Grief, anger and suspicion in Ukrainian village where collaborators killed 59
Two brothers from Ukrainian village Hroza betrayed their own by giving Russian forces information which led to the biggest single loss of civilian life since the war began.
Two landmarks welcome visitors to Hroza. One a windswept cemetery, where blue and yellow flags flutter above dirt mounds; the other a concrete bus shelter bearing the face of the man who consigned his former neighbours to their graves.
“The killers have names!” the writing on the poster blares. “Volodymyr Mamom killed 59 of his fellow villagers for Russian gold.” Down the road to Shevchenkove, a second billboard barks the same charge against Dmytro Mamom, his younger brother.
Before the 2022 invasion, no one in this quiet village in northeastern Ukraine, close to the Russian border, had any reason to suspect the two men of pro-Moscow sympathies.
That all changed last October after a Russian Iskander missile struck Hroza, flattening the cafe where the villagers had gathered for the wake of Andriy Kozyr, a fallen soldier being reburied in his native soil after its liberation from Russian control.
Funerals for the victims were still taking place when intelligence services made their jaw-dropping revelation: those responsible for the slaughter were Hroza born and bred.
The part the Mamom brothers played in Hroza’s destruction, may have made them the war’s most deadly collaborators – inauspicious village boys responsible for the worst single loss of civilian life in Ukraine that year.
Six months on, the shadows of betrayal and suspicion still linger over Hroza, a word meaning “thunderstorm” in Ukrainian. “There is a lot of fear and suspicion still here,” explains Nadya, a former neighbour of the Mamoms. The reverberations from such betrayals and the distrust they have sown can be felt in communities across Ukraine: struggling to unite again after occupation, unsure of what their neighbours did to survive those long months before liberation.
In the distance, the sound of fighting around Kupiansk is a constant reminder of the threat of a Russian return. “Even now there are people here waiting for them to come back,” she says. “The brothers were not the only collaborators.”
Life was different before the war. Hroza was “a kind place, the whole village was very close,” Nadya said. “We lived a good life. We helped each other.”
Nataliya Mamom was visiting relatives in Russia’s Belgorod region when the invasion began. Her sons Volodymr, 30, and Dmytro, 23, were low-ranking policemen. Hroza was all but bypassed by Russian troops bearing down hard on Kharkiv and villagers only became aware Volodomyr had begun working for the occupiers when he turned up manning a Russian checkpoint. When Russia’s lines in the Kharkiv region collapsed in September 2022 amid a surging Ukrainian counteroffensive the Mamom brothers vanished.
Via a Facebook page used by the villagers, they learnt the Mamoms were now in Russia. Others had gone that same way to escape the fighting but unlike them, the Mamoms did not return.
While they had left the village, they kept in contact with former neighbours. Messaging with old friends they learnt that the soldier’s wake would take place on October 5 at the Sputnik cafe where their mother had worked during their childhood. Messages that came to light after the attack revealed the brothers discussing what they had picked up: the time the wake would start, where it would take place and the chances of a large number of soldiers being present.
There were, however, no soldiers present at the wake and Kozyr, the fallen soldier, and his wife, had been among their parents’ closest friends before they left a decade earlier to work in Poland.
The missile wiped out the residents of half of Samarskaya St where the Mamoms had lived. Fourteen children lost at least one parent; eight lost both. The youngest victim was a young boy, Ivan, eight.
“When we found out it was them, there was hatred and incomprehension,” Anya, a neighbour, says. “People could not believe they would do such a thing.” Around 20 more villagers left Hroza after the attack, including Karina Krysivi, one of the few who had been in contact with the Mamoms yet survived. “I think the guilt destroyed her,” Anya said.
The Mamoms face life imprisonment for high treason – if they are ever caught. Both now serve in the Russian police force in Belgorod. Ukraine has 8,100 criminal proceedings for collaboration ongoing, with vast obstacles to justice.
“Ninety-five per cent of those who have this guilt left with the Russians,” says Vitaly Ovcharenko, a special forces soldier and activist who helped bring the first legislation on collaboration into being after serving in the Donbas. Their motivation is “mainly ideology, a nostalgia for the Soviet Union, that kind of Russia propaganda,” he says.
For others, like the Mamoms, it is more transactional. “Status. And money. Nobodies who become somebody under occupation.”
Hroza spent just six months under occupation, long enough to fray lifetime bonds.
Ovcharenko worries how justice and peace can be reconciled to reunite Ukraine in the future, including those who have risked their lives to help Kyiv under a decade of Russian occupation.
In the Donbas, loyalists “are scared that the real collaborators won’t be punished. They’ve been waiting for us for 10 years. And after that, we will have to glue society back together again”.
The Times
More Coverage
Reports suggest pilots may have identified wrong approaching jet
The helicopter failed to ‘see and avoid’ the American Airlines plane, findings indicate, marking the first significant commercial jet crash in the US for 16 years.
Prince Andrew stayed in contact with Epstein
The Duke of York told the convicted pedophile they would ‘play some more soon’, two months after he professed to have broken contact.