Among the Russian perpetrators of the mass murders of civilians west of Kiev, Lieutenant Colonel Azatbek Omurbekov is said to be in particular.
His name is Mikhail Tkach, and he’s not ashamed. This 20-year-old Russian soldier with a round, chubby face was identified as one of the perpetrators of the atrocities committed in Boutcha (340 dead) and found on the Russian social network V Kontakte (UK) by Ukrainian journalist Andriy Tsaplienko. †You are a war criminal and an executionerthe apostrophe is a surfer. On your hands is the blood of civilians executed in Boutcha. You will roast in hell!“Mikhail Tkach immediately responds to VK, casually stating that his unit, barely withdrawn from the outskirts of Kiev, seems ready to return to battle: “I’m already on my way home, and I’m going to fuck you soon. As soon as I find you I’ll cut your head off†
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Such verbal abuse echoes the very real violence perpetrated in the peaceful residential town of Boutcha, during 33 days of Russian occupation: gratuitous executions, gang rapes, torture, systematic looting, in the style of the crooks of the Middle Ages.
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The Ukrainian technosphere, aided by the disclosure on April 3 of the coordinates of 120,000 Russian soldiers by the hackers of the Anonymous group, has made it possible to identify those likely responsible for Boutcha’s war crimes. According to Inform Napalm, a Ukrainian online surveillance collective that scours the web and correlates open information, the prime culprits belong to Unit 51460, which is equivalent to 64and Russian Army motorized rifle brigade based in Kniazé-Volkonskoye, a village on the Chinese border, near the Amur River and the city of Khabarovsk.
His numbers, judging by the regimental photos available, are mainly Manchus, a Tungus people from the Russian Far East. Its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Azatbek Asanbekovich Omurbekov, is a stocky officer in his forties, pictured in November 2021 after being blessed by the Orthodox Patriarch of Khabarovsk.
Post-mortem beheadings
Other units moving through Boutcha may have committed some of the kills, but aren’t as precisely targeted as the 64th Brigade. On Wednesday, a Pentagon official cautiously admitted that he “would it be possible to identify the Russian units responsible for the abuses“, a task that visibly “highest priorityfor the Biden administration.
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The horrors perpetrated by Omurbekov’s men are breathtaking. †Children lay outside, their hands tied behind their backs. Children… They tied up children and slaughtered them like dogs“, testifies the Ukrainian journalist, Evgeny Spirin. Other bodies are trapped. Another was beheaded postmortem. Many corpses perish for weeks without the killers, looting and pillaging the surrounding houses, concerned with the smell, the vermin, their own hygiene. Why else would they have done it, if the corpses of more than 200 fellow paratroopers during the battle of Hostomel Airport, 5 kilometers away, were never buried or repatriated themselves?
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Members of an orphaned army of his “greatnessIn the Soviet era, known for its internal violence and relative discipline, these young soldiers may have been fooled by the Kremlin’s predictions that the Ukrainian people would be liberated from “neo-Nazis” and “ultranationalistswould welcome them with flowers. Instead, they came face to face with enemy civilians and brutally reacted, killing all the men of combat age as in Boutcha and raping the women. Alcohol, laziness, the absence of morally engaged superiors have broken the last ditches of the civilized world. Assuming that an international tribunal hears Boutcha’s case, the question of premeditation will arise among the suspects. †I’ll just say that when you look at the footage, when you see people tied up, with bullets in the head, it seems terribly planned, premeditated“Adds the Pentagon official, on condition of anonymity.
For the first time in history, war crimes perpetrators are no longer anonymous. Their names, like Mikhail Tkach’s, are scattered across long lists that are open to everyone. Formally identified, unlike most executioners from Oradour-sur-Glane, My Lai in Vietnam, Vukovar in Croatia or Srebrenica in Bosnia, they will be hunted for their entire lives unless Ukraine becomes their grave in the coming battles.
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