The northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv was one of the hardest hit during Moscow’s offensive into the region last year, before Ukrainian forces prevailed. Located some forty kilometers from the Russian border, it is still under regular fire from the invaders.
On the outskirts of the city, in a place that is kept secret, the prosecutor’s spokesman, Dmytro Chubenko, shows what has been called the Kharkiv missile graveyard. “This is a fragment of a cluster bomb. It has these cuts in it. When that type of projectile explodes, the fragments fly, hit people and cause extensive blood loss and often death.”
More than a thousand missiles have arrived here since the start of the war. Sorted by size and shape, they are analyzed to provide international courts with evidence of alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces against the civilian population.
“Prosecutors and investigators describe this ammunition, in order to connect the specific type of shelling and the time of the shelling, so that we can detail and determine the houses destroyed, and the people killed,” Chubenko explains.
The ammunition has caused severe massacres, according to the prosecutor’s spokesman “more than 1,500 civilians died during the shelling of Kharkiv and the region and 2,700 were injured […]We now have more than six thousand criminal proceedings related to violations of the laws of war. That is, Article 438 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, which is related to shelling.”
