Russian Who Led Troops Linked to Bucha Killings Is Charged With Corruption

The Russian authorities have arrested a prime navy colonel and charged him with large-scale fraud, the state information company TASS reported on Thursday. The colonel was beforehand the commander of troops chargeable for a 2022 bloodbath within the Ukrainian metropolis of Bucha.

The authorities arrested the colonel, Artyom Gorodilov, on July 3 and charged him with committing fraud amounting to a minimum of 1,000,000 rubles ($11,236), TASS reported. A navy courtroom ordered that he be held in pretrial detention till Aug. 19, and he faces as much as 10 years in jail if convicted, TASS reported. He has denied any wrongdoing.

Colonel Gorodilov is at present the commander of the 83rd Guards Air Assault Brigade, a unit primarily based within the Russian Far East, which is working in japanese Ukraine. He beforehand led the 234th Guards Air Assault Regiment, primarily based within the Russian metropolis of Pskov.

An investigation by The New York Occasions in 2022 decided that members of the 234th Regiment had been behind a bloodbath of civilians on Yablunska Avenue in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, when it was occupied by Moscow’s troops within the early days of the struggle.

Colonel Gorodilov led the unit on the time and was current within the city the place tons of of civilians died, in some instances because of brutal executions, The Occasions discovered. Russian troops retreated from the world in early 2022.

The U.S. authorities imposed sanctions on Colonel Gorodilov final 12 months for what it known as “his involvement in gross violations of human rights, specifically extrajudicial killings.”

He was promoted to the rank of colonel days after photographs from Bucha emerged publicly and turned the suburb into a worldwide image of the phobia that Russian forces have delivered to occupied Ukrainian cities.

Moscow has denied involvement within the Bucha killings, with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia calling the occasions “a provocation.” The Occasions, nonetheless, recognized two dozen members of the 234th Regiment who have been in Bucha on the time of the bloodbath, partly by tracing the numbers the troops known as in Russia utilizing the Ukrainian victims’ cellphones.