As Russian troops were shooting hundreds of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha, one killing began with a massive manhunt focused on a tiny coffee shop.
A new documentary by RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service has pieced together the life and death of Oleksiy Pobihay, an obscure shopkeeper whose home was surrounded by armored vehicles and truckloads of troops.
“There were periodic ‘cleansing operations,’ but there had never been such a mass of equipment in one place at one time,” said one witness to the operation.
Another man, military chaplain Anatoliy Kushnirchuk, said: “The Russian fascists hated people like Oleksiy. They were looking for them.”
Pobihay had grown up in Bucha, working in restaurants before opening his own business at his home.
After Russia-backed separatists began an armed insurgency in eastern Ukraine in 2014, he volunteered to help gather aid for Ukrainian forces fighting them.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Pobihay joined up with the local territorial defense unit -- and was filmed by RFE/RL for the first and last time.
It’s a poignant interview that has now been published for the first time. Pobihay has a gun and a military helmet but does not look much of a soldier. Chubby cheeked, peering through eyeglasses, he laughs as he says, “I am a strong man!”
Kushnirchuk would later tell RFE/RL that he was not sure if Pobihay’s gun was even loaded and that probably “he did not know how to shoot.”
This may sound like Pobihay would be an unlikely target for Russian forces.
Brutal Crackdown
It was not possible to determine if Pobihay continued to work secretly with Ukrainian forces during the Russian occupation. His detention came amid a brutal crackdown.
The RFE/RL film documents many cases of people being arrested and shot for having a previous background in the military or as activists, as well as Russian soldiers simply shooting people in apparently random violence.
There is chilling CCTV footage of Russian forces rounding people up on the streets. In telephone intercepts, Russian soldiers tell family members back home of being ordered to kill civilians.
When Russian forces retreated from Bucha, leaving its streets littered with corpses, they also left paperwork behind.
In one abandoned dugout, a local resident found a military document that details Pobihay’s detention by the Kuzbass unit of Russia’s National Guard, based in the Siberian city of Kemerovo.
There is further documentary evidence that this unit was working with the 76th Airborne Assault Division, which was present in Bucha throughout the occupation.
Pobihay’s body was found, with his hands bound and a bullet wound in his head, at the division’s abandoned headquarters in a local forest. DNA tests confirmed his identity.
On the police video of the discovery, six months after Bucha’s liberation, an officer holds Pobihay’s glasses to the camera. They are caked in mud but instantly recognizable as his spectacles.
