“It is not considered a war crime if you had fun,” reads graffiti left by Russian soldiers in the backroom of a bar in the village of Velyka Komyshuvakha, located in the Izium district of Kharkiv Oblast. Before being liberated, the area was occupied by Russian forces for six months between April and September 2022, during which Russian troops set up a network of torture chambers and carried out a systemic, organized effort to terrorize the local population. The message is just one of around 650 inscriptions translated and verified by members of the Wall Evidence project, an open-source digital archive of graffiti, drawings, diary entries, notes, and other markings left behind by Russian forces in previously occupied territories.
Since the liberation of the Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson regions, the Ukrainian nonprofit Mizhvukhamy has collected over 500 inscriptions left by Russian soldiers.