Ukraine is about to try Davor Savicic in absentia – the first Bosnian national to be charged with war crimes allegedly committed while fighting with Russian forces in 2022. In an interview with BIRN, one of his accusers recalls his captivity in a rat-infested pit, blindfolded and bound, fearing for his life.
Mykola had barely finished celebrating his birthday when he was taken away the next day by Russian forces almost immediately following their full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.
He spent a week in captivity.
“Seven days,” he said. “I live constantly with those days.”
“When they were taking me away, I realised that was it – that I was dead, that they were going to kill me,” Mykola told BIRN at his home in Fedorivka, a rural settlement some 80 kilometres north of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.
More than four years later, Mykola finds himself a key witness in the milestone war crimes trial of Bosnian citizen Davor Savicic, the first Bosnian national to be charged in Ukraine with crimes committed while fighting alongside Russian forces. For security reasons, BIRN is not using Mykola’s full name.
Savicic, a Bosnian Serb originally from Banovici, is one of roughly 200 people from the Balkans who have fought with the Russians in Ukraine; he is the first, however, to be tried for war crimes.
“Yes, that’s him,” Mykola said on being shown several photographs of Savicic. “He looks completely the same. It’s 100 per cent him.”
“He walked around the village handing out chocolates to children. He was saying: ‘I came from Serbia to liberate you.’”
Savicic, however, is being tried in absentia. The 46-year-old holds both Bosnian and Russian citizenship. There is no firm information on his whereabouts, though it is likely he is in Russia. A warrant for his arrest has been issued by Bosnian authorities. He did not respond to requests for comment sent to his social media accounts.
According to Mykola’s account, Savicic oversaw his captivity in a rat-infested pit, much of the time blindfolded and bound, fearing for his life.
Violence, torture
A phone shows a photo of Davor Savicic. The image was sent to BIRN undercover reporters in 2025. Photo: BIRN.
Ukrainian authorities accuse Savicic of commanding a unit called ‘The Wolves’, part of an ostensibly private army known as ‘Redut’ but which Radio Free Europe reported in 2023 is controlled and financed by the Russian military intelligence agency GRU.
For much of March 2022, Fedorivka was occupied by Russian forces.
Mykola was taken away on March 3.
His eyes were covered, his hands tied, and he was driven into a forest.
First he was beaten, then tied to a tree. Mykola said a soldier then slid a grenade between his back and the tree and removed the pin. His description suggests it was an impact grenade rather than a grenade triggered by a time-delay fuse.
“I couldn’t move either way,” he said. “Even if it slipped, I had nowhere to run. It would simply explode. I wouldn’t even have those four seconds to react.”
Mykola said he was left sitting there, motionless, for between 90 minutes and two hours.
On June 30 this year, Savicic was charged in Borodyanka with violating the laws and customs of war, specifically crimes committed against the residents of Fedorivka, Ivankiv and surrounding areas, including the capture, abuse and interrogation of Mykola.
The indictment is among 740 raised by Ukrainian prosecutors and involving alleged war crimes charges committed since February 24, 2022, the day of the full-scale invasion. According to the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, 206 people have been convicted of war crimes as of November 2025.
A preliminary hearing in Savicic’s case is due in early September.
Propaganda tools
Mykola said he saw Savicic every day when his blindfold was removed and he was forced to dig pits for military vehicles and trenches.
“He sat and gave orders,” Mykola said.
“When you sit there and listen to everything, you learn every voice. You know who is coming, who is going to beat you, and who isn’t.”
Mykola recounted going without food for several days and said he was forced to make false statements to camera about being an officer of the Ukrainian SBU intelligence agency.
He cited Savicic as telling him the planned ‘confession’ was the only reason he was still alive.
“‘If it weren’t for that, I would have killed you a long time ago,’” Mykola quoted him. “‘You are a burden to me. You sit in a pit and people have to guard you. It would be easier to get rid of you and sleep.’”
“I was never an SBU officer,” Mykola told BIRN. “But if they asked me to say I was, then I told them I was.”
His statement was played on Russia’s Channel One in March 2022, the same year that the West imposed sanctions on the broadcaster as one of the main tools of Russian propaganda.
In the video, seen by BIRN, Mykola has an injury to one eye. He said a Russian soldier kicked him in the head, knocking him to the floor, right before the ‘interview’.
‘Liberate me from what?’
Mykola said he spent most of his captivity in a forest pit between the villages of Shybene and Krasny Rih. He said his hands were tied and there were rats in the pit. When he killed one after it bit him, he said a soldier hit him in the head with a rifle butt. The soldier told him: “Kill another one and I’ll shoot you.”
Mykola said he saw other captives being tortured.
According to the Ukrainian Media Initiative for Human Rights, MIHR, which inspected the site, the pits were some 90 centimetres deep; those inside had to sit in water; they lost feeling in their legs; and they had to urinate and defecate in the same spot.
Lidiia Tarash, a journalist and head of the documentation department of MIHR, said the researchers were led to the site by Mykola. A dead body was found in one of the pits, as well as the remains of Russian military rations, fortifications and ammunition boxes.
MIHR identified five locations in the area where civilians were held and documented the capture of 43 individuals. Its findings helped lead to the indictment of Savicic. Multiple interlocutors said Serbs were among the Russian forces. Everyone named Savicic as being in charge, Tarash said.
In late May last year, the X account of Milorad Dodik, then the president of Bosnia’s predominantly Serb-populated Republika Srpska entity, published a photo of himself visiting the representative office of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Russia. Savicic was in the photo.
Britain imposed sanctions on him in November 2024.
Mykola said Savicicand his unit arethe reason he still has trouble sleeping at night. His back was damaged during his captivity and he said he is haunted by the word ‘liberation’, which he heard over and over again from his captors.
“They kept saying: ‘We came to liberate you.’ But liberate me from what? From a normal life?”
Savicic’s trial is a matter of justice and responsibility, he said.
“None of them can say: ‘I was just following orders’ and to think they aren’t responsible for it,” Mykola told BIRN. “Someone gave you an order, but it was still your choice whether to execute it.”
Source: balkaninsight.com
