To get to the crime scene, the police investigators drove about 30 minutes northeast of downtown Kharkiv – past neighbourhoods in ruins, destroyed Russian military vehicles, a field littered with blast craters, and plumes of dark smoke rising a few miles in the distance, where fighting between the Ukrainian and Russian militaries was ongoing.
The Ukrainians had expelled Russian forces from the town of Tsyrkuny, less than 20 miles from the Russian border, just three days earlier – part of a Ukrainian counteroffensive that has reclaimed a significant swath of territory in the Kharkiv region this month.
