Court sentences Russian commander who staged execution of Ukrainian officer's mother
A self-styled Russian "commandant of Boromlia" who staged the mock execution of a civilian woman, the mother of a Ukrainian serviceman, in 2022 has been sentenced in absentia to 10 years in prison by a court in Sumy Oblast.
Source: a project titled The Book of the Executioners of the Ukrainian People, citing the verdict of the Trostianets District Court of Sumy Oblast
Details: According to the project's investigators, Mykhailo Bakhmanov, 43, a native of Donetsk, voluntarily joined the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. At the time when the crime was committed, he was the commander of a rifle battalion in a mobilisation reserve regiment within the 1st Army Corps of the 8th Army of the Russian Armed Forces. He introduced himself to local residents as Medved ("Bear") and referred to himself as the "commandant of the village".
Investigators were able to identify him in part thanks to photographs taken on a mobile phone stolen from a local resident, which had been automatically uploaded to the owner's cloud account.
On 19 March 2022, at around 10:00, Bakhmanov arrived with a group of armed Russian soldiers at a house in Boromlia where an elderly woman lived with her husband and their grandson, a minor. The soldiers were looking for the woman's son, a Ukrainian officer and ATO veteran, and Medved was threatening to stab him to death if he found him. [The ATO or Anti-Terrorist Operation is a term used from 2014 to 2018 by the media, the government of Ukraine and the OSCE to identify combat actions in parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts against Russian military forces and pro-Russian separatists – ed.]
The Russians behaved aggressively, threatening to kill everyone and blow up the house. They even fired shots into a well in case the woman's son was hiding there.
During a search of the house, Medved ordered the woman to hand over all mobile phones. Fearing for her life, she complied and handed over two phones – a Bravis C281 Wide and a Samsung GT-E1200i, with SIM cards worth UAH 562 (about US$13) in total. The phones were never returned, leaving the family temporarily with no means of communication.
When the soldiers failed to find the serviceman or obtain any information about his whereabouts, they threatened to take the woman's grandson away with them. She asked them to take her instead.
The Russians took the woman and drove in the direction of Sumy to a pond on the outskirts of the village. There, Medved ordered her to walk towards a hole in the ice, while he and another soldier followed behind with their weapons aimed at her. They continued to threaten to kill her if she did not reveal where her son was hiding. When she replied that she did not know, they forced her to kneel facing the ice hole. Three shots were fired. The woman said she did not see who fired because she had her back turned to them, but she perceived what happened as a real execution.
Both the victim and her grandson identified Medved in photographs independently of each other. Two other local residents and a firefighter who had spoken with the commander in person also recognised him from photos. A ballistic examination confirmed that shell casings found by the victim at the scene were live 5.45mm rounds for Kalashnikov rifles. Intelligence data also confirmed that it was this officer who commanded the battalion stationed in the area.
After reviewing the evidence, on 5 March 2026 the court found Bakhmanov guilty of committing a criminal offence under Articles 28.2 and 438.1 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine – ill-treatment of civilians and other violations of the laws and customs of war committed by a group of persons acting in prior conspiracy – and sentenced him to 10 years' imprisonment.
Support Ukrainska Pravda on Patreon!