car and drove to the hospital in Svatove. There was one-year-old Mykhailyk, his stepsister Maryna, 12, and Polina, five years old.
He also took two adult women, but he didn’t have room for all the wounded.
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With help of the Red Cross and the prosecutor’s team, most of the surviving children have since been reunited with family members. Maryna has not yet returned home. She was transported to Moscow for surgery and remains in the Russian capital.
At least two children were taken to the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic, said Ihor Chub, head of the Department of the Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office, referring to the pro-Russian enclave in east Ukraine.
“Law enforcement officers are currently working on ways to return these children to Ukraine,” he said.
The father of one of them, Denys Derevianko, said he heard about the fate of his 10-year-old son, Pavlo, through the Russian media, which reported its state-friendly version of the attack from the hospital.
“I recognized him, and he said that they were travelling, trying to leave through Russia. It was territory controlled by Russia, through Russia to the Czech Republic, where my wife’s aunt is,” the father said.
