Bucha was the war’s bloodiest civilian massacre. These 13 commanders led the troops accused of rape, torture and execution
Dominic Hauschild, Oleksiy Morozov
September 27, 2025
The Sunday Times
Russian forces occupied Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, for just under a month. Across those 29 days in early 2022, they committed acts of such barbarity that this Ukrainian town will forever be synonymous with war crimes; this conflict’s Srebrenica.
Residents were killed and tortured in their hundreds; more than 100 were buried in a mass grave outside the Orthodox Christian church. Others were murdered as they fled.
The basement of a children’s summer camp was converted into a torture chamber where women and children were systematically raped. Soldiers slashed throats, mutilated victims and killed parents in front of their children.
More than 500 civilian corpses have been recovered. Dozens more are still missing. The United Nations has described it as ethnic cleansing and a crime against humanity, yet Russia claims the scene was staged by British special forces.
Today, however, The Sunday Times reveals the identities of the 13 commanding officers in charge of Russian troops accused of the Bucha massacres.
They include Colonel General Aleksandr Chayko, commander of the Eastern Military District, who led the Russian army at the outset of the invasion and was the most senior officer on the ground in Ukraine.
This is Major General Sergei Chubarykin, head of the elite 76th Guards Air Assault Division. Soldiers under his direct command allegedly carried out the majority of the war crimes in Bucha, including executions, torture and widespread looting.
Colonel Azatbek Omurbekov, from the 64th Separate Motorised Rifle Brigade, personally had a hand in “gross violations of human rights” including “direct responsibility in killings, rape and torture”, according to the US state department.
Their identities have been compiled by independent lawyers and investigators using open-source intelligence, and all 13 have been confirmed by the Ukrainian security services.
This war is one of the first in which investigators have been able to use CCTV, phone video and social media to prosecute war crimes.
Eight names have been verified with the Office of the Prosecutor-General (OPG) in Ukraine and are supported by legal notices of suspicion, which have been issued by Kyiv as a precursor to possible formal prosecution in local courts and the International Criminal Court.
Five men have been identified using notices issued for their subordinates, cross-referenced against publicly available Russian military records. These officers do not individually have notices of suspicion against them.
More than 80 soldiers under their combined command have already been officially identified under suspicion of carrying out crimes in Bucha. Many more participated but so far it has not been possible to identify them.
If an individual soldier commits a crime, under the Geneva conventions their superior is not absolved of responsibility. However, there is a high burden of proof to charge a commanding officer in an international court for the crimes of a subordinate. To be culpable, investigators must prove that officers must or should have known that the subordinate was committing a crime and did not take all feasible measures to prevent it.
Prosecutors must present evidence that links a specific military unit and its commanders to the offences.
Bodies left in the street
The assault on Bucha, a town of 37,000, began three days into the invasion of Ukraine, on February 27, 2022, when a convoy of Russian soldiers advanced toward Kyiv from staging points in nearby Belarus.
They were beaten back, but on March 3 returned ruthless and prepared, sending in paratroopers from the 234th Guards Air Assault Regiment, some of the country’s best-trained and equipped troops.
The paratroopers set up a base on an industrial site on Yablunska Street, Bucha’s main arterial road, for their reign of terror.
A day later, reinforcements arrived from the 76th Guards Air Assault Division and the 35th and 36th combined arms armies. They shot at anything that moved. Passers-by were killed, their bodies left to rot in the street.
Natalia Plotnikova, 45, lived on Yablunska Street when she was stopped by Russian soldiers after taking an injured neighbour to hospital. They forced her to strip to her underwear in the freezing cold by the roadside with seven others, including children and an elderly man. After an hour, more soldiers arrived, split the group in half and took four women around a corner. “We heard a burst of automatic fire. I saw a young woman being dragged under the arms by two men,” she said. “Then the tanks started up and drove off. I tried to take in the scene but I was told, ‘Look again and I’ll shoot you in the head.’”
After another hour she was released. She believes the women were killed. Plotnikova said the scene she witnessed was typical of the occupation.
Uncovering war crimes
As the Russians got closer to Kyiv, Ukraine fought back, reclaiming huge amounts of territory. On March 31, the Ukrainians took back Bucha. The next day, Wayne Jordash was driving
through the forest in a white rented hatchback, steering around bullet-riddled tree trunks and burnt-out vehicles. He was with Anna Mykytenko, a Ukrainian lawyer. They needed to get to Bucha immediately to help verify the reports they were hearing of crimes against humanity. “All the road signs had been removed to make it harder for the Russians to know where they were going,” Jordash said. “We came to a crossroads and we saw in the distance somebody with a gun. Perhaps we were being naive but Anna got out to speak to him; when he raised his gun we realised that, actually, this was a Russian soldier on the run.”
