by Olha Hembik | 2026-07-27

A retired Russian general went on state television and confessed to killing civilians. In 2014, he said, his artillery struck a Donbas church where families had taken shelter, killing a woman and a child. Years later, he found the priest and owned it: "I did that."

For years, Moscow blamed the war in eastern Ukraine on local "separatists" and Donetsk coal miners. The confession by Andrey Gurulyov, a retired army general and State Duma deputy, tells a different story. Regular Russian troops, following Kremlin orders, brought the war to the Donbas.

Such admissions were rare before Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion. Now the Kremlin increasingly abandons its old excuse of "protecting" the region's people.

A general's televised confession

Gurulyov commanded the forces trying to seize the settlement, he said. When his troops stalled, his superiors ordered artillery strikes on residential areas, and the barrage hit the church. He said he issued the order to "finish off the enemy."

He showed little remorse.

"I am not asking for people to forgive me, or anything like that," he said. "I just want you to tell the people the truth during your sermon. If necessary, God will forgive me."

In the same broadcast, he claimed Russia does not fight civilians.

According to Ukraine's Main Directorate of Intelligence, Gurulyov took part in Russian war crimes on Ukrainian soil in 2014 and 2015. Russia promoted him to lieutenant general for that role, and he won a State Duma seat in 2021. He has used television to attack Ukraine ever since, once urging strikes to cut Kyiv's civilians off from power, heat and water.

Denis Kazansky, who tracks such confessions online and on Russian television, called this one unprecedented.

"There have never been revelations like this before," he wrote on X. He predicted the child's death would be pinned on Ukraine.

"And then they probably put this child on the 'Alley of Angels' list and claimed that Ukrainians killed them," Kazansky wrote, pointing to a Donetsk memorial for children killed in the region.

Who bombed the Donbas?

Russian aggression in Ukraine has run on propaganda since 2014, said Mykola Yemets, a CrimeaSOS activist and Ukrainian Armed Forces serviceman. He cited Igor Girkin, the convicted war criminal and former commander of the so-called Donetsk People's Republic militant groups, who admitted regular Russian forces led the fighting. Putin later acknowledged as much, Yemets told Kontur.

"From the 'little green men' in Crimea to the infamous 'they aren't there' denials—it is all just Russian propaganda myth-making," Yemets said. He knows Girkin's admission by heart: "If our unit hadn't crossed the border, it all would have ended just like it did in Kharkiv and Odesa."

The Kremlin built its central claim that Ukraine bombed the Donbas for eight years in 2014 and pushed it harder after the 2022 invasion, said Vladyslav Seleznov, a military analyst and former spokesperson for the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

"Ukraine never conducted carpet bombings in the Donbas," Seleznov told Kontur. "Most of the destruction resulted from intense urban warfare, where Russian forces stationed military hardware in residential neighborhoods to launch attacks, using civilians as human shields."

Opposition blogger Maksim Mirovich published footage on May 29 showing Grad rocket launchers firing in the so-called "Novorossiya."

"One launcher fires at Ukrainian army positions, while the other fires in the exact opposite direction, right into Donetsk," he wrote. "There is your answer to who 'bombed the Donbas for eight years.'"

Building cases for court

The Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office is documenting Russian war crimes and crimes against humanity with local and international partners. The catalog covers killings, torture, sexual violence and the use of civilians as human shields.

CrimeaSOS has collected testimony from victims and witnesses across Ukraine since Russia occupied Crimea, Yemets said. The work is slow and grim. Investigators assemble evidence piece by piece, interviewing people who escape occupation and combing through videos posted in hostile online communities. The group now runs several projects, including one on war crimes in the Kherson region. Verified footage of shelling and executions helps lawyers build cases for international courts.

Government agencies and civil society groups have driven this effort since the fighting began, said Yaroslav Zhukrovsky, a military lawyer and co-coordinator of the Servicemen's Families Support Office.

"Once the war ends, a primary focus will be organizing these files and handing them over to international courts," Zhukrovsky told Kontur. "This is a top priority."

Ukrainian authorities have registered more than 239,000 war crimes cases. The total number of crimes tied to Russia's aggression tops 265,000.