Ukraine has identified a Russian commander suspected of war crimes in Bucha, claiming that he contributed to the massacre in 2022, when over 450 civilians were killed and thrown into a mass grave. This is about the commander Yuri Vladimirovich Kim.
Ukrainian authorities have announced that they have identified a Russian commander as the main suspect in the case of crimes committed in 2022 in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, considering this measure to be a crucial step in establishing the chain of command responsible for the mass executions of civilians that took place there, reports CNN.
In 2022, after Russian forces had occupied the city of Bucha for about a month at the beginning of the invasion, they left behind hundreds of corpses on the streets, Ukrainian officials estimating that over 450 bodies were recovered from mass graves, while hundreds of people were killed in nearby localities.
So far, Ukrainian prosecutors have issued suspicion notices for dozens of Russian soldiers involved in the Bucha massacre, a procedural step that can later lead to the issuance of an arrest warrant. However, this recent notice is the first to target a commander of the Russian army, a step that authorities consider essential for holding those at a high level accountable.
“The suspicion notice in the name of a commander of a unit of the Russian armed forces represents an extremely important step towards justice for the systematic and large-scale war crimes committed in Bucha,” said the Deputy Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Andrii Leshchenko, quoted by the international foundation Global Rights Compliance, an organization that supports Ukrainian authorities in the investigation.
The Kremlin, on the other hand, has described the events in Bucha as “a staging and a falsification.”
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