KYIV, Ukraine — Three days after the first Russian bombs struck Ukraine, Andrii Kuprash, the head of a village north of Kyiv, walked into a forest near his home and began to dig. He carved out a shallow pit as a just-in-case, a place to lie low if he needed.
A week later, Kuprash got a call around 8 a.m. from an unknown number. A man speaking Russian asked if he was the village head.
“No, you’ve got the wrong number,” Kuprash lied. “We will find you anyway,” the man responded. “It’s better to cooperate with us.’” Kuprash grabbed a camping kit and his warmest coat and headed for his hole in the woods.
The hunt was on.
Erika Kinetz, Associated Press
Andrii Kuprash, the head of Babyntsi village north of Kyiv, Ukraine, poses for a photograph on April 30 in front of the local town hall.
In a deliberate, widespread campaign, Russian forces systematically targeted influential Ukrainians to neutralize resistance through detention, torture and executions, an Associated Press investigation has found. The strategy appears to violate the laws of war and could help build a case for genocide.
Russian troops hunted Ukrainians by name, using lists prepared with the help of their intelligence services. In the crosshairs were government officials, journalists, activists, veterans, religious leaders and lawyers.
The AP documented a sample of 61 cases across Ukraine, drawing on Russian lists of names obtained by Ukrainian authorities, photographic evidence of abuse, Russian media accounts and interviews with dozens of victims, family and friends, and Ukrainian officials and activists.
Some victims were held at detention sites, where they were interrogated, beaten and subjected to electric shocks, survivors said. Some ended up in Russia. Others died.
In three cases, Russians tortured people into informing on others. In three other cases, Russians seized family members, including a child, to exert pressure. The pattern was similar across the country, according to testimonies AP collected from occupied and formerly occupied territories around Kyiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Chernihiv and Donetsk regions.
“Clearly what you have here is the playbook of an authoritarian regime that wants to immediately decapitate the area and eliminate the leadership,” said Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues who is advising Ukraine on prosecutions.
The lists are part of growing evidence that shows much of the violence in Ukraine was planned rather than random. Russia has used brutality as a strategy of war, conceived and implemented within the command structures of its military and intelligence services. The Associated Press has also documented patterns of violence against civilians, including lethal “cleansing operations” along a front of the war commanded by a Russian general implicated in war crimes in Syria.
Bernat Armangue, Associated Press
Residents walks amid debris on Nov. 24 after a Russian attack in Kherson, southern Ukraine. In a deliberate, widespread campaign, Russian forces systematically targeted influential Ukrainians, nationally and locally, to neutralize resistance through detention, torture and executions, an Associated Press investigation has found.Â
Led by the Federal Security Service (FSB), Russian intelligence spent months compiling hit lists before the Feb. 24 invasion, according to leaked U.S. intelligence and U.K. national security analysts. Ukrainian intelligence indicates that the division of Russia’s spy agency tasked with planning the subjugation and occupation of Ukraine — the Ninth Directorate of the FSB’s Fifth Service — scaled up sharply in the summer of 2021, according to the Royal United Services Institute, a prominent defense think tank in London.
“This political strategy of targeted killings was directed from a very high level within the Kremlin,” said Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at RUSI.
The Center for Civil Liberties, a Ukrainian NGO, has amassed more than 770 cases of civilian captives since Russia’s February invasion, but emphasizes that they are the tip of the iceberg.
While Kuprash hid in his hole in the woods, more than a dozen Russian soldiers ransacked his house and held a knife to the throat of his 15-year-old son. They threatened to tear out his guts if he didn’t give up his dad.
Father and son had set up a code: Call me “Tato” — dad — if everything is OK. Call me “Andrii” if there is trouble.
Surrounded by soldiers, his son went out to the garden and hollered “Andrii! Andrii! Andrii!” as loud as his voice would carry.
