ERIKA KINETZ: OK. This is Yablunska Street we’re on now.
SASHA STASHEVSKYI: Right.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH, HOST: Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, FRONTLINE and the Associated Press have been investigating the mounting evidence of war crimes.
ERIKA KINETZ: So your sister lived here?
KATERYNA: [Speaking Ukrainian] Yes.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Our new film Putin’s Attack on Ukraine: Documenting War Crimes - the result of eight months of reporting…
BENJAMIN STRICK: What we do have is satellite imagery to confirm at least the presence of Russian military...
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: …It examines the scope of the atrocities, and the prospects for accountability.
DMYTRO KULEBA: Ukraine calls on the establishment of a special tribunal which would have a specific jurisdiction over the crime of aggression against Ukraine.
ERIKA KINETZ: Can you indict Putin?
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Erika Kinetz is a global investigative reporter at the Associated Press and the correspondent on the film.
ERIKA KINETZ : I don’t think we and I don’t think anybody in Ukraine really had any notion at that point of what was to come.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: She joins me today to talk about this important collaborative investigation. I’m Raney Aronson-Rath, editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE, and this is the FRONTLINE Dispatch.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Erika, thanks so much for joining me on the Dispatch and also for your incredible work in Ukraine.
ERIKA KINETZ: My pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So let's start by going back to when you first arrived there with our producer Tom Jennings and his team. So it's March, a few weeks after the invasion began. And tell me about that first trip, and especially what struck you.
ERIKA KINETZ: I guess what struck me, first of all was when we crossed the border into Ukraine. The war felt very far away. We were in Lviv in Western Ukraine and at that point the war was, was farther down towards Kyiv and you just passed through these beautiful churches and these, these trees and these fields, and it looked like a normal country. You would see every once in a while, roadblocks, sandbags on the road. Um, but you didn't, the war seemed like in some other place, and yet you knew it was very close at hand. We were going to, we'd gotten an introduction to the prosecutor general and we were going to speak with her about the systems that they were trying to build to document and catalog potential war crimes.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Talk to us about how you got in there?
ERIKA KINETZ: So it's always a bit of a production to cross the border. We had talked with a lot of people who had done this crossing before and quickly learned that the most expedient way to get across the border was on foot. We would take a car to the border, then we would walk across the border pushing carts of camera equipment up a slight hill over rough bricks and stone. And then we would meet another car in Ukraine that would then drive us to Lviv. And from there we could take, um, an overnight train onwards to Kyiv or wherever we needed to be. But it's always kind of a production to get in and out.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So before you went in, I know that, you know, obviously we were working with you, we were doing a different story. We were doing a story about Hungary. Can you tell me when you first heard about Ukraine and what your thoughts were about you know a potential pivot?
ERIKA KINETZ: Well, we were doing a story that's right about the rise of Victor Orban in Hungary and this kind of synergy that we saw between what was happening in Hungary and what was happening a little bit in the United states and we wanted to explore that. And we were in Hungary, we'd done a huge amount of prep and reporting and had a whole investigation, you know, in motion. And then the war broke out and I'm based in Brussels. And so sitting here in Europe, I just felt like there's no other story we can write. Children are dying next door to us, like we have to pay attention to this. And so we all pivoted and just started thinking about the war and how we could try to come up with a strategy that would let us say something meaningful like nine months down the line.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Yeah, I mean I think we all felt that and it’s just a really important thing that you all did that pivot. So pretty much from the start, we all decided that the focus of our collaboration should be on war crimes. Did you have any idea the extent of what you would find and where the reporting would lead you?
ERIKA KINETZ: AP and Frontline built a war crime tracker and wow. We had no idea that there would be so many war crimes that we would have to be cataloging. I mean, the idea was to just try to create a space where, You, you'd hear these stories each day of atrocities happening and they would flash before our eyes and then vanish, and we thought we should build a space where these things accumulate, where we can track them and see the patterns and the scale of what's going on. But I don't think we, and I don't think anybody in Ukraine really had any notion at that point of what was to come.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: And so as you started reporting on this, I, I, I think on the first trip you actually met with the Ukrainian prosecutors, um, who are already starting to build war crime cases It struck me, you know, when I was hearing that, like they were right away trying to contain the evidence, to collect the evidence. So talk to me a little bit about that and how that struck you.
