Kira Tolstyakova is an editor for Schemes, the investigative unit of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service.
A company co-owned by a powerlifter who is linked to the governor of Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region and the business partner of an FBI fugitive received nearly $41 million in public funds for road repair, a journalistic investigation by Schemes found.
A Russian commander stabbed an elderly Ukrainian woman to death during the retreat from Izyum, according to a soldier in his unit. Evidence of the alleged war crime first emerged from a phone intercept by Ukrainian intelligence.
A Ukrainian man spent months digging through the wreckage of an apartment block to find the body of a close friend from his school days. Pavlo Holub lives in Izyum, and he carried out this work during the six-month Russian occupation of the town before it was liberated by Ukrainian forces.
Some residents of Shevchenkove tell Schemes, the investigative unit of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service, how they withstood torture and threats to resist collaboration with the Russian forces occupying their village in Ukraine's Kharkiv region. Others describe what compelled them to cooperate.
“Right in front of me, they were simply shot and thrown into the cellar,” a survivor told Schemes. Russian soldiers summarily executed five civilians at a village post office in northern Ukraine days after the February 24 invasion, relatives and eyewitnesses say.
At least twice since it invaded Ukraine, Russia has clustered warplanes on territory it has seized in the south, creating platforms for further attacks but presenting prominent targets for counterstrikes by Kyiv’s forces, officials, analysts, and satellite imagery indicate.
