‘The truth is all we have’ – on the ground with Ukraine’s wartime investigators

Deliberate attacks on civilian areas, torture, rape, summary executions and the shooting of fleeing refugees are war crimes of which Russian forces in Ukraine are accused but proving the charges beyond doubt is ‘a marathon, not a sprint’

Brian Castner, a war crimes investigator pictured in the city of Rivne in the north west of Ukraine. He spent two weeks in Ukraine last month cataloguing human rights abuses. Picture: Olga Ivaschenko

In the wreckage of a destroyed television tower, Brian Castner found some, but not all, of what he was looking for.

Buried in the debris, amid the bricks and the bodies, rested the cruise missile, evidence of a Russian airstrike that killed 19 people last month in Rivne, a city in Ukraine’s north west.

The weapon didn’t give Castner, an author, weapons expert and long-time war crimes investigator for Amnesty International, the whole story. He ...