Jordash is president of the legal foundation Global Rights Compliance. Funded by the UK, United States and European Union, his “mobile justice teams” travel the country teaching prosecutors and law enforcement how to carry out their investigations.
There are seven such teams working across Ukraine today, but Bucha was the test case for how it would work. The aim was to help the Ukrainians piece together what had happened to lay charges against high-ranking enemy soldiers. “The evidence that war crimes had been committed was scattered all over the town and we needed to take this slow, methodological approach in the midst of all the chaos,” Jordash said. “That could mean everything from the diaries of Russian soldiers to helmets and uniforms.”
Their work has involved searching homes abandoned by the Russians where, among the piles of empty alcohol bottles, faeces and rotten, half-eaten food, there was invaluable information. Jordash said: “There were manuals, which had been handed out to Russian soldiers explaining their overall war objectives, and soldiers had written their names inside them. There were discarded uniforms showing the soldier’s unit.”
Elsewhere, the debris of war included a carelessly forgotten list of codenames used to refer to senior officers.
In other instances, investigators interviewed witnesses and prisoners of war, accessed CCTV and used facial recognition software. This enabled them to capture images of soldiers’ faces and start trawling social media and other public resources to find their identities.
The 13 commanders
Three years on, through these methods, the first chart has been compiled mapping the Russian officers they believe are responsible for what happened in Bucha.
The Sunday Times has corroborated the names of these officers and their actions using translations of formal notices of suspicion issued by Ukrainian prosecutors, as well as documents supplied by, and interviews with, Ukraine’s security service (SBU) and the OPG. We also verified them using images and video obtained from investigators and lawyers, as well as information published by the Russian military and on Russian social media.
At the top sits the commander of the Eastern Military District at the outset of the war in Ukraine, Colonel General Aleksandr Chayko. Before his commission he led Russian troops in Syria, where he was sanctioned by the UK for ordering attacks on hospitals and schools in Idlib; 1,600 civilians were killed.
He was the lead commander in Ukraine when Russian troops entered Bucha. There was already enough evidence to charge him with the crime of aggression — the use of armed force by a state against the sovereignty, integrity or independence of another state — but more was needed if officials were to levy a stronger war crimes charge that could go before an international court.
Prosecutors needed to prove that he knew what his troops were doing, and that he could have stopped them.
Jordash said: “Between Chayko and what’s happening on the ground there are dozens of mid-ranking commanders and you have to build cases against them before you get to the person in charge. Once you have built up this pattern of criminality, you can show who the commanders were that implemented this pattern and you can build a case against them.”
One of those mid-ranking commanders was Sergei Chubarykin, now a major general, who at that time reported directly to Chayko. In charge of the 76th Guards Air Assault Division, part of the Eastern Military District, he was 41 at the time of the massacre.
Like Chayko he had served in Syria, propping up the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. It was the soldiers under his command who are alleged to have carried out the majority of the war crimes in the town, including executions, torture and widespread looting.
Soldiers under Chubarykin’s command have been identified and it is alleged that they conducted “cleansing” operations, hunting people from lists and going door to door identifying potential threats. Those they picked up were tortured and executed.
The Dossier Centre, a London-based investigative organisation funded by Russian opposition figures, analysed phone calls placed by soldiers subordinate to Chubarykin, which were intercepted by the SBU.
During the calls one soldier revealed the orders he was given: “It does not matter whether they’re civilians or not. Kill everyone.” Notices of suspicion have been issued against Chayko and Chubarykin for committing war crimes.
Daylight executions
Reporting in to Chayko and Chubarykin was Artem Gorodilov, the commander who led the 234th regiment. A notice of suspicion has not been issued against Gorodilov, but sources in the SBU said they believed he was complicit in the crimes of his subordinates. Analysis of Ukrainian legal documents has found troops under his command were accused of committing at least 40 war crimes during the month-long occupation of Bucha, the most by far of any unit stationed in the region. Offences include murder, looting and rape.
Among the documents listing the codenames of Russian officers was evidence that he was operating under the call sign Uran.
In surveillance video first obtained by The New York Times and verified by the OPG, Gorodilov can be seen standing on Yablunska Street as soldiers under his command execute civilians in broad daylight.
