Hours before Russian troops began withdrawing from the Kiev suburb of Bocha in late March, a Russian soldier left behind a trail of blood and ruined lives in a final burst of violence.
On one of the last nights of the Russian occupation of Bocha, a lone Russian soldier, drunk or high, went looking for wine. He held a 75-year-old resident at gunpoint in the street and let him bang on the doors of the houses.
What happened next was a night of horror for two families, capping a month of senseless killings by Russian troops in Bocha, a suburb of the Ukrainian capital Kiev. The Russian soldier left a trail of blood and ruined lives in a final burst of violence just hours before Russian troops began to withdraw. His own unit picked him up in the morning and disposed of the bodies. Within hours he was gone.
Nine months following the events, most of the dead have been recovered and laid to rest, the survivors have resumed their lives and returned to work. But the grief of relatives remains raw, and the pain inflicted on this small part of a neighborhood by this Russian soldier and his comrades still ripples through the community of Bocha.
The soldier’s attack was not an isolated one. Nine soldiers from a unit in the same wooded neighborhood have been charged in one of the first war crimes to go to trial in Ukraine. The case revolves around their brutal treatment of a civilian, an electrical engineer who was detained and beaten repeatedly in the last days of March last year.
The engineer, Serhiy Kybka, is gradually losing his sight from injuries sustained in another severe beating he later received from a Russian soldier who encountered him in the street following his release.
Genocide
In Bocha, more than 450 people died in one month, regarding 10 percent of the remaining population, a level that war crimes investigators say might amount to genocide. Fifteen of those people died in an area just a few blocks around Antonia Mykhailovskoho Street, where the drunken soldier went on a rampage. They included six members of a retirement home who died of cold and lack of medicine, and an 81-year-old woman who was found hanged in her garden.
Like their neighbours, the two men – who according to the mayor of Bocha, neighbors and relatives died at the hands of the soldier – were victims of an indisciplined and brutal occupying army.
It was evening, just before the 8 p.m. Boetsja sat in the dark, without electricity or internet.
Kryvenko was a teacher, who lived alone following helping to evacuate his wife and her disabled daughter from Boocha. Trained as a pilot, he had spent his life working as an adjuster in the Boetsja glass processing factory, renowned for its many mechanical inventions. Since then he has operated an educational center, where he shared his love of building model ships and airplanes with generations of children.
His family said they tried to talk to the Russian soldier. “We never argued,” says his wife, Svitlana Tkachuk, 55. “He was very equanimous and always tried to come to an agreement.”
When he and the soldier reached the house, Kryvenko banged on the gate and called out to the guard, a Ukrainian named Serhiy, whom he knew. Serhiy opened the gate and the soldier shouted, rifle at the ready, “I want wine, Boyar!”, an old-fashioned address for a Russian nobleman.
Serhiy explained that he was just a guard. Russian soldiers had already confiscated all the alcohol in the house. “Then he put the gun to my temple and asked: ‘Do you have wine?’” Serhiy says in an interview, only mentioning his first name. “I said no.’ I thought, ‘This is the end.’”
Serhiy braced himself for a bullet, but the Russian suddenly raised his rifle and fired overhead. The soldier ordered the two Ukrainians to search the house for alcohol. When he discovered there was none, he threatened to throw a grenade, but was so drunk he mightn’t get it out of a pocket on the side of his combat trousers.
‘He’s out of his mind’
In the end, the soldier, who Serhiy said was an ethnic Russian and looked regarding 35 years old, ran off, taking Kryvenko with him. Twenty minutes later, the soldier’s commanding officer came by with three others looking for the soldier. The commander said the soldier, whom he called Alexei, was a confused man, a veteran of his fourth war, and dangerous.
“Go hide and don’t stick your nose out at anything,” the commander told him. “He is out of his mind. He can shoot or throw a grenade.” Despite all the warnings, the commander did not catch up with Alexei and his hostage that night. The two ended up not far away on the large estate of a retired Ukrainian politician, Oleksandr Rzhavsky. Rzhavsky, 63, a former banker and member of parliament, was the leader of a small political party and had run for president twice.
If anyone might handle a warlike Russian soldier, it was probably Rzhavsky, who spoke Russian and behaved with natural authority. His “friends and detractors agree on one thing — he was always sincere,” his family wrote in an April obituary. “The explanation for this is very simple – his goal has always been peace and tranquility on Ukrainian territory.”
Rzhavsky was seen by many Ukrainians as pro-Russian, and in his pre-war writings he supported greater political and diplomatic efforts to reach an agreement with Russia. But he expressed great shock at President Vladimir Putin’s large-scale invasion that began on February 24, 2022. “Why now and through open war?” Rzhavsky asked in a March 2 Facebook post. “My brain frantically searches for different options, but finds none that don’t lead to even greater disaster.”
Rzhavsky apparently let the Russian and his hostage into his house. They sat at the dining room table in the large open living room, and Rzhavsky gave them wine, according to neighbors familiar with the events. Rzhavsky’s family declined to be interviewed for this article, citing privacy in difficult times. But the two women in the house at the time, Rzhavsky’s wife and his sister, were able to hide and escaped injury, according to Bocha mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk.
That night something snapped and the soldier, Alexei, opened fire on the two men at the table. Kryvenko was killed in his chair with three bullets to the chest, says his son, Yuriy Kryvenko. Rzhavsky was shot in the head. The soldier then threw a grenade and injured his own leg in the explosion.
“There followed a night like in an American horror movie,” says a neighbor, Olga Galunenko. “This dark house, two bodies lying there and this crazy man with a gun.” She says that Rzhavsky’s sister, Zoya, crawled out and hid in a wardrobe. “His wife was hiding in another place.”
Graf
Only in the morning did the soldier’s unit come looking for him. They took him in an armored vehicle. They apologized to the women for his actions and even dug a grave and buried Rzhavsky in the yard. As a final act of cruelty, they dumped Kryvenko’s body in a small grove across the street.
The Kyiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office has launched a separate investigation into their deaths, alleging “violations of the laws and customs of war combined with premeditated murder,” the prosecutor’s information office said. In the case of Kryvenko, there is another charge of violation of the territorial integrity of Ukraine.
The Rzhavsky family blamed the soldier for Rzhavsky’s murder in a joint Facebook post in April, saying he was “drunk on his own impunity.” They made no mention of Kryvenko. When his son came looking for him in early April, they confirmed that Kryvenko had been shot, but said they did not know what happened to his body.
“They thought he was some bum or an alcoholic,” says Yuriy Kryvenko bitterly, recounting how he pieced together the details of his father’s death. For a week and a half he searched for his father, desperately hoping that he had somehow survived.
At one point, the family became so desperate that they consulted a psychic, who said that Kryvenko’s body was only two houses from his house, but in the woods. When the snow began to melt, Kryvenko’s son, with the help of a friend, began to search the grove opposite Rzhavsky’s house. They found a pair of shoes and uncovered his father’s body. He was lying on a curtain of Rzhavsky’s house.
Kryvenko was buried next to his mother in his native village outside Bocha.
“For 18 days he lay on the ground, covered with leaves,” says Kryvenko’s son, talking regarding the pain of being confirmed dead. “At first I didn’t think it was him. If someone is missing, it’s somehow easier.”
© The New York Times