Lawfare Archive: Memorializing Babyn Yar after the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
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I'm Isabella Royale, intern at Lawfare, with an episode from the Lawfare Archive for December 20th, 2025. On December 14th, two gunmen opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration in Australia's Bondi Beach, killing 15 people, including an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor from Ukraine. The day before, the Russian military conducted what Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Sviridenko characterized as one of the largest assaults on Odessa in the Russia-Ukraine war. For today's archive, I chose an episode from July 1st, 2022, in which Tyler McBrien, Maxim Rokmanenko, and Linda Kintzler discuss a Russian missile striking a TV tower in Kyiv, near Babyn Yar, the site of Nazi mass murders during the Holocaust. The three discuss the history of Babiniyar as a site and symbol, the role of open-source investigative techniques and forensic modeling in the documentation of war crimes, the battle over historical narratives, memorialization, and memory, and the limits of the law in achieving justice for victims of negation and genocide.
I'm Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare, and this is the Lawfare Podcast, July 1st, 2022. When a Russian missile recently struck a TV tower in Kyiv near Babyn Yar, the site of Nazi mass murders during the Holocaust, some saw the attack as a potent symbol of the tragic occurrence of violence in Ukraine. In her recent New York Times essay, The Bloody Echoes of Babyn Yar, Linda Kintzler wrote, "...the current war in Ukraine is so oversaturated with historical meaning." It is unfolding on soil that has absorbed wave after wave of the dead, where soldiers do not always have to dig trenches in the forest because the old ones remain. To talk through the historical significance of the attack, I sat down with Linda, a PhD candidate in the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley.
Linda is also the author of Come to This Court and Cry, How the Holocaust Ends, which is out in the U.S. on August 23rd from Public Affairs. I was also joined by Maxim Rokhmaniko, an architect, designer, entrepreneur, and director at the Center for Spatial Technologies in Kyiv, Ukraine. We discuss the history of Babinyar as a site and symbol, the role of open source investigative techniques and forensic modeling in the documentation of war crimes, the battle over historical narratives, memorialization, and memory in achieving justice for victims of negation and genocide. It's the Lawfare Podcast, July 1st, memorializing Babinyar after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So I wanted to start our conversation in March of this year when Russia launched a missile strike on a TV tower in Kyiv.
You've both written about or investigated this particular strike, even though, as people have pointed out, it wasn't the deadliest or most militarily strategic.
Why was the March missile strike near Babyn Yar investigated as symbolically significant?
Maxim, I'd love to start with you. Why investigate this particular attack? What's its significance?
Yeah, this is a question to unpack. I have to say I have a strong personal connection to this place. I live in Lukianivska district of Kyiv from which you can see the TV tower very well. You can in fact see it from my bedroom. And I've lived in that area for most of my life. But also for the two years starting from the end of 2019. The team that I run did an investigation about one of these major Holocaust sites, which is Babeni Yar, which is basically buried under the territory, which is now called Babeni Yar, on top of which the TV tower has been constructed. So we've been researching that place using this kind of forensic architecture type of tools, reconstructing the terrain digitally, mapping the events, and we know that place really well.
So when the first missile landed on Cave on the 24th of February, our team was kind of ready to do this work. We didn't even have a discussion about kind of mapping these events, collecting evidence and stuff like that. In fact, we were immediately on Mirrorboard, which is a tool for like digital mapping, trying to understand from which directions this missile came. Missiles came and, you know, basically trying to
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