Alexandra Ramos
Editor’s note: This story contains explicit images.
(CNN) — A gray car speeds down a highway near Kyiv, heading toward the Ukrainian capital. As he approaches a Russian position, he makes a sharp U-turn and stops shortly after.
Then a man opens the door. A second later, he’s on the ground.
“He raised his hands above his head, and at that moment, he was shot,” Oleksandr Radzikhovskiy of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense forces told CNN.
Radzikhovskiy is a member of the Bugatti company, a special intelligence-gathering unit operating on the outskirts of Kyiv.
The unit recorded the March 7 incident on the E-40, a key road connecting the western city of Lviv with Kyiv, with a drone while Russian forces controlled the area.
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In the footage, Russian tanks are seen facing east toward Kyiv, the direction Russian forces were advancing in early March, as civilians tried to flee a nearby town.
“A group of cars was fleeing from a small town, on the outskirts of Irpin, where they had been sitting for about 10 days, without food, water or warm clothes,” Radzikhovskiy said. “They didn’t know what was going on, they didn’t know that the Russian forces had advanced and taken this position.”
“There was an ambush by a Russian tank and Russian personnel,” Radzikhovskiy said. “They opened fire.”
A man raises his hands in the air moments before he was fatally shot on the E-40 highway on March 7.
In the video, after the man falls to the ground, Russian soldiers approach the vehicle.
Two people, who CNN later confirmed with their families, were six-year-old Gordey Iovenko and a family friend get out of the car.
The woman wraps her arm around Iovenko, trying to protect him from the death that surrounds them.
Iovenko had just lost his parents, Maksim, 32, who was lying motionless on the ground, and his mother, Ksenia, 37, who was killed by Russian gunfire inside the car.
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Iovenko and the woman are then herded into a wooded area by Russian forces. Meanwhile, other troops search the car and inspect Maksim Iovenko’s body before dragging it to the side of the road.
The BBC first reported on Iovenko’s deaths.
Radzikhovskiy’s drone unit, which was only 500 meters away, filmed the entire scene.
“…We captured everything, every moment and detail of that murder,” he said. “Since then we have had to live with that image in our heads,” he added.
Drone operator Oleksandr Radzikhovskiy left his job in England to help fight the Russian invasion.
Nearly a month after the incident, CNN visited the scene on the E-40 highway near Myla, where the destruction Russian forces left behind in their retreat was on full display.
Decomposing corpses were strewn along the road, charred bodies were still propped up against the vehicles they were driving and the same car seen in the drone footage, which burned to the ground, was in the same spot where it was found. stopped on March 7.
Drone footage from March 7 (left) shows the car Maksim Iovenko had been in before he was shot. An image from almost a month later (right) shows that the car and the charred corpses had not moved.
“You can see this is like a firing zone… Cars are lined up,” said Radzikhovskiy, who showed CNN the scene of the incident.
“There are no cars (beyond a certain point) because they didn’t let them come. They just fired as soon as they got close,” he added.
The Kremlin has rejected accusations that it has targeted civilians or civilian infrastructure in what it calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine. He also downplayed reports of murders in cities like Bucha, Irpin or Borodianka as fake news and announced his own investigation into it.
A member of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense forces inspects a destroyed Russian armored vehicle on the E-40 highway.
However, CNN saw the remains of a camp used by the Russian military in the wooded area where Iovenko and the woman were taken. It was filled with Russian military rations, currency and abandoned equipment, some with “V” symbols painted on them, proof that his soldiers held that position for about three weeks.
Iovenko and the family friend were later released by the Russians, their relatives told CNN.
Radzikhovskiy’s team sent footage of the incident to the Ukrainian prosecutor for investigation and also sent it to the UK Metropolitan Police’s war crimes unit, which has been collecting evidence of war crimes in Ukraine for a possible future trial.
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova told CNN: “When we see such cases where our cars are burned and the people inside the cars were shot and burned, and we see that it’s systemic, it’s not just war crimes, They are crimes against humanity and we will do everything possible to prove it.”
The grim episode further prompted Radzikhovskiy’s unit to continue helping the Ukrainian army with their drones.
A decomposing body lies in the middle of the E-40 highway, which connects Lviv to Kyiv, a day after it was retaken by Ukrainian forces.
Radzikhovskiy, a senior Ukrainian software engineer who lived in St. Albans, England, before the war, said he couldn’t sit idly by while his country was attacked. He returned to the Ukraine to try to help fight the Russian invasion the best way he could.
“In normal life, before the war, we were civilians who liked to casually fly drones and just make nice YouTube videos,” he said. “But when the war started, we actually became a vital part of the resistance.”
His unit regularly flies its drones, documenting Russian positions and communicating them to the Ukrainian military.
“They call us eyes, because we are eyes, we can see. And if you can see and you can report, you can make artillery strikes,” he said, adding, “In good times it’s a matter of minutes between detection and attack.”
Radzikhovskiy’s unit has shared hours of drone footage showing Russian tanks operating in the forests around Kyiv. In one video, moments after the tanks are seen, they are hit by Ukrainian artillery.
The unit is a grassroots operation, using civilian store-bought drones, but its method is how Radzikhovskiy feels most comfortable. And he is forced to continue the work.
“There is no other way, we cannot withdraw, because if we do, Ukraine would not exist.”
The-CNN-Wire
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