Day-to-day war crimes
With each attack on civilians and their homes, Russia commits another atrocity
The destroyed apartment building in Kharkiv, Ukraine, where Zoe Smelnytska lived with her son, Egor. (c. Martin Kuz)
Bits of concrete and broken glass crunched under the boots of Zoe Smelnytska as she climbed a darkened stairwell to her gutted dream home. She and her son, Egor, had moved into the 10th-floor apartment in the eastern city of Kharkiv in late 2021. The unit cost the equivalent of $46,000, money she had earned the previous two years working in a fish processing plant in Alaska.
Three months later, Russian missiles and artillery began atomizing Kharkiv, forcing mother and son to flee to the country’s west. The pair stayed until the end of 2022, when they returned to a city and home hollowed out by war.
Their building was one of more than 4,000 damaged or destroyed in Kharkiv in the war’s first months. Fires had ripped through the high-rise, and in the emptiness of her scorched apartment, Zoe saw a barren future.
“There were plans — ambitions — for both of us,” she told me. At 42, she hoped to open a consulting business; Egor, a 22-year-old biology major, intended to study abroad in Canada. “Now there’s nothing — like in our home.”
The windows that once offered expansive views of Ukraine’s second-largest city were boarded up. The plywood panels blocked the day’s gray light without obscuring the sense of gloom. “You could see the world from here,” she said. “It’s all gone.”
Zoe Smelnytska and her son, Egor, stand outside their gutted apartment building in Kharkiv, Ukraine. (c. Martin Kuz)
I had met Zoe a couple of days earlier at the headquarters of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, the organization — founded in 1992 and one of the oldest of its kind in Ukraine — has gathered testimony and evidence for referral to prosecutors investigating war crimes. The list ranges from summary executions, torture and sexual violence to intentional destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure.
The nonprofit’s office — two small rooms with blank walls and a few desks — serves as a repository for dark memories. Men and women travel from across the Kharkiv region to share their stories of trauma and anguish with the group’s attorneys, desperate to reclaim a small piece of something lost inside. “You feel helpless,” Zoe said. “You just want to talk to somebody.”
When I visited the office a little over a year ago, Mykhailo Romanov, a lawyer and an expert on genocide, explained the team’s dual motivation to record the details of every civilian killed, every home burned. “We want to find the truth and for the perpetrators to be punished,” he said. “But just as important, we want to find the truth so that everyone — Ukrainians, Russians, the world — will always remember.”
Ukrainian officials had documented almost 109,000 potential war crimes committed by Russian troops through last September. More than 10,000 occurred in the Kharkiv region, including the killing of nearly 450 civilians in Izium, where Ukrainian soldiers found a mass burial site after liberating the city in fall 2022.
Russia’s relentless bombing of civilians seeks to terrorize Ukrainians into leaving their homeland. The day-to-day news reports about such attacks note the number of people killed and buildings destroyed. None mention that, under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, each strike qualifies as a war crime.
Left: Mykhailo Romanov, a lawyer who works with the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. Right: An apartment building damaged in a missile strike in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Feb. 5, 2023. (c. Martin Kuz)
Mykhailo and his fellow human rights attorneys collect narratives that give human shape to the statistics, ensuring that history can never forget. “The story of war is more than numbers,” he said. “It is the story of what happened to each person, what they have suffered.”
An industrial and university town, Kharkiv lies less than 20 miles from Russia. Heavy shelling early in the invasion triggered an exodus of 1 million of the city’s residents. By the end of last year, the population had rebounded close to its pre-war level of 1.5 million even as sporadic missile, drone and artillery strikes provided unsettling reminders of the enemy’s proximity.
The attacks have increased since January, with dozens more residents killed, numerous apartment blocks leveled and the power grid knocked out for prolonged stretches. The intensified bombing has provoked concerns that Russia will launch another attempt to seize Kharkiv as Ukraine’s military struggles with shortages of troops, weapons and ammunition.
Two-plus years of headlines about Russian attacks — Russian war crimes — have caused most Westerners to turn numb. One ruined building resembles the next. As Ukrainians continue to suffer, Mykhailo and his colleagues offer comfort through their quiet work of listening. They counter unending atrocities with unreserved humanity.
“We want to understand what Russian aggression has done to us because we hope we can prevent this from happening again in the future,” he said. “So we will keep going — day by day, week by week.”
Etc.
— The ongoing resistance of far-right Republicans in Congress to a Senate funding measure that would provide $60 billion in military aid to Ukraine has pushed the country’s forces to a perilous point. Even if the bill or a variation of it moves forward soon, Ukrainian commanders could be forced to weigh a managed retreat in one or more regions.
— Ukrainians have proved remarkably resourceful throughout the war. Here’s another example: A soldier who helps his ammunition-starved comrades by wading into swamps and navigating minefields to recover unused munitions abandoned by retreating Russian forces. (If you can’t access the story with that link, try here.)
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What’s the point of the Geneva Conventions if they are just ignored in Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere and there are no consequences for these atrocities?