Veterans of the volunteer Donbas Battalion have denied accusations made by the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine in a recent report that its soldiers were involved in torturing and executing civilians during the fighting for the Donetsk Oblast city of Ilovaisk in August 2014.
Ilovaisk, some 620 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, which had a pre-war population of 16,000 people, was the epicenter of a crucial battle early in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
During fighting for Ilovaisk, Russia sent regular troops into Ukraine to aid its proxy forces in the country, which changed the course of the war, killing hundreds of Ukrainian troops and forcing the Ukrainian army into retreat.
The UN mission published a report on Aug. 9 mentioning at least five executions of civilians by soldiers in Ilovaisk, saying that at least two of them were most likely carried out by the Donbas volunteer fighters.
But veterans of the Donbas Battalion called the report biased at the press conference on Aug. 14. The UN mission said that after Ukrainian forces left Ilovaisk in late August, residents found a grave containing the bodies of three people in the yard of school No. 14, where the Donbas battalion had been based.
The UN report said that two of these three people had been tortured and executed by Ukraine’s forces, while a third man had been killed as a result of shelling.
However, Anatoliy Vinohrodsky, the deputy commander of Donbas, said one of three men found in the grave, Valentyn Minich, was, in fact, a sniper fighting for Russian-led forces, who was killed in a firefight with the Donbas soldiers.
Vinohrodsky added that two other men found in the grave were killed by shelling. The Donbas soldiers asked the civilians to bury the men by the school and report their deaths to their families, he said.
Vinohrodsky also said that all the civilians arrested by Donbas battalion were armed when they were detained, and he denied they were kept in the harsh conditions in a hot metal cabinet, as the UN report said.
“Yes, there was an iron cabinet in that room (in school workshops). But people weren’t kept there, they were kept in a room,” he said.
The Donbas veterans also said they were appalled by the fact that the UN didn’t mention the role of Russian regular army troops in the fighting for Ilovaisk.
“When leaving encirclement I was walking through a Russian military base next to Novozariyivka for four to five hours,” Oleskandr Fedorchenko, another Donbas veteran who fought in Ilovaisk, said at the press conference.
“Why doesn’t the UN pay attention to facts like this?”
Semen Semenchenko, the founder and now informal leader of Donbas battalion, who is also a lawmaker in the 25-member Samopomich party faction, claimed the civilians living in Ilovaisk have “Stockholm syndrome” and so give evidence in favor of the Russian-proxy forces who now control the city.
Semenchenko accused the UN mission of not asking the Ukrainian soldiers about the accusations they heard from the civilians.
However, Semenchenko said he agrees with the UN mission that more investigations need to be done into the events at Ilovaisk in 2014.
“I’m interested, along with the UN mission, that the investigation into Ilovaisk leads to a court (trial),” he said.
“Unpunished evil and unanswered questions undermine the credibility of the military authorities, and lead to fear that it could all happen again.”