One woman riding a bicycle past Yablunska Street was killed after a tank fired a shell at her. The murder took place fewer than 100 metres from where Gorodilov stood.
Days after the occupation of Bucha ended, Gorodilov was promoted to colonel. Since then, he appears to have fallen out with Russian authorities and is on trial in Moscow accused of fraud.
Butcher of Bucha
Lieutenant Colonel Azatbek Omurbekov was one of the bloodiest commanders stationed in Bucha during the occupation. Head of the 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade, elite infantry, he has previously been identified and sanctioned by eight separate jurisdictions and a notice of suspicion has been issued against him.
The British sanctions list accuses Omurbekov of being in “direct command” of troops involved in the killing of civilians in Bucha. The US said he had personally committed gross violations of human rights, including extrajudicial killings.
Ukrainian officials have nicknamed him the “Butcher of Bucha” because of his direct hand in these crimes against humanity.
After reports of Omurbekov’s crimes and those of his subordinates emerged, Putin announced he would confer honours upon the 64th brigade. The Russian ministry of defence promoted him and awarded him the title Hero of Russia.
Shot in the back
Of the five officers who have not had notices of suspicion issued against their names, troops under their command have been accused or convicted of committing war crimes. All of them have been named by the SBU as potential war criminals.
Nikolai Sokovikov, a 28-year-old lieutenant in the 5th Guards Tank Brigade, is one of the only men to have been convicted, although it is unlikely he will ever see the inside of a Ukrainian prison cell. He was sentenced to life in prison in absentia after a trial in Kyiv.
The case was built after CNN handed Ukrainian police surveillance video of a Russian soldier shooting two civilians, Leonid Plyats and Sergei Muravytsky, at a bike shop on the Kyiv-Chop motorway in Bucha on March 19: Plyats, 68, worked as a guard at the shop; Muravytsky, 61, sold bikes. The video shows how Russian soldiers conversed with the pair at the building’s gate. As the civilians walked away, a soldier opened fire. Muravytsky died on the spot. Plyats managed to drag himself to a security office, where he later died of blood loss. The soldiers embarked on a looting spree.
When the prosecutor’s office in Bucha received the video, they sent it to their team of 100 people with expertise in open-source investigations. The prosecutor-general’s office confirmed that state-of-the-art facial recognition software had identified one of the men in the video as Sokovikov.
Investigators cross-referenced Sokovikov’s face against public social media profiles. They learnt he was from Omsk, in Siberia, and was married with two children.
On the strength of this evidence, prosecutors issued a notice of suspicion: “On that day Nikolai Sergeevich Sokovikov fired a total of no less than 12 shots from automatic firearms into the back and pelvis of Leonid Oleksiyovych Plyats and Sergei Yuriiovych Muravytsky.”
Using Russian military records, legal experts have identified the lieutenant’s commanding officer as Colonel Andrei Kondrov, head of the 5th Guards Tank Brigade, who is named as one of the 13 commanders. He has been identified by the SBU, although he does not have a notice of suspicion against him individually.
‘Every crime will be punished’
In the pine forests on the edge of Bucha, local investigators are still uncovering bodies of civilians who were taken out and shot. The SBU says it has investigated more than 100,000 suspected war crimes since the 2022 invasion. In Kyiv Ruslan Kravchenko, the prosecutor-general of Ukraine, is determined to identify the soldiers who committed murders. “Morally, it is painful to think about, but you have to put that aside to do your job,” he said through a translator on a call from his wood-panelled office. “But I intend to identify as many of the Russian soldiers who carried out killings in Bucha as possible.”
A spokesman from the Russian embassy said Bucha was “a staged provocation by Ukraine’s special services”. He added: “Its goal was to disrupt the talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul in 2022 and to demonise Russia.”
Kravchenko said it was vital that the world continued to seek justice for what took place in Bucha and elsewhere in Ukraine. “The last time there was such a tribunal was after the Second World War. But even today, at the moment, there are criminals being prosecuted for the crimes they committed more than eighty years ago,” Kravchenko said. “If we continue to have the support of the United Kingdom, the European Union and the United States of America, we will certainly achieve a just peace and every war criminal will be punished. Let it happen in ten years from now, or twenty years from now, but it will happen.”
Dominic Hauschild is a general news reporter for The Sunday Times. Previously, he was a freelance journalist at The Times covering politics and news, and a producer on Times Radio’s mid-morning politics programme.