Ukraine’s National Police published a testimony of a criminologist who spent four months working on the de-occupied territories. Taras Pyrizhok, a criminologist from Ternopil, arrived in the de-occupied regions in November 2022 to document Russian war crimes in the liberated territories. He was a member of a police unit working in de-occupied areas of Kharkiv and Kherson regions.
The criminologist says he had never seen so many deaths of innocent people. “One of my tasks was to exhume the bodies of those killed and tortured. We went to local cemeteries or simply to people’s backyards. There were mass burials where even children were found. Very often, there were improvised graves because people were not properly buried but simply covered with soil. Those human remains were often mined. According to the local residents, the occupiers booby-trapped the bodies themselves. I’ve worked as a criminologist for ten years, and yet I haven’t seen so many dead as I saw in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions after it was liberated from Russians”, recalls Pyrizhok.
According to Pyrizhok, de-occupied regions have been literally pumped up by explosives. Ukrainian Ministry of Defence says that nearly a third of the country has been mined since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. According to the ministry, at the moment, about 30% of Ukraine’s territory (174 thousand sq. km) has been or still is a war zone, leaving six million people at risk of being killed or injured by mines. These areas require inspection and clearance. The most contaminated regions are Kharkiv, Kherson, and Mykolaiv.
There is a thin line between life and death in the regions once occupied by invading Russian troops. Pyrizhok tells a story of a near miss, one of the many: “I remember how, together with the other police officers, we were on our way to document another war crime, and our route passed through a road we’ve already taken many times before. I noticed a suspicious object on the road. I was worried, so I swerved to avoid it. My colleagues mocked me for being too cautious. When we got out of the vehicle and saw the explosion crater on the ground, everyone fell silent. It was our second birthday”.
Pyrizhok later served in the Kherson region when Russians blew up the Kakhovka Dam in June this year. “I never thought I would witness an environmental war crime on this scale. I have no words to describe it. Just imagine that a street was here yesterday, and today, you can’t even see the rooftops of its houses; they are well under the water. The chances of survival of any living being were slim. We got into boats and, together with rescuers and emergency service workers, helped people. The heat was unbearable, the humidity made breathing impossible, and Russians simply wouldn’t stop shelling civilians”.