ERIKA KINETZ: I mean, this is a tremendous challenge for the Ukrainian government. You know, they're trying to build a system in real time that can handle efficiently, literally tens of thousands of war crimes investigations. And they don't. It's like these war crimes prosecutions, in a way, have become a management problem because these cases cut across all fiefdoms and all different layers of the bureaucracy. The, the Ukrainian law is, you know, quite weak on in terms of how war crimes are enshrined in Ukrainian law. And I mean, you, you, we can get into the sort of weeds on this, but suffice it to say both procedurally and bureaucratically, the challenges are immense.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Mm. And were you surprised that they were just diving right in at that point to try to collect the evidence? I know from our reporting that's quite unusual, but why do you think that they knew that they had to do that?
ERIKA KINETZ: Well, I think it took an incredible amount of foresight on the part of the Ukrainian prosecutors, not only for prosecutions, but also with an eye to compensation. So that first trip when we met then Prosecutor General Venediktova she had set up these sort of remote units for her prosecutors to try to gather witness testimony and register victims with an eye, number one, to building potential cases, but an eye number two, to try to get these people on a list so that one day they might be able to, um, to get some compensation.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Erika, you said something that really profoundly, you know, moved me. You've said that ‘every victim, every survivor had the same question as you were reporting, and the question was why?’ Can you tell me how this actually played out in terms of what you ended up finding and writing about and how in the end that really ended up shaping our film, that animating question.
ERIKA KINETZ: Yeah, so we, I mean, we started doing interviews with people and it was true. Victim after victim, survivor, after survivor would ask the same question, which is why? Why did this happen? Why did I lose my husband? Why is my child gone? And as we did more and more reporting. It didn't actually dawn on me until near the end of our, our reporting that there were actually patterns at play in the violence that we were seeing, and there were actually strategies motivating a lot of the violence. Not to say that there wasn't also random violence, but there were… There was strategic violence, and so that from an investigative standpoint and also from the, the point of view of accountability was what we decided to focus on.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Tell me about Tanya. Let's talk about her for a moment.
ERIKA KINETZ: Well, she was just one woman in a crowd of people, um, outside the Bucha morgue, trying to get the body of her lost husband back and her husband had been picked up, um, in a town just north of Bucha, a town called Ozera and soldiers came to their house one day. He had actually been stopped on the street. He went home to get his documents and phone and showed them to the Russian soldiers. They accused him of being a spotter, someone who was taking coordinates and sending them onto the Ukranian military. And there was no evidence that he was actually doing that. Um, we got, I got phone records, um, of his cell phone activity and saw that his phone hadn't been active, um, since the second day of the war. And it was like weeks before he was picked up, so it would've been very difficult for him actually to be sending in coordinates. Um, so he just disappeared. He was gone. Tanya goes back to her basement and waits. And she waits and she waits and her husband doesn't come home. So what does she do? She hears from a priest in her little village that the priest in another village, about 15 minutes to the north, has pictures of dead people on his phone. So she goes to some friends from church to find that priest. And there on her phone is her dead Kolia, her dead husband.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, um, you came, to find out through your reporting that this was not random. You talked about a method to the violence and you talked about a deliberate strategy. Can you talk to me about how you came to that conclusion? Um, and, and in some of your stories, you even used words like strategic and organized brutality.
