The Russian military executed seven residents of the village of Pravdino near Kherson during the occupation, writes The New York Times.
Local residents told the publication that six of the seven killed worked as security guards who came to work in the village from another city. One of them, Vlad, began to communicate with a teenage girl who was bullied by her stepfather. Interlocutors of the NYT said that the man began to cooperate with the Russian military and invented a story that Vlad and other guards were spying on them.
In mid-April, local resident Anatoly Sikoza heard an explosion in a nearby house. He came to him and saw that the bodies of six guards and one girl were buried under the rubble on the ground. Several of the men had their hands tied behind their backs and were blindfolded, and the girl, according to Sikosa, looked as if she had been strangled. “I can say that it was not the explosion that killed them,” he concluded.
The man told the NYT that he "begged" the Russian military to allow him to bury the dead, but received permission only five weeks after his death. Sikosa prepared a grave for the six guards. The girl's body was collected and buried by her family.
In mid-November, Ukraine's Interior Minister Denis Monastyrsky said that Ukraine had opened 436 proceedings based on "the results of the first signs of war crimes" by Russia, and also found 11 places where the Russian military held prisoners. In four of them, torture was used on prisoners.