Three weeks later, Russians again came for Kuprash at his home. A commander sat him down at his kitchen table and, at gunpoint, promised him “a great life” in exchange for information about Ukrainian positions, as well as names of Ukrainian veterans and patriots. Kuprash insisted he didn’t have access to that information.
Dozens of locals from Babyntsi village had gathered outside. Kuprash thought maybe the crowd had saved him.
Next time, he wouldn’t be so lucky.
On March 30, three Russian vehicles pulled up to the town hall.
“Who’s the village head?” the soldiers demanded.
“I am,” Kuprash said, stepping forward.
“Andrii?” they asked.
“Yes.”
“We found you,” one soldier said. “You are dead.”
The soldiers hit Kuprash in the head with a rifle, threw him in the back of the car and drove towards a cemetery in the forest. One of the Russians pulled out a long knife and held it against Kuprash’s throat.
“This knife killed nine people. You’ll be the tenth,” he said.
They accused him of sending Russian troop positions to Ukrainian authorities, which Kuprash told AP he had been doing. Under the laws of war, Russians could detain spotters like Kuprash in humane conditions, but never disappear or torture them, human rights lawyers say.
When they got to the forest cemetery, dozens of Russian soldiers forced Kuprash to strip and shoved him around in a circle, jeering and insulting him, he said. The Russians handed Kuprash a shovel and ordered him to dig himself a grave in the frozen earth.
As Ukraine claws back more territory from Russia, the accounting of the disappeared grows. Finding them and bringing them home is not easy.
One of Kherson’s disappeared was Serhii Tsyhipa, a blogger, activist and military veteran. He vanished March 12 and reappeared six weeks later on pro-Russian television, thin and hollow-eyed, regurgitating Russian propaganda. Ukrainian police analyzed the video and told AP he was clearly under duress.
Tsyhipa’s family has spoken with lawyers, NGOs, international organizations, Ukrainian intelligence and journalists. Nothing has brought him home.
Kuprash was one of the lucky ones. After the grave he dug was about a foot deep, the commander threw his clothes back at him and told him to have a cigarette.
They headed back towards the village. The commander cursed Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Kuprash kept his mouth shut and prayed.
They stopped in front of the town hall. Kuprash climbed off.
“Live,” the commander said. He turned and drove away.
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‘We will find you:’ Russians hunt down Ukrainians by name for detention, torture or execution
Associated Press
Two carloads of Russians came for Viktor Maruniak on his 60th birthday.
It was March 21. Maruniak, the head of Stara Zburivka village, in Ukraine's southern Kherson region, said he and three other local men were taken to a nearby hotel, blindfolded, handcuffed, beaten, strangled and forced to strip naked in below zero weather.
"They'd point a gun toward our heads or toward the head of someone else, saying if you don't say something, we will kill them," Maruniak said. "Something was turned off in my head. It helped me survive. I was out of my body."
After several days, he said, he was taken to a second detention center and tortured with electric shocks. They asked where weapons were stored. He said his captors' vehicles and uniforms, along with documents he spotted and conversations he overheard, indicated that he had been taken by a special paramilitary police force under Russia's National Guard.
To his surprise, he was released three weeks later, on the condition that he return to his village as an informant.
Instead, he fled to Latvia. He said he had nine broken ribs. Photographs taken after his ordeal show him thin and withered, with injuries to his hands, back, buttocks and leg. He looks with a level gaze at the camera, a man beyond shock or sorrow, as if nothing human beings might do to each other would surprise him anymore.
"They kept kidnapping people in my village," he said. "Nobody knows where they are kept and why they are kidnapped."
Associated Press
Two carloads of Russians came for Viktor Maruniak on his 60th birthday.
It was March 21. Maruniak, the head of Stara Zburivka village, in Ukraine's southern Kherson region, said he and three other local men were taken to a nearby hotel, blindfolded, handcuffed, beaten, strangled and forced to strip naked in below zero weather.
