'Highway Killers': Russians Targeted Civilians Along E373 and E40, Says Report

Russian soldiers targetted and killed civilians along the highways leading to Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, according to a report. These highways pass through towns like Buzov, Myla, Vorzel and Bucha, where the Russian troops reportedly committed massacres and rapes.

The shocking information was included in the report by the Centre For Information Resilience, a non-profit organization dedicated to exposing human rights abuses. The report, authored by Benjamin den Braber and Benjamin Pittet, has also examined a string of cases using open-source evidence to prove the killings.

According to the report, researchers have documented five casualties along the E373 Highway, the stretch running from Lublin in Poland to Kyiv in Ukraine and 13 killings along the E40 Highway, which passes through Lviv, Zhytomyr, Kyiv, Poltava, Kharkiv and Luhansk.

Examining each incident, the report concludes that it "was highly likely that Russian forces were responsible for the civilian harm incidents" and the "Russian military forces were in control of or close by to each location" when it happened.

The researchers could visually confirm five casualties on a stretch of the E373 highway between Vorzel and Bucha. This includes a decapitated woman inside a vehicle at Bucha and four men in Vorzel.

On April 3, Ukrainian politician Oleksiy Goncharenko tweeted a video showing the decapitated body of a woman inside a car in Bucha. The video showed the car on the E373 highway, most likely traveling in the direction of Bucha. The car in which she was traveling appeared to have been hit with heavy machine gunfire.

The Centre For Information Resilience could geolocate the car to Bucha. According to the report, a Planet satellite image from March 11 showed a military vehicle in the direction from which the shots were fired. The dimensions of the vehicle indicate it was an "armored combat vehicle" and was just 790 meters from the car.

The military vehicle arrived in the area between Feb. 28 and March 11 and was no longer visible in the images of March 29.

In Vorzel, a body was photographed lying on the side of the road next to an overturned vehicle. The overturned vehicle appears for the first time on Airbus satellite imagery of March 29.

The report added that civilians were also targeted at an intersection on the same highway. On April 6, Ukrainian blogger Denys Kazanskyi posted images of three deceased people. These images were geolocated, and the bodies were found 1.5 kilometers from the cases mentioned above.

The researchers could also prove that the damage to civilian infrastructure and several vehicles along the highway happened after March 11, after Russia assumed control of the stretch.

The killings of 11 people around gas stations in Myla and Buzov were also proven to have happened when Russia was in control. Russian forces were visually confirmed to have set up a camp behind one of the gas stations where the killing happened, as two Russian vehicles and a tent were spotted in the satellite images.