< Bucha Massacre: Victim Oleg Abramov
June 26. 2022
(slightly rough - updates June 28)
This victim of the "Bucha Massacre" is already the subject of an early post here, by blog member Petri Krohn: Monitor on Massacre Marketing: Who killed Oleg Abramov?. (BTW membership and blog authoring here is still possible, I think - so long as I approve it.) This post will take a deeper dive into this sub-story.
Petri raised a lot of questions, some of which weren't well-founded, or have been answered since. Others remain. For example, he saw no sign of decay, and took that as meaning a death well after the reported March 5. But it's quite hard to say much about the signs from the one low-resolution view we have, and under refrigeration or winter conditions, these signs can come on quite slowly. Inconclusive. A visual match with one of the victims at 144 Yablunska looked decent by photos, but is probably wrong; those men all have alternate identifications, and Petri didn't realize there probably was a shirtless victim right where Oleg was said to be and where a bloodstain could be seen later.
Petri asked "Why would [the Russians] target Russian-speakers?" I'm not sure what that was based on - a misread video caption had given me that impression. But in my digging, I found Iryna saying to NBC news of the Russian people, including the occupying soldiers: "I always thought they were our bothers. I'm half-Russian myself." As such, Ukrainian ultranationalists likely had better motive to cause the family harm than the Russians would. This suspicious kind of irony - the Russians opting to burn bridges and kill "their own" as much as possible - keeps popping up with other Bucha Massacre victims:
* Pro-Russian and anti-Fascist politician Oleksandr Rzhavsky allegedly killed by Russian invaders he was hosting when he poured the vodka too slowly, 3 years after someone murdered his son and had it called suicide.
* Ethnic Russian Karina Yershova from Donbas who willingly climbed into a V-marked car before she disappeared March 6.
*Zoreslav Zamoysky, the Jewish journalist who remembered the massacre in Odessa, worried about Nazis, and was seen by some as "a supporter of the Russian world."
The same kind of "irony" played heavily in prior incidents like a January, 2015 rocket attack on Vostochniy, Mariupol. And for what it's worth, neo-Nazi thug Serhiy "Botsman" Korotkikh of the infamous Azov Battalion was involved both in that and, at a higher level, in Bucha. In Mariupol, he was amused at how "supporters of the Russian world" just midlessly killed each other. His men in Bucha - the "Botsman Boys" - on April 2 openly discussed executing locals lacking the approved blue armbands (see here and note Korotkikh's response was that HE wasn't there, but off fighting on the Belarus border).
Any such killings Azov or the Botsman Boys or their ilk carried out in Bucha would wind up blamed on the Russians, just like Mr. Abramov's killing was.
Intro
Oleg Oleksandrovych Abramov, age 40, was a welder by profession. He lived with his wife Iryna Abramova (48), in a subdivided house owned by Iryna's father Volodmyr Abramov (72) on the SW corner of Yablunska and Vokzalna streets in Bucha. Igor (or Ihor) took Iryna's last name when they married, the New York Times reported, following on several interviews with Abramova. "They never had children, but Iryna said they had the perfect family: the two of them."Iryna, 48, said that Russian soldiers shot at her two-story, multi-unit house on the corner of Yablunska and Vokzalna Streets at the start of their occupation on March 5.
The soldiers said they were there to free them from the “Nazis” and demanded to know where the Nazis were hiding.“The soldiers accused us of killing people in Donbas,” Iryna said. “They accused us of killing the Berkut in Maidan as well [referring to the since-dissolved riot police unit that killed dozens of protesters during the 2014 Maidan protests in Kyiv]. They concluded that we were guilty and should be punished.”
As consistently told, the soldiers took Oleg to the corner, stripped off his sweater, made him kneel, and shot him in the head, blowing off the right side.
HRW: "She said a group of soldiers was standing no more than five meters away, “watching the event as if they thought it was theater.” Richard Engel, NBC News: "She thinks they did it to scare others in Bucha into submission."
HRW: "Soldiers then told Iryna and Volodymyr to leave or they would be shot. ... Russian forces ... ordered her to walk southeast down Yablunska Street." It seems thetwo sheltered somewhere else during to occupation, and they lived to tell this tale, quite a few times to a lot of journalists. Below: Volodomyr and Iryna Abramov returned to the scene, from a well-made Hromadske video.
