The Russians were “looking for anything that might link the brothers to the attack on the convoy,” said Bell, and they found no such evidence, but did find their grandfather’s military medal and Kulichenko’s brother’s military bag. He was a reservist in the Ukrainian Army.

Kulichenko said he and his brothers were taken from their home, blindfolded, interrogated in a cellar for four days, beaten, and taken out to the woods to be executed. Their sister heard nothing from them for four days, said Bell, “until Mykola came back from the dead.”

“I came home and there was Mykola,” said a tearful Iryna Kulichenko through a translator. “I looked at his eyes and asked, ‘Where are the others?’ He said, ‘There are no others.’”