Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Centre launches investigation into Russian war crimes

The Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Centre near Kyiv is co-launching a new unit to help investigate Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

Babyn Yar is the ravine by which more than 33,000 Ukrainian Jews were shot and killed by occupying Nazi soldiers over just two days in 1941, and was itself damaged in an attack by Russian forces earlier this month, albeit accidentally.

This week, the BYHMC said it would launch the new unit with French non-governmental organisation Yahad-In Unum, led by Father Patrick Desbois, who investigated the killing of Ukrainian Jews by Nazis during the Holocaust.

The new unit will aim to “discover the horrors of the [Russian] crimes committed on a massive scale, day-after-day, against the Ukrainian civilian populations in Mariupol, Kharkiv, Mikolayiv and beyond”.

It will collect as many filmed testimonies as possible of the victims of war crimes, examining the charge that civilians – including women, the elderly, and children – have been targeted without any link to military targets.

“Innocent citizens trying to leave cities are killed by bullets in their cars or in the street,” they said in a joint statement. “Schools, kindergartens, and hospitals are targeted by Russian missiles. The voice of a witness is a cry thrown to the sky. It must be heard by the International Criminal Court.”

Countries such as Germany have already launched investigations, and Desbois said eyewitnesses would be “key to confront the denial of Putin and his helpers”.

Yahad In Unum investigated the “Holocaust by Bullets”, including the shooting and killing of Ukrainian Jews by Nazi soldiers, by building a special methodology and interviewing more than 8,000 witnesses.

“I never thought that, in 2022, I would need to once again be investigating war crimes on these same lands,” he said.