How pro-Russian media corroborates key details of atrocities in Ukraine

The Russian government's denials and counter-conspiracies about apparent atrocities committed against civilians in Ukraine have been as flamboyantly silly as usual, but corroboration of key details can be found in an unexpected source: pro-Kremlin media.

Russia's pro-government news outlet Life this week published a first-person-perspective video of Russian troops performing what it said were "cleaning" missions in the besieged eastern city of Mariupol. It showed gun-toting soldiers entering and searching homes.

“The Russian military . . . go around all the basements, the population is checked for documents and the presence of Nazi tattoos,” the caption read.

A more in-depth account was published by the war correspondent of newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, who recounted his experience being embedded with Russian troops during what the headline called the “Cleansing of Mariupol”.

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Russian soldiers searched for tattoos and any documents "related to the period of Ukrainian statehood", wrote Dmitry Steshin, whose report included a photograph of military service documents found.

The aim was “Detention of suspicious persons. Elimination of saboteurs,” Steshin wrote. “The result of the cleansing is impressive: out of a hundred households inspected, only two people can be conditionally recognised as supporters of the Kyiv authorities.” The article did not say what happened to the two.

Lying dead

The search for documents and tattoos matches multiple accounts by Ukrainians. A Kyiv sommelier, Vladislav Kozlovsky, joined family in Bucha after the war began. He has described surviving an incident that left a group of men lying dead outside a building, some with their hands bound behind their backs, a scene captured in now-famous photographs by Vadim Ghirda of the Associated Press.

Kozlovsky told Belsat Vot Tak, a Russian-language television service funded by Poland, that Russian forces had found him among a group of people sheltering in a bunker. They separated men from women and children and made them kneel, he recalled. "They knew some of the people, checked the documents," Kozlovsky said. "They also checked tattoos."

If someone was found with documents indicating military service or with a tattoo of Ukraine’s national coat of arms, the trident, “they were immediately shot”, he said.

Similarly, a 53-year-old Bucha local called Mykola told ABC correspondent James Longman that Russian troops searched men for documents and tattoos. They then killed all men aged under 50, Mykola recounted. He had to hurriedly bury his friends.

Escaped from Mariupol

Accounts from elsewhere are similar.A 32-year-old builder, Dmytro Kartavov, who escaped from Mariupol, told news agency Reuters about a search by Russian troops. “They stripped the men naked, looked for tattoos,” he said.

A resident of the village of Zabuchchya outside Kyiv also told Human Rights Watch: “They took us back inside and ordered my son to strip naked because they said they wanted to look for nationalist tattoos.”

A teacher in Bucha told the NGO she was among 40 people brought to a town square and searched for documents, before men were lined up on their knees.

“They shot one in the back of the head. He fell. Women screamed. The other four men were just kneeling there. The commander said to the rest of the people at the square: ‘Don’t worry. You are all normal – and this is dirt. We are here to cleanse you from the dirt’,” she recalled.

Reading the Russian justification for the war reveals the same kind of thinking. Russian president Vladimir Putin has said the aim of the invasion is the "denazification" of Ukraine. What this may mean in practice was laid out in an article by the state-owned news agency, RIA Novosti, published last Sunday.

It defined Ukrainian independence as an inherently “Nazi” project – “an artificial anti-Russian construction” – and anyone who favours it over Russian control as therefore a “Nazi”. This means a huge swathe of the Ukrainian population. “A significant part of the masses, which are passive Nazis, accomplices of Nazism, are also guilty,” it laid out.

The solution for “implacable Nazis” is “elimination”, the piece stated. This would be followed by 25 years of “re-education”, forced labour for “accomplices”, the banning of Ukrainian educational materials, and the “installation of the Russian information space”.

List of the missing

In areas under Russian control, prominent members of society including local leaders and activists have disappeared, according to Human Rights Centre ZMINA, which recently published a list of the missing. This echoes events in Russian-controlled areas since the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

The Ukrainian government has said that when the village of Motyzhyn was retaken, its mayor Olha Sukhenko was discovered in a shallow grave, executed along with her son and husband. Eleven other community leaders were taken into Russian custody throughout the country and are missing, they warn.

Intentionally killing non-combatants is a war crime. Needless to say, summary executions are also illegal, irrespective of what tattoos the victim may have.