The Armed Forces liberated Sumy Oblast at the end of March 2022. During the month of occupation, the enemy managed to do a lot of damage. According to law enforcement officers, more than a hundred people have died, hundreds have been injured, and some people are still missing. In addition, there is information about more than 1,600 cases of destruction of civilian objects because of Russian shelling. These are only official data, which usually do not reflect the scale in full, and do not illustrate either the human tragedies or the war crimes of the Russians. After all, “destruction of civilian objects” refers to broken cities, “death of civilians” refers to their tortured to death inhabitants, and the phrase “missing persons” can hide both forced deportation and mass graves that have not yet been found.
At the beginning of April last year, when the Ukrainian military dislodged the enemy from Sumy Oblast, a torture chamber was discovered in the town of Trostianets, liberated from the occupiers. The Russian military chose the basement of the railway station as the place of torturing the local population. In the torture chamber, traces of blood and clothes of the victims were found, as well as batons, handcuffs and metal pincers. To this day, law enforcement officers continue to establish the identities of the tortured residents of Trostianets, as well as those who have gone missing. The Okhtyr District Prosecutor’s Office manages criminal proceedings for violations of the laws and customs of war. Among the crimes is alleged murder.
On March 18, the Russian occupiers fired from a tank at the local hospital in Trostianets. At that time there were people in the building – doctors, patients, women in labor and pregnant women. That day, the women in the maternity ward saw from the window how Russian equipment was moving towards the hospital. Doctors and patients were saved only because they had time to go down to the basement. The occupiers fired from a T-72 tank with a high-explosive shell from a 125-mm tank gun.
The court established that the order to shoot the hospital was given by the tank commander Petro Smirnov, and the shots were fired by Ainur Mukhametkhanov. The case file also states that the tank itself, from which the hospital was shot, was left by the occupiers on the territory of the Sumy region when they fled to Russia. Documents were also left in it, which helped Ukrainian law enforcement officers to establish the identities of the criminals. Witnesses who saw these Russian soldiers on the day of the hospital shooting confirmed in court that the documents belonged to these people.