ERIKA KINETZ: Yeah, I think the starting point for that was, we also saw the picture of her husband's body. It looked a lot like those photographs that everybody saw of the bodies of Bucha, where you had men in civilian clothes whose wrists had been bound with tape, who, and their eyes were blindfolded. Their bodies showed signs of torture and they'd been shot. Well, there we were half an hour north of Bucha and there were five bodies in a garden that looked exactly the same, only no one was paying attention to them. And so it was, it was just that simple. They looked the same. Was there a pattern? And so then we started to ask how did the people, how did these people die? And we managed to get eyewitnesses to the abductions of three of those men, and they were all picked up under very similar circumstances. Russian soldiers came, accused them of acting as spotters for Ukrainian military, took them away, tortured them, and killed them. And in fact, interestingly, in one of those cases, we did document that the guy, Andrii, actually had been sending coordinates into the Ukrainian military. We spoke to the man who'd been taking those coordinates from him and sending them to the Ukrainian military. And the government of Ukraine really mobilized, tried to mobilize the whole population. This became a whole of society war, and they created on their main government digital identity app called Diia. They created a button, you just push it and the coordinates get sent automatically. There were two telegram apps set up. These were promoted on social media. There were SMS push notifications sent out to Ukrainian phone numbers to have everybody help report on the war. And so there was a ton. There were a ton of civilians who did act as spotters and this kind of collided with this Russian occupation and in, in, you know, the Russian soldiers were coming to a town and they didn't see a clear line between civilians and combatants and, and this, I think, that gray area, a, a lot of terrible violence emerged from that gray area.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Hmm.
ERIKA KINETZ: At the same time, there is absolutely no justification for a soldier to go and shoot a civilian. You know, that is not permitted under international humanitarian law. Either they're a civilian or if they're a combatant, they need to be treated as a prisoner of war under the Geneva Conventions. So it's not, I don't mean to say any of this as a, as an excuse or justification for the Russian violence, just to say that there was technology used at a new scale, in a new way in this conflict that has created a whole other set of questions and problems.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. That, that's a really important distinction. I'm glad you made that. Let's talk about the Russian word for the operations that the military were carrying out. So translated as cleansing operations. Um, can you tell me more about those operations?
ERIKA KINETZ: Yeah, I mean, so the other piece of the puzzle for what was going on with Kolia and other other people was when we got a trove of like more than 2000 intercepts of phone calls that Russian soldiers had made from around Kyiv back home to Russia to their wives, mothers, and friends. And in those phone calls they used a word quite a lot, zachistka, which means cleansing. It's what that is, is a sweep of an area. So Russian troops will go and secure their perimeter searching to identify and neutralize any potential threats. That could be veterans, that could be civilians collaborating in any way with the Russian military.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: And when did you first learn of that? So as you're going through the materials and how did you go through all of that material?
ERIKA KINETZ: Very good question. So we had these audio intercepts logged on spreadsheets, and we did this iterative process of screening. Um, and we would just go through a first pass and listen and then log, ‘Oh, this is just talking about grocery shopping, or the dog, and, you know, that's not of top priority interest for us here. Let's just try to identify the conversations that are relevant to the questions we're asking.’ And then we would delve into those in more detail. Um, similar with the CCTV video that we got. Um, you know, we had tens of thousands of videos. And what really helped us there was C2 has, um, it's a visual investigations firm in New York who helped us do this short film about Bucha. Um, and what, what they had, they have a platform where we could just load the videos on, um, on a timeline and you, so you could see from the different cameras in town what was happening at a at the same moment, on the same day, and you could see how events unfolded over time. And this was revelatory.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So as you started to learn more, how does that then affect the reporting that you did on the ground?
ERIKA KINETZ: So what we learned from the intercepts was that, you know, Russian soldiers had been ordered to do these cleansing operations, this zatchistka, and they, they talked about doing this. They talked about, you know, searching people's phones and if they had anything like an image of a Russian tank, they would be executed And this was like the other side of the conversation from what we were seeing on the ground where you would, we saw the victims, we saw people who– we talked with, people who'd seen those victims taken away and executed. And it was like both sides of that conversation matched. This is what was happening. And then what was so powerful about the video that we got from Bucha was that we were able to see actually a cleansing operation as it unfolded in Bucha on Yablunska Street, right at this major Russian headquarters where a lot of people were killed, we could actually see what that looked like in real time.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Hmm. It's unbelievable in the film, I mean, I have to say, those moments of, you know, being inside your reporting, but then also on the ground with the actual people doing those actions is just, it's, it's just, it's almost like 3D in its nature. You can hardly believe what you're seeing and hearing.
[midroll]
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Let's talk a little bit more about Bucha what happened there? That was the focus of your most recent story.
