“The Car Was Riddled with Bullets”: Life Sentences Upheld
Due to the victims’ judicial connections, appeal case involved steps to eliminate any doubt regarding impartiality.
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The Kyiv Court of Appeal has upheld the life sentences for two Russian servicemen who shot at a car near Chernihiv in March 2022, killing two civilians.
The attack killed 45-year-old Judge Liubov Kharechko and 52-year-old Oleksandr Bobrov.
The appeal in the case of Vladislav Dongak, 37, and Artem Tereshonkov, 24, took additional procedural steps to eliminate any doubt regarding its impartiality throughout the hearing and the delivery of the verdict.
Judge Kharechko had worked at the Chernihiv Court of Appeal for over ten years, handling civil cases. On the first day of the full-scale war, she, her son and the Bobrov family – close friends of theirs – travelled to a country house in the village of Rohoshchi, 24 kilometres north of the regional capital.
“They arrived in the village from Chernihiv on the afternoon of February 24,” Viktor Hryhorus recalled in a September 2022 interview with the Vist newspaper. “It was Liubov and her son, Valerii, and my neighbours, Iryna and Sasha Bobrov, with their 16-year-old daughter Katia and Polina, a relative of the same age.
“The Bobrovs have a dacha next door, which Sasha had been fixing up himself, but the building wasn't ready to live in yet,” the 67-year-old continued. “So, they came to my house, bringing their own food. I cooked a large pot of pilaf. We all ate together. We put mattresses and a hunting sleeping bag on the floor. Liuba slept on the floor next to her son. My guests tried to stay out of sight, because enemy military vehicles were moving through the village…Russian soldiers were going from cellar to cellar, searching for our troops. In yards where they saw cars, they shot out the tires and windshields. Whenever they got close to our yard, I hid the girls in the cellar.”
The occupying troops pushed deeper into the region in an attempt to encircle and capture Chernihiv. On March 3, the Bobrov and Kharechko families decided to leave the Russian-occupied village for Chernihiv, 17 kilometres away.
However, when their car - driven by Bobrov, with Kharechko in the front passenger seat - pulled over to the side of the road and stopped to let a Russian military column of vehicles moving through the village of Khmilnytsia pass, it was fired on. Russian soldiers moving toward the grey Renault Duster car firing at least 11 shots. Bobrov, the husband of Kharechko’s former colleague, retired Chernihiv Court of Appeal judge Iryna Bobrova – and Judge Kharechko herself were killed instantly. Kharechko’s 22-year-old son Valerii was wounded.
“Later, I learned there were two bullet holes in the windshield in front of where Liuba was sitting,” Hryhorus said. “One bullet struck her in the heart and the second killed her dog. There were eight bullet holes in front of Sasha. And the back of the car was like a sieve.”
The following day, he and fellow villagers buried Bobrov and Kharechko in the village cemetery.
Life Sentence
According to the investigation, Tereshonkov and Dongak were among the Russian soldiers who opened fire on the grey Renault. The charges, filed in absentia, stated that the passengers were not resisting the Russian advance, therefore posed no threat to them and could not be considered participants in an armed conflict.
Tereshonkov and Dongak were served a notice of suspicion in absentia for war crimes in November 2023. After the investigation concluded in January 2024, the case was transferred to the Chernihiv district court. During a preliminary hearing, the court granted a motion to recuse one of the judges on the panel. The motion was filed by Valentyn Lieskov, the defendants’ attorney from the Free Legal Aid Centre. He argued that one of the judges was friends with a victim in the case, while another victim was the goddaughter of that judge’s husband. According to the defence, this could raise doubts about the judge’s impartiality.
In its ruling, the court stated that even the potential appearance of bias could call the fairness of a future decision into question. The motion for recusal was therefore granted and a new judicial panel was appointed.
Tereshonkov and Dongak failed to appear for any of their court summonses. During the pre-trial investigation, it was established that one of them was located in the occupied territory of Luhansk Oblast, while the other was in the Russian Federation. The court accepted the testimony of the victims in the vehicle during the shooting as the key evidence of the Russian soldiers’ guilt. The victims unanimously stated that they were civilians, their car had no military markings and that after pulling over to the roadside, they came under aimed fire.
“As we approached the highway and saw a column of military vehicles, we pulled over to the roadside and stopped,” Iryna Bobrova testified in court, according to her statement cited in the verdict. “Soldiers were walking towards us and shooting, there were about ten of them. An armoured personnel carrier was speeding toward us from the other direction.”
“I could hear bullets hitting the glass and could smell gunpowder, there was a burst of gunfire,” the daughter, Kateryna Bobrova, told the court. “When I lifted my head, I saw my dad lying motionless over the steering wheel.”
After the shooting, the Russian soldiers forced the passengers out of the car and onto the ground. They were subsequently held in a house and ordered not to leave until the military column had passed. The victims and witnesses identified the accused as the individuals involved in the murder, recognising them during a photo identification procedure.
A forensic medical examination concluded that Kharechko and Bobrov’s deaths resulted from gunshot wounds to the chest inflicted by 5.45x39 mm bullets from a non-close range. Ballistics tests further confirmed that the recovered casings and bullet fragments were from live ammunition rounds of the same calibre. The evidence indicated the use of at least two different automatic weapons and that the 11 bullet holes on the vehicle were all entry wounds. This data fully aligned with victim statements describing a targeted shooting by a Russian military column.
The Chernihiv district court ruled that the testimony of the survivors and witnesses, the results of identification procedures, expert findings and investigative experiments constituted relevant and admissible evidence. This evidence proved Dongak and Tereshonkov’s guilt in committing a war crime combined with premeditated murder as set out in Part 2 of Article 28, Part 2 of Article 438 of the criminal code of Ukraine, carried out by a group of individuals by prior conspiracy. On September 16, 2024, the court found them guilty in absentia and sentenced them to life imprisonment.
The defendants’ attorney appealed the verdict within the one-month period required by law.
However, the Chernihiv Court of Appeal was unable to hear the appeal. It filed a motion with the Supreme Court to transfer the case, explaining that the victim Bobrova and the deceased Kharechko had both served for a long time as judges in its Civil Cases Chamber. Therefore, the court could not review the lower court’s verdict. The Supreme Court granted the motion and transferred the case to the Kyiv Court of Appeal.
More than a year later, on February 4, 2026, the Kyiv Court of Appeal upheld the verdict and the ruling took effect the moment It can be appealed to the Supreme Court within 90 days, but it is not yet known whether such an appeal will be filed.
