Ghanna Mamonova has been documenting war crimes for two years. We talked with her about the hopelessness of the victims, the rudeness of the investigators and why the Russians torture

During the two and a half years of the Great War, the Russian military committed more than 137 000 war crimes. Documentaries help law enforcement officers process a large array of evidence about them. According to previously approved protocols, they interview victims and witnesses and transfer the materials to the Office of the Prosecutor General. This is exactly what a former reporter of Babel and a documentarian at the "Laboratory of Public Interest Journalism" Ghanna Mamonova has been doing for the second year. She documented Russian airstrikes and deportations in Borodyanka, researched the network of death camps in the Kherson region and the environmental consequences of blowing up the Kakhovka HPP. We recorded an interview with her for the Babel YouTube channel. These are the brief summaries of our conversation.

Until the middle of 2023, victims and witnesses of war crimes actively told documentaries and law enforcement officers about their experiences. However, fewer and fewer people are now testifying. At the beginning of the great war, it was important for people to speak out. They were faced with so much stress and grief that they needed to talk about it just to reframe. Over time, these crimes became expected, and evil became commonplace.

In addition, people are afraid of the Russiansʼ response. Someone is afraid that the Russians will strike their house with a drone for testifying, someone has many relatives in the occupation. The Russians captured the relatives of those who testified about crimes in the occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia region. There was a case when the Russians called people in the territory controlled by Ukraine so that they could hear how their relatives were being tortured.

However, people increasingly rarely see the point of testifying. First of all, due to the inaction of law enforcement officers. It is true that any law enforcement system would not be able to cope with such a large number of crimes. But victims and relatives of the dead complain about the way they communicate with them. Law enforcement officers can be rude to people, do not answer calls, and do not provide necessary information.

It often seems that law enforcement officers do not care or do not understand that they are working with victims of war crimes. They often lack humanity. Sometimes the victims see that the crimes against them are not investigated — the investigation is not closed even for what happened in Borodyanka.

Many former prisoners also encountered bureaucracy. Due to mistakes in Borodyanka, people took DNA tests two or three times to identify their relatives, sometimes they took these expensive tests at their own expense. Sometimes it is difficult for people to get a document confirming that they were in captivity. I have an example of two people who were together in captivity. After their release, they collected the same documents and both testified. But one was given the status of a prisoner and paid 100 thousand hryvnias, the other was refused.

In a month, we interview dozens of witnesses and victims. Right now weʼre focusing on double-tap strikes and drone drops on civilians. The latter is a fairly new phenomenon that began in the Kherson region and became widespread on the coast of the Dnipro and in the Pokrovsk direction. People say they canʼt even go outside to feed their dog — drones are constantly in the air. One woman in the Kherson region has already survived three drone attacks in six months: explosives were dropped on her car, her house and her cellar.

Documenting war crimes is painful, difficult and exhausting. There are such stories, after which I intuitively wash my hands every hour or two, it is so difficult. Some stories are then dreamed, you cannot talk about them. I could not return to Borodyanka for two years. Only now I feel that somehow I survived this story and it is letting me go little by little.

However, I document war crimes because I canʼt do anything else right now. It also helps me to go through my own experience related to the war. I was born and lived in Luhansk for a long time. During these two years, I heard from the victims a lot of what I wanted to hear for eight years. Before the start of the full-scale invasion, I often felt indifferent towards the occupied territories [Luhansk and Donetsk regions]. Before the invasion, few understood what it was like to have your home occupied. Some of them even said that we wanted it ourselves, but it is not so.

Some of the former prisoners tell how, after several weeks of torture, the occupiers change their attitude and communicate as if they were friends. At first, a person is severely beaten for two or three weeks, tortured with electric shock, and sexualized crimes are committed. And then they start to communicate "in their own way". The executioners are already starting to tell something about themselves, their families, hobbies. I am still looking for answers for myself, how it is possible to first torture for weeks, and then talk so differently.

I canʼt explain it, but I realized that for Russians, torturing others is not about physical pleasure and not about sadism. I think itʼs just a job for them. Apparently, they grew up in such conditions all their lives and do not understand at all what a normal attitude towards each other is, what love is, what respect is. Therefore, what we cannot explain to ourselves is the norm and standard of life for them.

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