They identified the “butcher” of Bucha

This time, the herd could not hide the individual. There is a name, a charge and even an address of the person responsible for the Bucha massacre, the village on the outskirts of Kyiv razed and strewn with bodies by Russian forces. The “Butcher of Bucha”, the commander of the troops who murdered mansalva, looted, tortured and raped before escaping to the border of the accomplice Belarus. This is Lieutenant Colonel Azatbek Omurbekov of the 64th Motorized Rifle Brigade. A man in his 40s born and raised in the Russian Far East. Before this terrible massacre of civilians, he had been decorated by the Kremlin and blessed by one of the highest authorities of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Omurbekov's data were published on the Telegram network by InformNapalm, the group monitoring Russian troop movements that uses open source intelligence, and corroborated by an investigation by the London Times, among other global media outlets. InformNapalm published the correct e-mail address, telephone number and address of the lieutenant colonel. His relatives answered the first calls and said that Omurbekov had not communicated with them for a few days.

The lieutenant colonel leads military unit 51460 based in the town of Knyaz-Volkonskoye, in the Khabarovsk Territory of the Russian Federation. It is the Russian military command that is in charge of an extraordinary area of 7,000,000 square kilometers. The head of the unit is Colonel General Aleksandr Chaiko, who ordered the deployment of Omurbekov and his men to Belarus in January, as part of what were supposed to be military exercises and ended up being the invasion of Ukraine by the northern border. They advanced on 24 February, first taking the city and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster exclusion zone until they reached Bucha, 12 kilometers from the center of Kyiv, which they occupied for 40 days and from where they withdrew on 31 March after the massacre. Intelligence reports suggest that the same unit is preparing to head to Belgorod, in western Russia, before being redeployed to the front, possibly near Kharkov, the second Ukrainian city.

Omurbekov had already been with his troops in Ukraine in 2014 when they invaded the Crimean peninsula and opened the two separatist enclaves of Luhansk and Donetsk. He was decorated for his outstanding service in that action by Russian Deputy Defense Minister Dmitry Bulgakov. He was also blessed by the bishop of Khabarovsk in November 2021, shortly before his deployment to Ukraine. The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, is a close friend of Vladimir Putin and explicitly and publicly supported the invasion.

According to a press report by the regiment, Omurbekov spoke after the homily and said: “History shows that most of our battles are fought with our souls.” He added that “weapons are not the most important thing” and that “with the blessing of the Almighty, we hope to achieve what our ancestors did.”

After the withdrawal of Russian troops, the atrocities committed in Irpin, Bucha and several other towns in northwestern Kyiv became known. The main avenue of Bucha with corpses scattered among the twisted irons of Russian tanks and trucks. The vast majority are civilian bodies with their hands tied behind their backs. A torture center on a children's sports ground. The children and husbands buried in the garden by the babushkas (grandmothers) who survived. The makeshift graves in the parks, with mutilated bodies on top of each other, dug in the closed night. The testimony of hundreds of women raped or witnessed the rape of their daughters, daughter-in-laws, granddaughters. Burned bodies to erase evidence. The horrendous scene of a new war crime, another Guernica, an Idlib, one Warsaw, another Raqqa.

The victorious armies have always caused massacres, steal and rape. Some practiced it as a State policy. An attempt was made to end these atrocities through the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, those of Geneva in 1864 and 1949 (plus the 1977 protocols). They are the main instruments that identify war crimes. And there is a court to try those responsible, the International Criminal Court (ICC) based in The Hague, Netherlands, created in 1998. Until now it has dealt with cases of genocide, but it can also take on crimes committed in international conflicts. Special UN tribunals were also created, such as the cases of Nuremberg, Tokyo, Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

“War crimes include serious breaches of the Geneva Conventions and other serious violations of laws and customs applicable in 'non-international' conflicts listed in the Rome Statute, when committed as part of a plan or policy or on a large scale,” says the ICC. “Many of the norms contained in these treaties have been considered part of customary law and, as such, are binding on all States (and other parties to the conflict), whether or not they have ratified the treaties themselves,” says the UN.

And they list what are considered war crimes:

1) Murder.

2) Mutilation, cruel treatment and torture.

3) Taking of hostages.

(4) Intentionally directing attacks against civilians.

5) Intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historical monuments or hospitals.

6) Plunder.

(7) Rape, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy or any other form of sexual violence.

(8) Recruitment or enlistment of children under the age of 15 into armed forces or groups or using them to participate actively in hostilities.

Many of these types of war crimes had the scene of Bucha. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the site and was deeply struck by what he saw. A few hours later he described some of the scenes before the United Nations Security Council. The press around the world, including Infobae, clearly showed what happened. The bodies scattered, the shallow graves dug by some survivor showing the corpses with signs of torture, hands tied, with gunshots of grace, basements with walls splashed with blood and human remains, cars hit with whole families riddled, babies killed by the same bullet that went through the mother, dogs eating the decaying bodies. The first count of that single city of 20,000 inhabitants was 410 bodies. Since then they have continued to appear.

The Kremlin had an attempt to discredit the correspondents who collected the data of the massacre by saying that it had all been a propaganda montage of the Ukrainian government. An aerial survey carried out by drones showed that the barbarities had occurred before Russian troops left the site. And security cameras showed dozens of Russian officers and soldiers sending to their homes from Belarus the goods they looted in Bucha. The testimonies of survivors are even more incriminating and overwhelming.

The person responsible for these crimes, in that area, is Lieutenant Colonel Azatbek Omurbekov, who was in command of the troops. But he's not the only one, of course. Above him are several military commanders and a top manager who ordered the invasion: Vladimir Putin.

Keep reading: