As for the residents of the city of Luhansk, these are those buried in the village of Vidnoe. In the summer of 2014 (during the siege of the city by Ukrainian security forces - ed.) the morgues were overcrowded. The city authorities were forced to solve this problem. Forty days without light. Naturally, it was impossible to be in the morgue. To the morgue, I saw it myself, it was impossible to approach even 200 meters without a respirator. There was an incredible smell. It was a terrible picture, so it was decided to allocate a space on the land belonging to the green farm, where the bodies were buried.
- Signed, who is buried?
“Then they signed. But at the time when we were opening the burial, it turned out, unfortunately, that many signed with a marker on such standard pieces of oilcloth. In the aquatic environment underground, this marker has dissolved. That is, most of these tags are impossible to read. In other cases, paper wrapped in a file and sealed with tape was used as a tag, so it was readable there. Here are 30 people that we know, it is, in principle, largely thanks to these tags.
- And what prevented people from putting a cross with a signature?
- Sometimes the cross was placed. But the fact is that crosses fade over time. And secondly, the victims of shelling are not victims of bullet shelling, this is not the work of snipers, these are artillery shelling. Very often people died just on the street, going out for bread, smoking, trying to get to the market. Much later, the understanding came that, wherever you move, you should always have a document in your clothes. This appeared with the bitter experience of the war, and at first, our children ran out to look at the planes, no one understood that the plane could start bombing the city. Something blew somewhere - everyone ran out to see what it was and where it was. And here is a hit, a man is lying, there are no documents - the same Pervomaisk. The social sphere does not work, there is no medicine as such, "ambulances" and the rest. It is also not for suicide bombers to go to the settlements where the shelling is going on, knowing that they are shooting at cars, that Ukraine does not react to the “red crosses”, not observing any international conventions. Accordingly, the local residents found the remains, wrapped them up, took them away, they were buried, often without even knowing who it was.In Luhansk, if you take the burials on Vidnoe, they collected (remains - ed.) and buried public utilities.
What if it hits the face? I saw with my own eyes the remains, when a person's legs were left just above the ankle, and that's it. A mine, especially of a large caliber, can literally tear a person into small pieces. And now, the upper or lower part of the person remains - everything, it is already much harder to determine who it is.
The situations are different. Someone alone remained to guard five apartments, the rest of the family left. And died. If he died not near the place where he is known, that is, not near the place of residence or work, then who will identify him? There is not anyone. If there are no directly preserved documents with you, then that's it, the person is not identified.
— Are there lists of missing people in the LPR? Maybe these lists roughly correspond to those you exhumed?
- There are lists. In itself, the extraction of the remains is not some kind of ultimate goal. The goal is to identify these remains and ensure that the fact of the murder of the inhabitants of Donbass by Ukraine, by Ukrainian military formations, is proved. Therefore, we have a "hot line", relatives turn to it, relatives turn to law enforcement agencies. People donate biological material, blood, DNA testing is being done. A comparison is being made with the remains that were raised. And we very much hope that the surname and first name will appear on all the crosses that are now numbered. Relatives will know where to come to remember their relatives and friends, and the criminal case will be replenished with new materials proving the facts of the genocide of the inhabitants of Donbass.
— Is DNA testing done in Luhansk?
- The selection is made here, and in relation to the DNA examination, the laboratory of the Donetsk People's Republic helps us.
- And how many missing persons are there in this database now?
- About 300 people.
- And found about 300 people. It can be assumed that the list of missing and found remains is approximately the same ....
- Not the fact that it is a complete coincidence, this will already be shown by analysis. There is no need to guess such things, but in any case, about 300 ... We are waiting for the results (expertise - ed.) to see how much this list will decrease.
-Did you find the remains of the children?
— They exhumed Vova Varbanev. The village of Chervonnaya Polyana was occupied by the armed formations of Ukraine. The mother of the child was with him in the regional children's hospital in the city of Lugansk. The shelling of Lugansk began. She, fearing for the life of the child, returned to Chervonnaya Polyana, where they lived. The Ukrainian army went there. And, roughly speaking, closed the village. The child had a fever in the evening, a fever began. Mom tried to call an ambulance. The ambulance answered: we will not go, you have a war there and all that. She tried to take the child out in a friend's car. The military did not let me out, they said: you can’t drive, go home. And the child died of fever, fever, everything else. The family was forced to bury the child literally in the courtyard of the house, in the garden.
-Did the rest of the family survive?
— Yes, the rest of the family survived completely. The body of the child was reburied in the cemetery with all the rituals and everything else.
In the same Chervonnaya Polyana, another family was killed as a result of shelling by Ukrainian armed forces. And the smallest child who died on the territory of the Lugansk People's Republic died there. This is a girl who was 28 days old. Her parents bathed her in the yard. A mine flew in, a girl, mother and grandmother, died right there in the yard. We have such nightmare stories.