"They'd point a gun toward our heads or toward the head of someone else, saying if you don't say something, we will kill them," Maruniak said. "Something was turned off in my head. It helped me survive. I was out of my body."
After several days, he said, he was taken to a second detention center and tortured with electric shocks. They asked where weapons were stored. He said his captors' vehicles and uniforms, along with documents he spotted and conversations he overheard, indicated that he had been taken by a special paramilitary police force under Russia's National Guard.
To his surprise, he was released three weeks later, on the condition that he return to his village as an informant.
Instead, he fled to Latvia. He said he had nine broken ribs. Photographs taken after his ordeal show him thin and withered, with injuries to his hands, back, buttocks and leg. He looks with a level gaze at the camera, a man beyond shock or sorrow, as if nothing human beings might do to each other would surprise him anymore.
"They kept kidnapping people in my village," he said. "Nobody knows where they are kept and why they are kidnapped."
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‘We will find you:’ Russians hunt down Ukrainians by name for detention, torture or execution
AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Ihor Kuraian buried his wedding rings for safekeeping and signed up with a volunteer military group in Kherson. Kuraian and his friends planned to storm a detention center where pro-Ukrainian activists were being held – an idea they later abandoned.
They had gathered 300 Molotov cocktails, 14 guns and a bag of grenades. When Russians found the weapons cache in his car, they tied him up and dragged him to a basement.
They interrogated him, twisted his fingers with pliers and beat him with a wooden club, he said. One man was beaten so badly his sternum fractured, and he died slowly, Kuraian recounted.
Under torture, Kuraian named another person involved in the plan to storm the detention center. When Russians forced him to call the man, he slipped false information into their conversation as a warning. The friend fled. Russians also took over his social media accounts to pump out propaganda.
"They wanted me to cooperate," he said. "They even offered to make me mayor of Kherson. I refused."
Kuraian was detained in Crimea and featured in a propaganda spot about prison conditions on Russian television. His family saw the video and lobbied for him to be released in an April 28 prisoner exchange.
"We were exchanged as you see in the movies," he said. "Walk on the highway towards each other."
AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Ihor Kuraian buried his wedding rings for safekeeping and signed up with a volunteer military group in Kherson. Kuraian and his friends planned to storm a detention center where pro-Ukrainian activists were being held – an idea they later abandoned.
They had gathered 300 Molotov cocktails, 14 guns and a bag of grenades. When Russians found the weapons cache in his car, they tied him up and dragged him to a basement.
They interrogated him, twisted his fingers with pliers and beat him with a wooden club, he said. One man was beaten so badly his sternum fractured, and he died slowly, Kuraian recounted.
Under torture, Kuraian named another person involved in the plan to storm the detention center. When Russians forced him to call the man, he slipped false information into their conversation as a warning. The friend fled. Russians also took over his social media accounts to pump out propaganda.
"They wanted me to cooperate," he said. "They even offered to make me mayor of Kherson. I refused."
Kuraian was detained in Crimea and featured in a propaganda spot about prison conditions on Russian television. His family saw the video and lobbied for him to be released in an April 28 prisoner exchange.
"We were exchanged as you see in the movies," he said. "Walk on the highway towards each other."
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‘We will find you:’ Russians hunt down Ukrainians by name for detention, torture or execution
AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin
Before the war, Vlad Buryak had the plump, carefree face of a well-loved child. Family photos show his father, Oleg Buryak, gazing at him with a happy smile in front of a Christmas tree.
All that changed at 11:22 a.m. on April 8th at the Vasylivka checkpoint between Melitopol and Zaporizhzhia, where Russians seized Vlad, then 16 years old, according to evidence gathered by his father, the head of the Zaporizhzhia district administration. As a guard looked on, Vlad called his father from a detention center and said he had not been beaten.
Buryak struggled to find words to help his son. "Do not get into conflicts, do not get nervous, do not get pissed off," he advised.
