Stepan Chubenko, a 16 year old youth from Kramatorsk believed in justice and he was an ardent pro-Ukrainian. Stepan was the goalkeeper for local football team Avantgarde and gave his life for his views. This article retraces Stepan’s history and asks what conclusions can be drawn from it.
Stepan Chubenko was very out-spoken about his pro-Ukrainian views and he knew that this could land him in trouble. In 2014 he took part in many political actions in support of the territorial unity of Ukraine. When Kramatorsk was already occupied by pro-Russian militias, he tore a “DNR” flag to pieces. After the “Donetsk People’s Republic was proclaimed Stepan lived with a friend in Kyiv for a while. He returned home with a blue and yellow ribbon on his backpack, Ukraine’s national colors. For reasons not fully understood he decided to travel through Donetsk, although it would have been much safer to travel through Kharkiv, which remained under Ukrainian control. In Donetsk militiamen abducted Stepan and detained him in the local SBU headquarters. They got enraged over the blue and yellow ribbon on his backpack. The boy’s parents were not informed about their son’s detention.
After Stepan’s disappearance his parents acted immediately. His mother, Stalina, forced the head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, Alexander Zakharchenko, to start a search for her son and to bring the perpetrators to justice. Later it turned out that this was a sham. The investigation never took off and the perpetrators were never brought to justice.
After some time, Stalina Chubenko was asked to a place where her son’s body was suspected to be buried. The teenager’s remains were found in the village of Gorbacheva-Mikhailovka. This is the place where Stepan was sent to dig trenches as a punishment for his views. It is possible that he dug his own grave there. The local population only very cautiously talked to his mother, but they said they knew about the killing of a teenager in their village’s vicinity.
Stalina Chubenko was present when the burial place was searched by representatives of “DNR”. She hoped until the last moment that the body found there was not her sons’s. Alas, Stepan had indeed been buried there. He had been shot with his hands tied on his back. He was wrapped in plastic and thrown into a pit with. The mother learned that three men executed her son, after stealing his sneakers.
When the case became public, the suspects in Stepan’s murder were arrested and questioned by “DNR law enforcement”. After they spent a few months in custody the “DNR’s” prosecutor’s office announced that “the actual presence of the three men at the killing site could not be proven.” They were released from prison. According to Stepan’s mother it is known now that the three men accused of the murder have fled “DNR”. Yuriy Moskaleev and Maksim Sukhomlinov fled to Russia. The third suspect, Vadym Pogodin, escaped to Crimea. In November 2017 a court in Dzherzhinsk, Donetsk Oblast in absentia sentenced the three men to life in prison.
The Donetsk prosecutor who handled the case, Evgeniy Bondarenko, stated that “in the framework of the investigation in the case of a first degree murder of a captive person, committed by a group of people, court expertise amounts to exhaustive evidence that the three militiamen have indeed committed the cruel murder of the teenager.”
Stepan’s mother has not ceased to knock on doors in the quest for justice for her son. In an interview with documenters from the Coalition Justice for Peace in Donbas, she said that for her it was also very important to conserve the memory of her son and his violent death.
Stepan Chubenko posthumously was awarded the title People’s Hero of Ukraine. Next to the entrance to Avantgarde Stadium in Kramatorsk, where Stepan used to play football, there is a memorial plaque and his friends have made banners “forever the first” which they sport during their team’s matches.
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