ERIKA KINETZ: Bucha became just this symbol of atrocity in this war. It was a real pivot point globally for people paying attention to what was happening in Ukraine and calling for accountability, um, for what appeared to be pretty grave war crimes. So we were trying to understand what, what happened there.You know, like we had this idea that there were these patterns to this violence. Was there any evidence of that in Bucha as well. And in the phone intercepts, we actually heard soldiers saying, Hey mom, I'm in Bucha and you know, there's dead civilians all around, that the violence against civilians was discussed quite openly by the Russian soldiers, and a number of them said that they'd been ordered, to do that, to do violence against civilians. The, the other, I mean, to go to your sort of earlier point, like how, how does the reporting work? It's like a puzzle And what was satisfying about this project was that with each piece of the puzzle, they fit. You know, like the one, the, the reporting that we did with witnesses and people on the ground, it matched this what we were hearing on the intercepts and that matched what we were seeing in the video. So we wanted to reconstruct these early days of the Russian occupation of Bucha. I talked with two soldiers who were there in early March fighting the Russian advance. It was a totally uneven fight. They had like untrained volunteers, not enough weapons to go around March 3rd, just overwhelming Russian fire power rolls into town from the west along the railroad tracks onto Yablunska Street, and the Russians take over this industrial complex at 144 Yablunska. And you can see, you can see this happen on video and you can really see, you know, March 3rd. We see the Ukrainian soldiers making their last stand, and then they flee to the east. Half an hour later, you see the first Russian troops creeping down the street on foot and then just tanks and tanks and tanks and tanks rolling in. And on March 4th, that morning, as Russian soldiers are consolidating their control of Bucha, that's when they start sweeping people up, trying to filter out anyone who might present a threat.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Hmm. Have you ever had, um, this much at your disposal as you're reporting in terms of elements to a story? Have you ever dealt with this much media before?
ERIKA KINETZ: No, well I have dealt with big data sets but never like this with these different huge data sets coming from different places where you have to to piece them together. No,we've seen fragments of this story told and told very well, you know, since March. I think what we were able to do with, you know, the information that we gathered was to tell a more holistic picture and try to try to understand how things unfolded, why they happened, what was motivating this, and, and, and also to show that there was a pattern here. I mean, what we saw in Bucha on March 4th, that cleansing operation, that was just an example of something that is happening across Ukraine. And we saw that even just in the other towns that we went to outside of Kyiv. What happened in Bucha was not unique.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. And that was one of the big shockers let's talk about, um, Colonel General Alexander Chaiko, Um, he's the commander in charge of the areas where these atrocities took place. What can you tell us about him?.
ERIKA KINETZ: I guess the easiest way to do that is to just rewind a bit and look at his history in Syria, so, He was the commander of Russian troops in Syria during the offensive on Idlib province, and lots of hospitals were bombed then, civilian infrastructure destroyed. The UK government sanctioned him for his leadership during that time, human rights watches said he's, you know, potentially responsible as commander for war crimes in Syria. So he's getting all this sanction from the west. This is 2019, 2020. 2020, Putin makes him a hero of Russia. Gives him a big honor, promotes him to Colonel General, gives him command of the Eastern military district and then tasks him with leading the invasion of Kyiv from the north, from Belarus down the Western flank flank of Dnipro River towards Kyiv through towns like Bucha.
We had been reporting about Tania and Kolia, and then we learned that just down the road from where Kolia's body was found was the head, uh, headquarters of Russian troops and Colonel General Alexander Chaiko had been spotted there at the same time as these men were tortured and killed in the garden. I mean, I should say the other thing is Zdvyzhivka, where Kolia was what, and the others were killed, is this tiny, beautiful little village in the woods. Just a place where people go berry picking and mushroom hunting and you know, fishing. It's a very bucolic little town and it became a major forward operating base for the assault on Kyiv and the Russians set up a quite robust infrastructure there. You could walk through the forest and see kind of semi-permanent structures of places to live. They made dining tables and chairs. They set up a sauna in the woods and we heard people on the intercept soldiers saying, Oh yeah, I had a sauna in the woods today. So,they had a field hospital. They were medivacing people in and out to Belarus. They had a, a tremendous amount of infrastructure there, and it was far enough from the front lines that you could do this, you could repair your vehicles, you could treat your wounded. It was safe enough for a high commanding officer like Chaiko to to stay there for a while.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: When it comes to someone like Colonel General Chaiko... So he's a commander in charge of the areas where all of these atrocities that you covered took place. What does this mean about him, regarding the potential for being charged down the road for the alleged war crimes? Like is that enough to be in charge there?