Vlad had two questions for his father: "Why am I here?" and "When am I going to get out?"
As Buryak scrambled to negotiate his child's release, the answer to the first question became clear: He was the reason Vlad had been taken. The Russians wanted local leaders like him to stand in front of a Russian flag and welcome them.
Three hard months passed before Vlad could tell the world all the things he hadn't said on those calls with his dad -- about the torture he'd witnessed, the blood he'd mopped up, the man who broke down and tried to kill himself.
Finally, on July 7, Vlad was released. Buryak held his son in his arms.
"We are going home," Buryak said. "Thank God."
AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin
Before the war, Vlad Buryak had the plump, carefree face of a well-loved child. Family photos show his father, Oleg Buryak, gazing at him with a happy smile in front of a Christmas tree.
All that changed at 11:22 a.m. on April 8th at the Vasylivka checkpoint between Melitopol and Zaporizhzhia, where Russians seized Vlad, then 16 years old, according to evidence gathered by his father, the head of the Zaporizhzhia district administration. As a guard looked on, Vlad called his father from a detention center and said he had not been beaten.
Buryak struggled to find words to help his son. "Do not get into conflicts, do not get nervous, do not get pissed off," he advised.
Vlad had two questions for his father: "Why am I here?" and "When am I going to get out?"
As Buryak scrambled to negotiate his child's release, the answer to the first question became clear: He was the reason Vlad had been taken. The Russians wanted local leaders like him to stand in front of a Russian flag and welcome them.
Three hard months passed before Vlad could tell the world all the things he hadn't said on those calls with his dad -- about the torture he'd witnessed, the blood he'd mopped up, the man who broke down and tried to kill himself.
Finally, on July 7, Vlad was released. Buryak held his son in his arms.
"We are going home," Buryak said. "Thank God."
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‘We will find you:’ Russians hunt down Ukrainians by name for detention, torture or execution
AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin
Yevheniia Virlych, editor of the local news website Kavun City, and her husband, Vladyslav Hladkyi, have spent years writing about Russian efforts to infiltrate Kherson and cultivate collaborators there.
When Kherson fell, they went into hiding and pretended on social media that they were in Poland. In fact, they were barricaded in a friend's apartment with their cat.
They never went outside. They set up a code so they would know whether to open the front door. Three rings at the doorbell meant one friend; two rings and a knock meant another.
"I was afraid 24 hours a day, seven days a week," Hladkyi said. "I had headaches. I've got a tic with my left eye."
One July afternoon, Virlych was near the open kitchen window when she overheard two Russian soldiers asking around for her by name. She and her husband created fake Telegram accounts to book tickets on the next bus they could find.
Forty Russian checkpoints later, they were in Zaporizhzhia looking at a Ukrainian flag, wondering whether it was a Russian fake.
It wasn't a fake. "It was real freedom," Hladkyi said.
"I wanted to cry," Virlych said.
AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin
Yevheniia Virlych, editor of the local news website Kavun City, and her husband, Vladyslav Hladkyi, have spent years writing about Russian efforts to infiltrate Kherson and cultivate collaborators there.
When Kherson fell, they went into hiding and pretended on social media that they were in Poland. In fact, they were barricaded in a friend's apartment with their cat.
They never went outside. They set up a code so they would know whether to open the front door. Three rings at the doorbell meant one friend; two rings and a knock meant another.
"I was afraid 24 hours a day, seven days a week," Hladkyi said. "I had headaches. I've got a tic with my left eye."
One July afternoon, Virlych was near the open kitchen window when she overheard two Russian soldiers asking around for her by name. She and her husband created fake Telegram accounts to book tickets on the next bus they could find.
Forty Russian checkpoints later, they were in Zaporizhzhia looking at a Ukrainian flag, wondering whether it was a Russian fake.
It wasn't a fake. "It was real freedom," Hladkyi said.
