Ukrainian investigators are working patiently and methodically in their determination to expose the scale of Russian war crimes to the world. With an overwhelming caseload of 100,000 open files and 40,000 recorded crime scenes ranging from execution, torture and rape to bicycle theft – Ukrainian law prohibits exclusion of any crime, however minor – police services in Kyiv are categorizing the different crimes committed either as on Moscow's orders or as certain units advanced through localities. According to Colonel Khrystyna Podyriako, "proving genocide" is the central modus operandi.

In cooperation with the Prosecutor General's Office and the secret services, two police colonels are in charge of the wide-ranging investigations. The young General Maksym Tsoutskiridze, the chief investigator for the national police, heads the investigation and reports to the interior ministry. His subordinates, Colonel Oleksandr Shapovalov and Colonel Khrystyna Podyriako head the department charged with documenting the crimes and the department charged with investigating them, respectively.

Interviewed in Bucha in November, where the police set up an outpost given the scale of the crimes committed in this municipality during the Battle of Kyiv in March 2022, Colonel Shapovalov unveiled "Road Map," a sophisticated software cross-referencing millions of data on crimes, victims, witnesses, criminals and suspects.

In the Bucha region, Shapovalov has included the 3,482 open criminal files, 536 civilians killed or missing and 501 bodies found to date. The team is currently performing forensic analysis on 32 bodies of the victims. They are also investigating a nursery where around 500 civilians were detained. This autumn, the investigators discovered a new local rape case: The victim was a woman who had never testified before. Thanks to cross-checks, the rape suspect has already been identified.

At the national level, Road Map is an incredibly detailed database of crimes and potential suspects: 230,000 Russian soldiers are listed, along with their chain of command, the movement of their units, the bases where they have been stationed and the crimes of which some are suspected. Transcripts of the interrogations of some 2,000 Russian prisoners of war, some of whom have already returned home as part of exchanges between the two countries, are also recorded.

In addition to information provided by the intelligence services, cross-checks are made with other entities such as telephone companies. The colonel showed a list of 6,032 Ukrainian cell phone lines used by Russian soldiers, usually on phones stolen from civilians or chips looted from stores. In these cases, searches are easy thanks to the cooperation of the operators.

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