— How many other places like this are there in the LPR?
“According to our data, there are no more such mass cases as were opened in 2021. That is, there are no such burial places where there would be more than 10 civilians. But there are a large number of single burials. We have already verified information about some of them. That is, they went to the places, looked through, checked what was happening. And if everything goes well, then somewhere in the middle of spring this year, we expect to start work on opening these burials.
- Approximately how many?
- There are more than five of them. You need to understand that collecting information is not just "one of us heard somewhere that someone was buried somewhere in the plantings." Representatives leave, surveys of the area are carried out, a survey of local residents, what, how, when, documents are checked. Whether the last name, first name, patronymic of the person, his data are known, then, accordingly, a check through the Ministry of Justice that it has been established somewhere according to the documents. Then a check whether the person passed through medical institutions, respectively. That is, there are similar checks, so we can say about five or six that these are already checked places where there really are burials. There is information about the rest, but work directly on the verification of this information continues.
— Why did they start doing exhumation so late? By the beginning of this process in 2021, seven years have passed since those events.
- Firstly, it was necessary to clearly find out where there are such burials.
Secondly, such an autopsy of the burial is actually investigative actions within the framework of an ongoing criminal case.
We have two criminal cases in the republic. The first is about the use of prohibited methods of warfare, which is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of State Security. The second is the Prosecutor General's Office of the Lugansk People's Republic, this is a case of genocide against the inhabitants of Donbass.
Investigative actions require a special approach: photography and video filming, the presence of experts who clear the territory, check the territory, analyze the soil, because you need to understand why this or that degree of decomposition. This is a huge process that needs to be carried out in the field, quite literally in an open field. As a result, the recovery in Sokologorovka is two and a half weeks, the recovery of the remains in Vidnoye is almost a month.
Moreover, the process that needs to be regulated by law. Everything had to be written out very clearly, because if there are any mistakes from a procedural point of view… We don’t invent something, we act within the existing norms of both national and international criminal law, that is, we try to comply with all .
People needed to be prepared. People must have the skills to retrieve the remains, experts must be ready to work here, there must be the appropriate tool, lighting, everything else...
Yes, we can say that this dragged on for seven years – we were looking for solutions on how to fix this correctly, how to tighten it up both from the point of view of national legislation and from the point of view of considering violations of international humanitarian law. These moments, they required time and a very complex approach between a large number of departments. That is why these works began with the creation of interdepartmental working bodies in the DPR and LPR, which were able, on the orders of the heads, to combine efforts, clearly fix the sequence of actions, who does what, who is responsible for what, what functionality. This made it possible to begin work on the opening of mass graves. Single ones were opened before that. But mass graves, which require a completely special approach, have been opened only now.
We sent more than once requests to the International Criminal Court (ICC). And we really want to believe that the International Criminal Court is still fulfilling its function of preserving and observing the rule of law, including in the area of warfare, and is also recording something for itself somewhere. This, of course, is from the realm of hope at the level of understanding, especially in the light of recent events, that any body is able to forget at all that there are rules of international humanitarian law.
-Did you get any answers?
— Yes, that requests are accepted. But this did not directly concern the burials, it concerned rather the requests of the territorial communities of our settlements. Territorial communities recorded appeals, a text version, a video version, showed passports that we are alive, not at gunpoint, as Ukraine likes to say. They told the ICC about the events that took place on the territory of their settlements
- Another important question: what awaits us in terms of this work in those territories of the Lugansk region that the LPR is now taking under control? Are there similar graves?
- At the moment, a special commission has already been created in the LPR to fix the newly liberated territories of the Luhansk People's Republic, which will fix the crimes of the Ukrainian military political regime. Accordingly, in the future, these materials will also be attached to the criminal case on the genocide of the inhabitants of Donbass and on the use of prohibited methods of warfare.
After the end of the active phase of hostilities, after the entire territory of the Lugansk People's Republic is liberated, the interdepartmental working group that deals with the opening of graves will also work there: examine, interview people, find similar places, because there is information about the presence of mass graves , graves of civilians, starting from the city of Happiness and ending with the far borders of the republic.
— Are these graves also massive?
— Yes, we are talking about the mass ones, but at the moment the information has not been verified, so for now I would not like to inform inaccurately, when we check, then there will be a complete understanding and, accordingly, we will tell everyone about it.
-When can we expect this work to start? Large settlements are already under the control of the LPR.
- In any case, the hostilities must end, firstly, the hostilities are completely, because many experts who are part of the working group are now defending the republic with weapons in their hands, and secondly, a demining process is necessary, without it, such work is not carried out.