"I wanted to cry," Virlych said.
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‘We will find you:’ Russians hunt down Ukrainians by name for detention, torture or execution
AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin
On a warm June night, a dozen armed men in balaclavas scaled the fence of Ilya Yenin's house in Russian-occupied Melitopol. Yenin's partner, Olga, went to the front door and was greeted by the glare of a flashlight. The Russians knew who they were looking for.
They hit Ilya a couple of times and asked where his brother Daniil was.
Both brothers were civilian activists, and Ilya helped found a group to deliver food and medicine to civilians. Daniil has been working with a different charitable fund that helps civilians and supports the Ukrainian military. He left Melitopol in early April, but his brother stayed behind to care for their grandmother.
Daniil waited for a call demanding ransom for his brother's release, but none came. He began to wonder if Ilya had been taken just to scare — or punish — the people of Melitopol.
After three weeks in a detention center in Melitopol, Ilya was released. He has not dared to try to pass Russian checkpoints to leave occupied territory.
Daniil advises families of the disappeared to talk as much and as loudly as possible about it.
"If no one is looking for you, it means they can do whatever they want with you," he said.
AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin
On a warm June night, a dozen armed men in balaclavas scaled the fence of Ilya Yenin's house in Russian-occupied Melitopol. Yenin's partner, Olga, went to the front door and was greeted by the glare of a flashlight. The Russians knew who they were looking for.
They hit Ilya a couple of times and asked where his brother Daniil was.
Both brothers were civilian activists, and Ilya helped found a group to deliver food and medicine to civilians. Daniil has been working with a different charitable fund that helps civilians and supports the Ukrainian military. He left Melitopol in early April, but his brother stayed behind to care for their grandmother.
Daniil waited for a call demanding ransom for his brother's release, but none came. He began to wonder if Ilya had been taken just to scare — or punish — the people of Melitopol.
After three weeks in a detention center in Melitopol, Ilya was released. He has not dared to try to pass Russian checkpoints to leave occupied territory.
Daniil advises families of the disappeared to talk as much and as loudly as possible about it.
"If no one is looking for you, it means they can do whatever they want with you," he said.
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‘We will find you:’ Russians hunt down Ukrainians by name for detention, torture or execution
AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin
Pastor Dmitry Bodyu was having coffee the morning of March 19 when his wife saw a group of Russian soldiers jumping over their fence.
A U.S. citizen, Bodyu founded the Word of Life church in Melitopol, an occupied city in southern Ukraine. The chilling thing was that the Russians seemed to know his secrets — not only who he was, where he lived and what he did, but also obscure details about his finances.
"Someone was talking about me. When they arrested me, they knew a lot of information about me," Bodyu said.
In detention, his daily interrogations were a battery of accusations, all of which he said were false: You are helping the Ukrainian military. You are organizing protests. You are a spy for the United States. He thought his captors — some of whom he said wore uniforms with markings of Russia's Federal Security Service, or FSB — wanted him to spy for Moscow.
"I said, what kind of information do you want to know about the U.S.? Where the McDonald's is?" he said. "You are talking to the wrong man."
The Russians insisted they'd come to help Ukraine and wanted Bodyu to spread their message of liberation. He said he was not beaten but could hear others held in the basement cells crying and screaming in pain.
After eight days, Bodyu was released, but Russians kept him under surveillance. In April, he fled with his family to Poland through Russia. He said Russians seized his church and set up a base there, driving parishioners underground.
"It's not safe," he said. "But people still meet together and even make plans to celebrate Christmas!"
AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin
Pastor Dmitry Bodyu was having coffee the morning of March 19 when his wife saw a group of Russian soldiers jumping over their fence.
A U.S. citizen, Bodyu founded the Word of Life church in Melitopol, an occupied city in southern Ukraine. The chilling thing was that the Russians seemed to know his secrets — not only who he was, where he lived and what he did, but also obscure details about his finances.
