Julia Ioffe: Life and Death and in Between in Kyiv

[Nevilledog]

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Serhiy Leshchenko
@Leshchenkos
Very personal, emotional and very dramatic conversation with @juliaioffe for @PuckNews. I said everything I kept inside me since the war started during last 45 days spend next to President @ZelenskyyUa in his office. Please repost for more people to know

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Life and Death and in Between in Kyiv
Many Ukrainians are in a state of shock after the atrocities in Bucha. For Volodymyr Zelensky’s inner circle, horror has given way to a powerful new conviction.
3:51 PM · Apr 11, 2022

https://puck.news/life-and-death-and-in-between-in-kyiv/

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When Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky toured Bucha and Irpin last Monday, at his side was his aide Serhiy Leshchenko. I first met Serhiy in 2014, through Mustafa Nayyem, when the two of them successfully ran for the Ukrainian parliament, the Rada, on the heels of the Maidan revolution. Like Mustafa, Serhiy had also been a star investigative journalist, exposing corruption at the highest levels of the Ukrainian government. Even while he served in government, however, Serhiy’s investigative instincts never left him. In August 2016, he revealed the secret ledgers showing illicit cash payments to Paul Manafort, which ended Manafort’s run as Donald Trump’s campaign manager and began his downfall.

At the end of last week, I spoke to Serhiy. I wanted to ask him about what it was like to tour the sites of atrocities committed by the Russian army, and he agreed readily. He scheduled the interview for midnight, Kyiv time, only to then push it off by an hour because he just wasn’t done with work yet. To say that he sounded exhausted after six weeks of war and living in the Ukrainian president’s office would be an understatement. I could barely hear him on the line. His voice was so faint that I had to listen to my recording of the interview surrounded by perfect silence in order to transcribe what he was saying. It was well worth it. I hope you find our conversation, which has been translated, condensed, and edited for clarity, as interesting and provocative as I did.

Julia Ioffe: You went with President Zelensky to Bucha. What was it like?

Serhiy Leshchenko: Before [going with Zelensky], I went to Irpin on Saturday with [advisor to Zelensky Oleksiy] Arestovych. It was the third day after it was liberated from the Russians and I just knew that I had to see it all with my own eyes. My journalistic instinct pulled me there. So we just got a car and drove there, no security, anything. That Saturday night, I saw Zelensky and told him that he should go, that it was important for the president to be there. On Monday, he went to Irpin and Bucha. By the time we got to Bucha, they had already moved the bodies.

How much did you know about what was happening in these towns around Kyiv when they were still occupied by Russian forces?

Before they were liberated, everything we knew was still essentially hearsay. We heard rumors that people were disappearing. We had seen the video from, I think, a German channel, of a man who got out of his car and a [Russian] tank fired on him. There were a few examples like this, but no one knew about the scale until the towns were liberated.

*snip*

[2naSalit]

1. K&R

[Crunchy Frog]

2. Another excerpt.

But do you hope to see specific people brought to justice?

I hope that specific people are identified and charged. The question about whether they’re caught or not, this is not the goal in Ukraine ~snip~
our goal has become investigating and charging these people, and having a judicial process independent of the fact of whether this person is physically in Ukraine or not. So that will be our goal here: establishing facts. Plus I think Ukraine will form—or maybe it will form on its own—a group that will seek revenge all over the world, the same way Israel does.

I've been really hoping to see something like this emerge.

[Nevilledog]

3. Kick