ERIKA KINETZ: So just being in charge is not enough. So, um, there are different standards in Ukrainian court versus international court and different standards for different kinds of, of crimes. So to try to keep this simple, there is this crime that emerged after World War II, the crime of aggression, and that's a very broad crime. It's the easiest. Prosecutors say, this is like the slam dunk crime. It's just much easier to get a conviction on the crime of aggression because it's the crime of waging an illegal war. To go further and, um, to prosecute someone for war crimes or crimes against humanity, you have to actually show that a commander should have known about atrocities, that his troops were committing and was in a position to either stop them or punish them and did not and that's a higher, that's a little bit more difficult to do than just saying that someone has waged an illegal war. Now in Ukraine it's even more complicated because Ukrainian law does not have this concept of command responsibility. So prosecutors would have to show that a commander gave a direct order for an atrocity to be committed. And the head of the war crimes department, you know, has said, this is a problem for us. This makes our job really hard.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Hmm. Where do you see Putin fitting in all of this, um, with these alleged war crimes?
ERIKA KINETZ: I mean, I think there is a real appetite globally to try to hold Russia accountable for atrocities that are happening in Ukraine. And I think part of what's motivating people is looking at the history of other Russian conflicts, for example, in Syria and in the Donbas and um, in Chechnya and in Crimea, um, where nothing happened. So I think there's sort of this, this momentum now around this that is kind of new is what people say to us. Putin– Ukraine cannot try Putin alone. You need an international forum to try someone like Putin. So that means the international criminal court or what a growing number of people are talking about, some kind of special tribunal for the crime of aggression.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. Okay, good. And in our film, just for people listening, we really go into detail on that because I think it, it's one of the most important things. And also Erika, in your writing. So you've said that this project is not just about documenting the suffering, it's about understanding what you do with that suffering. What do you mean by that?
ERIKA KINETZ: Well, I felt like, you know, going into Ukraine, I have these very courageous colleagues who are there on the front lines documenting the bombs falling and you know what's happening to people, you know, right on the front line. And we were coming in at a different time to a different place of the war, trying to not just document the bombs falling, but to ask what happens next? What do you do with this violence? What do you do with this tragedy? You as an individual or you as a society.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: One of the things that I thought about the work you did is you created a record. You did the hard work of understanding and turning the rock over and trying to look at it from every different angle. And now that's part of the record of what's happened in Ukraine. And, and that to me is, you know, part of the, the most powerful part of what we do is just creating that record.
ERIKA KINETZ: Yeah, I think you're right. I feel like we've tried to tell stories in different ways and on different levels from a very personal narrative of one woman's loss, but also showing how that fits into a bigger pattern of what was, what has been happening and continues to happen on the ground in this war. And then finally, also, you know, this accountability piece of who might be held responsible.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Well, I thank you and we, we really have enjoyed working with you, Erika, and I hope we do it again. Um, hopefully not in a war zone, but I do hope we work with you again. Thank you.
ERIKA KINETZ: It's been great working with you too. Thank you so, so much.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Thank you again to Erika Kinetz from the Associated Press for joining us on the Dispatch. To watch the film Putin’s Attack on Ukraine: Documenting War Crimes, head to frontling-dot-org. You can also read and watch more reporting from our ongoing collaboration with the AP on Ukraine, including a 3D visualization of what happened in Bucha, and our digital tracker documenting incidents involving potential war crimes.
This podcast was produced by Emily Pisacreta.
Maria Diokno is our Director of Audience Development.
Katherine Griwert is our Editorial Coordinating Producer.
Frank Koughan is our Senior Producer.
Lauren Ezell is our Senior Editor of Investigations.
Andrew Metz is our Managing Editor.
I’m Raney Aronson-Rath, editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE.
Music in this episode is by Stellwagen Symphonette. The FRONTLINE Dispatch is produced at GBH and powered by PRX.
Thanks for listening.
