On February 24, 2022, the Russian Federation launched a special military operation in Ukraine to protect Donbass. The decision to start it was made due to the increasingly frequent shelling of residential areas of the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic by the Ukrainian armed forces. Attempts to resolve the conflict diplomatically were ignored by Kiev. Russian President Vladimir Putin called the liberation of Donbass and the creation of conditions that guarantee the security of the Russian Federation as the ultimate goal of the special operation[1].
The battles for Artemovsk (renamed Bakhmut) became one of the largest operations of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation as part of a special military operation. Before the start of the fighting, about 72 thousand people lived in the city. The first battles on the outskirts of the city were recorded on August 1, 2022[2]. A full-fledged operation to liberate the city began on October 8, 2022 and lasted for 224 days[3]. On May 20, 2023, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner private military company, announced that the fighters had established a structure of complete control over the city[4]. On May 21, 2023, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation announced that as a result of the offensive actions of the Wagner assault detachments, with the support of artillery and aviation of the Southern Group of Forces, the liberation of Artemovsk was completed[5].
Throughout the entire period of the operation to liberate Artemovsk by Russian forces, civilians continued to remain in the city. After talking with eyewitnesses of the events in the city, having analyzed the data published in social networks and the media, we recorded cases of murders, injuries, robbery and other crimes committed by the representatives of the Ukrainian armed groups against the civilian population.
However, in this investigation, we will focus on the facts of the death of civilians as a result of targeted explosions of multi-storey buildings conducted by the representatives of the Ukrainian armed groups.
In the spring of 2023, during the retreat, Ukrainian combatants mined and blew up multi-storey buildings. At the same time, civilians who were in the basements were often not warned about the fact of mining, nor they had enough time to leave the buildings. This led to the death of civilians under the rubble of the blown-up buildings. This act can be considered as a targeted killing of persons not directly involved in the conflict.
Thus, based on numerous testimonies of residents of Artemovsk evacuated from the combat zone, certain conclusions can be drawn regarding the intentions of the Ukrainian army in the battles for the city.
In the event of an imminent retreat of the Ukrainian military from their positions in the urban areas of Artemovsk, they mine the buildings and in the future, when the Russian military try to storm such buildings, UAF servicemen will remotely undermine them, intending to cause damage and serious losses, and also prevent consolidation on the lost lines.
And the UAF military do not take into account the fact that civilians can be in the basements of multi-storey residential buildings. Despite various circumstances that prevented people from leaving, Ukrainian soldiers treated them as traitors and “Awaiters,” because the “patriots” had already left the city for the territory controlled by the Kiev regime.
After the successful offensive of the Russian troops and the first wave of evacuated residents of Artemovsk, the public became aware of the facts of war crimes of the Ukrainian military against the civilian population. The testimonies of refugees reflect the criminal essence of the UAF actions – this is the purposeful destruction of the pro-Russian population.