When Russian soldiers shot Leonid Pliats and his boss in the back, CCTV cameras captured the murder in clear and horrific detail.
The images, which were obtained by the BBC, are now being investigated by Ukrainian prosecutors as an alleged war crime.
The incident occurred during the height of the fighting around kyiv, when the main roads to the capital were a battlefield. That included the area around the bike shop where Pliats worked as a security guard.
But this was not an exchange of bullets: the video clearly shows heavily armed Russian soldiers shooting the two unarmed Ukrainians and then looting the business.
We have reconstructed the entire sequence, comparing what was recorded on multiple CCTV cameras at the scene with testimony from people Pliats called that day, as well as volunteer Ukrainian fighters who tried to rescue him.
The Russians arrive in a stolen van with the V sign used by Russian forces and a sign that says “Russian SWAT Tank” in black paint. They are dressed in Russian military uniform and approach with their weapons raised, fingers on the triggers.
Pliats walks towards the soldiers with his hands up to show that he is unarmed and not a threat.
The Russians initially talk to him and his boss through the fence. There is no audio on the footage, but the men seem calm, even smoking. Then the Ukrainians turn around and the soldiers start to leave.
Suddenly, they turn around, crouch down and then shoot the two men several times in the back.
One dies on the spot, but somehow Pliats manages to get back on his feet, though it wobbles. He ties his belt around his thigh to reduce blood loss.
Then he makes his way to his cabin, where he begins to ask for help.
Vasyl Podlevskyi spoke on phone with his friend twice that day, while he was bleeding profusely.
Pliats told him that the soldiers claimed that they do not kill civilians and then they shot him.
“I said, can you at least bandage yourself? And he said to me, Vasya, I barely crawled here. It hurts me a lot. I feel really bad”, recalls Podlevskyi.
“So I asked him to wait and started calling the territorial defense”, he adds.
“When we arrived, he was already dead”
The men she went to, Sasha and Kostya, used to sell air conditioning before the war, but now they are combatants.
They both show me videos on their cell phones of Russian tanks passing their positions. Their job was to send real-time information on Russian movements to Ukrainian military positions along the way.
When Pliats was wounded, they were tasked with crossing the dangerous highway E40 to try to save it. Even today, the road is littered with charred Russian tanks, a reminder of the intensity of the fighting.
While the security guard lay bleeding, Russian troops were still on the scene.
In CCTV videos show them entering the premises shooting, stealing bicycles and even a motorcycle and wandering into the manager’s office, drinking his whiskey and rummaging through his cupboards.
Outnumbered and outgunned lightly, Sasha and Kostya were forced to wait, although they realized that Pliats was dying.
“We talked to him on the phone, we tried to calm him down. We told him, ‘Everything will be fine. You’re going to survive,’” Sasha tells me. He adds that they did everything possible to comfort him.
“We said we were on our way. Maybe that helped him. Perhaps. But unfortunately, when we arrived, he was already dead”, he narrates.
Even while picking up the bodies of the two men, the fighters had to take cover when a Russian tank passed by.
Face uncovered
There is ample evidence against the men responsible for these murders. We have studied the video in detail and the Russian soldier we believe to be one of the assassins is clearly visible, his face uncovered.
It takes a long time before his friends realize they are being filmed and break one of the security cameras.
We showed the footage to the police chief of the kyiv region and he told us that the bodies of 37 civilians, all shot dead, were found along the highway to the Ukrainian capital after the Russian forces withdrew.
The Prosecutor’s Office confirms that it is now investigating the murder of Pliats and his boss as a possible war crime: one of the more than 10,10 registered cases.
“My dad was not a military man at all. He was a pensioner. They killed a 10 year old man. What for?” asks Pliats’ daughter, Yulia Androshchuk.
She is abroad and has not yet been able to bury her father due to the war.
“I am not angry, but full of pain and fear. These fucking Russians are so out of control that I’m afraid of what they might do next,” she told me.
Androshchuk hopes that those responsible will be judged one day, somehow. For now, she wants people to know exactly what happened to her father and for the brutality to stop.
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