One of the guys Leonid reached out to spoke to the media anonymously and said they immediately took action. Unfortunately, Leonid had already lost a lot of blood when the first Ukrainian arrived. They tried to retrieve his body, but the Russians spotted them and shot at them multiple times as they were escaping. They tried to fight back but were unsuccessful. Since they were a civilian volunteer force, they didn’t have the firepower to fight the Russians on site.
He added that Leonid said the Russians told him they don’t kill civilians, so he was caught off-guard when they were shot.
“I said can you at least bandage yourself up? And he told me, Vasya, I barely crawled here. Everything hurts so much. I feel really bad,” Vasyl remembers the call.
“So I told him to hang in there and started phoning the territorial defence.”
A couple of minutes later, the CCTV detected the Russians were looting the place, stealing bicycles, scooters, and other files in the director’s office. They even drank whisky as they flipped through the cupboards.
Sasha and Kostya, the volunteers who tried to retrieve Leonid, were forced to wait. Unfortunately, it was not until later that they realized Leonid was already dead.
“We talked to him on the phone, we tried to calm him. We told him, “it’s ok. Everything will be ok. You’ll survive,” Sasha tells me they did their best to comfort him.
“We said we were on our way. Maybe that helped him. Maybe. But unfortunately, by the time we made it, he was dead.”
War Crime
After more than two months of investigation, the Ukrainian prosecutors finally have the images and other documents they need to file this to international courts as a war crime. In addition, the prosecutors have reportedly informed Moscow of their pre-trial investigation. However, they refused to reveal how they identified the Russian suspect.
The Bucha Prosecutor’s Office said the suspect has finally been identified as Nikolay Sergeevich Sokovikov. Now, Sokovikov is being charged with “violation of the laws and customs of war” and “international murder.”
With the pre-trial ongoing, Leonid and his boss’ families are one step closer to getting the justice they deserve.
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