Oleg's body would remain at the corner until the end of March or early April, after the Russians had left the entire city. A possibly shirtless body seems to appear in a close-up drone video of March 25 (at right w/labels), We can see his head and/or the dark blood near it, what seems like a bare, bent arm, and nothing else clear, as the body seems to be mostly covered with a torn-down banner.After that, bloodstains and maybe small bits of brain matter can be seen in that same spot, along with the banner (NBC News videdo). Below: Iryna Abramova standing at the same corner (Hromadske video). Note the holes poked in the fence. We'll come back to that below (see House Notes)
Only in April, after the Russians had left the entire city, was the body moved a bit south on that sidewalk and briefly seen on video (below) just before it's bagged up and removed. This is the best view we have of his body. It's not even clear from this that he has much of his head missing, but it seems likely (and the rest seems a bit darkened with decay) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Idux4708A5Y - https://twitter.com/StratcomCentre/status/1511582282708135938
Story Inconsistencies?
A few important story variations could all be down to mistranslation and erred inference. But they are notable, and might indicate a partly fictional story with inadequate coaching.
BBC Indonesia: "A Russian tank pulled up outside. Their home was shelled. As it was burning," the soldiers ordered Oleg to come outside. This is the only version where shelling is blamed, rather than a grenade.
BBC: "The soldiers took Oleg out beyond the gate on to the pavement, Volodymyr said, and threw a grenade in through the front door of the house that exploded with a deafening bang and set the house on fire." That sounds like the grenade was tossed after everyone was out. Otherwise, the explosion came first.
Roman Sukhan video: Volodomyr relating the story from all over the scene. At one point he says soldiers threw a grenade in the window, pointing to which one. But then he also says (1:40) "the projectile is flying," makes sound effects like an incoming shell and 3 booms, and "glass flies out."
NYT: "On the morning of March 5, Iryna said, Russian soldiers attacked her house. They threw a grenade through the window, which started an enormous fire, and marched her and Oleh outside at gunpoint."
"On the night of March 4, they heard huge trucks passing in the road. The next morning, their house was rocked by a grenade, which set off a fire. Gunshots rang out. Their gate was blasted open. Four Russian paratroopers stormed in, she said. Three were young, maybe 20, and the commander was in his 30s."
Whose trucks were driving which way the night before?
Hromadske video: Abramova: "...on the morning of March 5, noise and explosions were heard. A grenade was thrown at our window, and immediately the shooting started at the windows and doors."
Richard Engel, NBC: "Russian soldiers threw a grenade through the window, and set fire to the house."
Daily Banner: And then on March 4, Russian vehicles passed again. On March 5, we woke up ... then something exploded literally next to us. ... after they threw a grenade into our house, they knocked out the gate and went into the yard." This report and some other mention they were trying to start a gas generator right before the blast. One might wonder if that exploded, but they seem to think it was something else, and it probably was.
To Ukrainian "Vadim" (standing in front of Oleg's body, moved to the shack along the southeast of the main house: "March 5, morning - we were sitting at home. We have a house split in half - we were sitting in this part and we heard an explosion. Our half exploded. then the shooting in the windows. ..."
When the house "explodes" with them inside, it's possible one of them would be killed. But allegedly, all three were able to walk out, only for one of them to then be shot.
"...they took me aside, and the house caught fire. Oleg ran to put it out, but they wouldn't let him"
HRW: "After an explosion and gunfire, the house caught fire. ... Four soldiers ordered them to come out of the house with their hands above their heads. The soldiers ordered Oleh, 40, and Volodymyr, a pensioner, to extinguish the fire. One soldier continued to question Iryna while three others took Oleh and Volodymyr to the northeast corner of the fenced-in yard. Volodymyr told Human Rights Watch that two soldiers then took Oleh out of the yard. Volodymyr said he pleaded for them to let Oleh come back to help put out the fire. One soldier went to look for Oleh outside the gate, but returned and said, “Oleh will not return.”"
Was he ordered to put out the fire, or prevented from doing so? Logically, it sounds like both. That is possible.
If they mean to say this grenade-triggered fire is the explanation for the house damage we see, that's a serious inconsistency. As it is, they don't specify if this is the case, or if the house was shelled later. No such thing is mentioned. But as I show below, the roof and much of the upper walls are blown off the house and a small barn, an area about 18m square, and the surrounding fences are heavily marked and punctured all across by explosive fragments.
It seems the house was expanded after this view to include a taller portion to the south - 2 stories and an attic that would appear as a triangle above, if it existed. At right is a closer view from the south, looking up Vokzalna st.,\That's the house's final form in the drone video just minutes to hours before the described incident.
Was there something written across that part of the banner someone didn't like? The same kind of people who would swap in @vshop_18 instead? That obscure reference seemed linked to some high-paying, maybe criminal, "courier" service in Ukrainian cities, especially Odessa. These are the kind of background details we don't know, but that could really matter. Just across the street was spray-pained 1488, well-known "White Power" code referring to David Lane and Adolf Hitler.
Mystery Bodies
Mit den Bildern stimmt etwas nicht.
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