"Someone was talking about me. When they arrested me, they knew a lot of information about me," Bodyu said.
In detention, his daily interrogations were a battery of accusations, all of which he said were false: You are helping the Ukrainian military. You are organizing protests. You are a spy for the United States. He thought his captors — some of whom he said wore uniforms with markings of Russia's Federal Security Service, or FSB — wanted him to spy for Moscow.
"I said, what kind of information do you want to know about the U.S.? Where the McDonald's is?" he said. "You are talking to the wrong man."
The Russians insisted they'd come to help Ukraine and wanted Bodyu to spread their message of liberation. He said he was not beaten but could hear others held in the basement cells crying and screaming in pain.
After eight days, Bodyu was released, but Russians kept him under surveillance. In April, he fled with his family to Poland through Russia. He said Russians seized his church and set up a base there, driving parishioners underground.
"It's not safe," he said. "But people still meet together and even make plans to celebrate Christmas!"
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‘We will find you:’ Russians hunt down Ukrainians by name for detention, torture or execution
AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin
Serhii Tsyhipa, a blogger, activist and military veteran in Nova Kakhovka, in Ukraine's southern Kherson region, knew the Russians were looking for him.
He went into hiding but kept posting updates about Russian forces and a barrage of anti-Russian messages, including a fantastical satire about a pigeon sent to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin. On March 12, he went out with his dog and never came back.
Around six weeks later, a thin, hollow-eyed Tsyhipa surfaced in a video on pro-Russian media. He trembled and he held his arm funny. He regurgitated Russian propaganda. The video has gotten nearly 200,000 views on one YouTube channel alone.
His stepdaughter Anastasiia watched with horror: What had they done to him? "It's not normal, the way he's talking," she told AP.
Voice analysis experts with the Ukrainian police concluded that Tsyhipa had made the video under duress, according to a copy of their analysis obtained by AP.
In July, his wife, Olena, got a Telegram message from a man who claimed to be a Russian agent. He told her to bring Tsyhipa's clothes and passport to a checkpoint in Russian-held territory, where her husband would be returned to her. Olena thought something was amiss: If she or a friend went for the handover, would they be taken too?
Tsyhipa's family has reached out to lawyers, NGOs, international organizations, journalists and every Ukrainian authority they can think of, and European officials have publicly lobbied for Tsyhipa's release. But nothing has worked.
"I asked them to put pressure on Russia to release political prisoners," Olena said. "I think there are many people like my husband."
AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin
Serhii Tsyhipa, a blogger, activist and military veteran in Nova Kakhovka, in Ukraine's southern Kherson region, knew the Russians were looking for him.
He went into hiding but kept posting updates about Russian forces and a barrage of anti-Russian messages, including a fantastical satire about a pigeon sent to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin. On March 12, he went out with his dog and never came back.
Around six weeks later, a thin, hollow-eyed Tsyhipa surfaced in a video on pro-Russian media. He trembled and he held his arm funny. He regurgitated Russian propaganda. The video has gotten nearly 200,000 views on one YouTube channel alone.
His stepdaughter Anastasiia watched with horror: What had they done to him? "It's not normal, the way he's talking," she told AP.
Voice analysis experts with the Ukrainian police concluded that Tsyhipa had made the video under duress, according to a copy of their analysis obtained by AP.
In July, his wife, Olena, got a Telegram message from a man who claimed to be a Russian agent. He told her to bring Tsyhipa's clothes and passport to a checkpoint in Russian-held territory, where her husband would be returned to her. Olena thought something was amiss: If she or a friend went for the handover, would they be taken too?
Tsyhipa's family has reached out to lawyers, NGOs, international organizations, journalists and every Ukrainian authority they can think of, and European officials have publicly lobbied for Tsyhipa's release. But nothing has worked.
"I asked them to put pressure on Russia to release political prisoners," Olena said. "I think there are many people like my husband."
