Prosecutor Mykhailo Nechatylyuk reads out the indictment, alleging violation of the laws and customs of war, combined with premeditated murder of a civilian. On 20 November 2024, the Irpin City Court, in the north-west of Kyiv, the capital city of Ukraine, began to try a Russian prisoner of war, military officer Nikolai Kartashov, captured by Ukrainian armed forces a year after the alleged crime.
Kartashov was born in 2002 in the village of Gukovo, Rostov oblast, in western Russia. During the invasion of the Kyiv region, he was a senior gunner in the Russian army. Between 27 February 2022 and 30 March 2022, he and other servicemen of the 76th air assault division of the Russian Federation’s airborne forces stationed in Pskov, Russia, were deployed in Bucha, a city located five kilometres away from Irpin.
According to a Russian media, in December 2022, Kartashov received a suspended sentence for desertion. He was then sent back to fight in Ukraine. The young man had returned unauthorised from the combat zone to his home in the Rostov region.
Shoot anybody dressed in black
On 27 February 2022, between 8 a.m. and 12 p.m., Kartashov and other soldiers were driving down Bucha’s Vokzalna Street, towards the intersection with Nove Shosse Street, as part of an armoured vehicles convoy. Kartashov was positioned in the middle of the convoy, approximately 500 metres from its front vehicle. As a gunner armed with an assault rifle, a 2S9 Nona-S self-propelled artillery gun, he was responsible for watching the perimeter.
The senior officer, Vadim Tsvetkov, gave an order over the radio that all the people dressed in black should be considered as enemies, although many ordinary civilians may have been wearing black clothing.
According to the indictment, officer Tsvetkov’s order did not comply with the international humanitarian law since it did not respect the principle of distinction and could have resulted in civilian casualties. However, Kartashov and his fellow officers - artillery gun commander Dmitriy Antonnikov, senior intelligence specialist and range-finder Ruslan Gorshkov, deputy platoon commander Denis Monakhov and senior artillery gunner Artem Derkach - jointly agreed to carry out the order, after “having reached a tacit agreement based on mutual trust and loyalty within the military formation”.
An unarmed security guard executed
Approximately three minutes after Tsvetkov had communicated the order, Kartashov and his associates noticed a man in a black uniform on the driveway of Vokzalna Street near the Novus store. It was a security guard of the supermarket, Valeriy K., born in 1996, a civilian who was not involved in the hostilities and was not armed. He was standing in plain sight between the rear of the Novus store and a residential building.
Between 10:30 a.m. and 10:40 a.m., Kartashov, Monakhov, Derkach, Antonnikov and Gorshkov opened precision fire with assault rifles. One of the shots inflicted a perforating wound to the guard’s chest, causing damage to the right lung. The victim died between 10:40 a.m. and 12 p.m. in the basement of the Novus store. The Russians kept driving in a convoy formation.
After the de-occupation of Bucha, a mass grave of people killed in the armed aggression of the Russian Federation was discovered on the Ukrainian orthodox church’s premises. Among them, there was Valeriy K.’s body. When the victim was identified, it was also discovered that he had managed to call an ambulance using his mobile phone before walking into the store’s basement, where other employees attempted to help him before he died.
The officer who gave the order reported dead
The identity of the killers was unknown until Kartashov was taken prisoner near the town of Kreminna, Luhansk oblast, in early 2023. At that point, he allegedly confessed to what had happened.
The police conducted an investigative experiment, a reconstruction of the crime scene with Kartashov's testimony as to what had happened, and subsequently issued a press release stating that the prisoner of war was testifying to crimes committed by his unit’s soldiers.
As the preliminary hearings began, in September 2023, the four other soldiers - Monakhov, Derkach, Antonnikov and Gorshkov - were served with suspicion notices in absentia for the murder of the supermarket security guard in Bucha. As for Tsvetkov, who allegedly gave the criminal order, Russian media reported in January 2023 that the officer had “died in the special operation’s area in Ukraine”.
Kartashov pleads guilty
Kartashov pleads guilty but refuses to testify in court. He is represented by a defence lawyer, Mykola Motruk, of the Free Secondary Legal Aid Centre. The accused faces 15 years in prison up to life imprisonment for violating the laws and customs of war.
Despite Kartashov’s cooperation with the investigation, the prosecutor stated in court that he didn’t consider that there were mitigating circumstances for the accused. The prosecutor reportedly has seven witnesses – residents of Bucha, including colleagues of the deceased who were nearby at the time of the shooting, residents of neighbouring houses and a man who identified the body of the victim. Yet none of them is known to have been an eyewitness to the crime.
The case will resume at the end of December. The court will start by examining written evidence. Then, a video of the investigative experiment and a 15-minute video of the military vehicles driving down the street, filmed on the day of the alleged crime by a Bucha resident from his balcony, will be reviewed. The judge explained to Kartashov that he could testify at any time during the trial if he wished to do so. He also recalled him thathe has the right not to testify against himself.
At the end of August 2023, the Irpin City Court found nine Russian military officers guilty of war crimes committed in Bucha, in March 2022. The ftrial held in absentia was the first, following the investigations led in Ukraine on the infamous crimes perpetrated in Bucha that shocked the world.
This report is part of our coverage of war crimes justice produced in partnership with Ukrainian journalists. A first version of this article was published on the « Sudovyi Reporter ».
