Anatoly Onoprienko was convicted in 1999 of 52 murders. RIA Novosti called him the bloodiest serial killer in the country's history when he died in 2013. He killed in two separate periods. In the summer of 1989 he and an accomplice robbed motorists sleeping in their cars by the road, and nine people died. Six years later, after a long absence in western Europe, he began again. Between October 5, 1995 and March 22, 1996 he killed 43 people, most of them in rural homes in central and western Ukraine, often whole families including small children, and he burned many of the houses afterward.
He was arrested in April 1996 in Yavoriv, near Lviv, after one of the largest manhunts the young country had mounted. The Zhytomyr Regional Court found him guilty on all counts and sentenced him to death. He was never executed. Ukraine had stopped carrying out executions in 1997 and abolished the death penalty soon after his verdict, and his sentence was replaced with life imprisonment. He died of a heart attack in Zhytomyr prison on August 27, 2013, at 54.
The hunt for him also produced a second tragedy. In March 1996 investigators looking for the killer arrested an innocent young man in Horodok, near Lviv, who died after days of torture in a detention cell. His death, and a second wrongful conviction in the same region, became a lasting case about how confessions were obtained in Ukraine in the 1990s.
Onoprienko was born in 1959 in Lasky, a village in the Narodychi district of the Zhytomyr region, in what was then the Ukrainian SSR, according to Interfax-Ukraine and ZN.ua. Lenta.ru, in a 2020 profile, gave his date of birth as July 25, 1959. He was raised partly in an orphanage, as Lenta.ru reported in 2013 and Espreso in 2026. His trial lawyer said in 2006 that he did not treat the defendant's childhood as a reason for leniency.
Accounts of his early years differ in detail. Espreso, writing in 2026, said his father treated the children harshly and left the family, that a grandmother and an aunt raised him and his older brother for a time, and that he was then sent to an orphanage where he was bullied and from which he ran away more than once. The 2020 Lenta.ru profile said his mother died when he was very young and that he was placed in an orphanage in Malyn. These details are not confirmed by a court record.
As a young man he served in the army and trained at a maritime school, then worked at sea. Lenta.ru reported in 2013 that he was dismissed from the merchant fleet after being caught in petty theft, and his trial lawyer, Ruslan Moshkovsky, gave the same account in 2006: he lost his place at sea for dishonesty and small thefts. He then worked for a fire service and, Lenta.ru said, briefly as a deputy party organizer in the Zaporizhzhia region. By the late 1980s he was living in Dniprorudne, a town in the Zaporizhzhia region, where his wife and son also lived. His son was eight when he was arrested in 1996, Serhiy Rogozin told Gazeta.ua in 2013.
In 1989 Onoprienko met Serhiy Rogozin in Dniprorudne. Rogozin, then in his twenties, had trained at a mining technical school in Dnipropetrovsk and at a special forces school, and had served in Hungary and in Afghanistan, according to his own account to Gazeta.ua. He had come home in 1988 and worked on a collective farm and as a bartender. Moshkovsky described him as a respected figure in the area and the chairman of a local society of Afghan war veterans.
The two men traveled the country selling vegetables. That year, Rogozin said, Onoprienko suggested robbing businessmen who slept in their cars at the roadside. Rogozin's account, given after his release, is that he waited in the car while Onoprienko killed and robbed, and that he was guilty of covering for him rather than of taking part. The court took a different view and convicted him in the 1989 episodes.
The court's count for the first series was nine people killed between June 14 and August 16, 1989, according to the archive of the Ukrainian public broadcaster Suspilne. Rogozin told Gazeta.ua that there were three attacks within three months and that Onoprienko killed nine people. The trial coverage in ZN.ua (Zerkalo Nedeli) in December 1998 names the victims of each episode as the court heard them.
The first was the killing of a married couple named Melnyk on June 14, 1989, in the Synelnykove district of the Dnipropetrovsk region. The second was the killing of a married couple named Vasiliuk, residents of Bialystok in Poland, in the Korets district of the Rivne region. Two witnesses from the Rivne region, a police officer and a fire service worker, told the court in 1998 that they had gone to the scene because they had been called to a fire.
The third episode, an armed robbery and murder, took the lives of five people from Bilopillia in the Sumy region, who were killed in the Zaporizhzhia region. ZN.ua, citing Interfax-Ukraine, listed them by initials as E. O. Podoliaka, his 11-year-old son O. Ye. Podoliaka, L. P. Seleshok, O. P. Seleshok and V. P. Teslia. Five relatives from the Sumy region and one from Khabarovsk in Russia were called as victims, along with 57 witnesses, and the court set aside several days to hear the case. Moshkovsky described this group in 2006 as a family of travelers killed near Vasylivka in the Zaporizhzhia region, whose car was then burned.
Espreso, in its 2026 account, said Onoprienko could have been caught that summer when traffic police stopped him for speeding but let him go for a bribe. Rogozin told Gazeta.ua that police chased Onoprienko as he fled in a stolen car, cornered him and still let him escape. Moshkovsky, in his closing speech, argued that the authorities should have stopped him in 1989; he said the inquiry had stalled and that a file on a hunting permit had gone missing. None of these claims was tested in court; they remain the views of the people who made them.
The two men split up in 1989, and the killings stopped.
After 1989 Onoprienko left his family and went to western Europe. Moshkovsky said in 2006 that he spent about five years there and was expelled twice. He sought political asylum in more than one country, committed petty thefts, and said he had tried to join the French Foreign Legion and had been held in prison in Germany, according to his lawyer and Lenta.ru. Interfax-Ukraine and ZN.ua reported in 2013 that he had traveled illegally to Hungary, Germany, Denmark and Greece.
On September 2, 1994, he carried out a burglary of an apartment in Kyiv, one of the lesser charges the court heard in December 1998. He told the court he had twice been hospitalized in Germany, in 1994 and 1995. His lawyer asked him in court to explain a stay in the Kyiv City Clinical Psychiatric Hospital, and he answered that the court "does not have all the data."
The hospital stay had a strange beginning. Moshkovsky said that after one expulsion, in 1992 by his account, Onoprienko stood on one leg for a whole day in Boryspil airport, outside Kyiv, apparently to appear mentally ill, and was taken to a psychiatric facility in Kyiv, where he was registered as a patient. Lenta.ru reported the same episode in 2013 and said he was given a psychiatric diagnosis there. Espreso put his detention at the Kyiv railway station on May 31, 1994, and said he was discharged with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. At that time no one connected him with the nine deaths of 1989.
After he was sent back from Germany again in 1995, he stayed for a time with his older brother and did not work, Espreso reported. He later moved to Yavoriv, a town west of Lviv, where he lived with a partner, according to the trial lawyer and Espreso.
The court's count for the second series was 43 people killed from October 5, 1995 to March 22, 1996, according to the Suspilne archive. Moshkovsky put the number at 43 for the months before the arrest.
In mid-October he armed himself. On October 3, 1995, he stole from an Opel Record car in Malyn, and on October 14 he stole a hunting rifle from A. Kushnir, a resident of Narodychi in the Zhytomyr region, and then made a sawn-off gun from it. Those were separate charges at his trial, heard in December 1998. When he was arrested police seized a 12-gauge sawn-off hunting gun, ZN.ua reported. The eighth episode heard at trial was the murder on October 28, 1995 of a 79-year-old woman from Odesa.
Moshkovsky said in 2006 that Onoprienko told him he killed for money, yet most of the robberies yielded very little: cosmetics, shoes, even a bucket of herring. The largest sum he ever took was about 1,000 dollars, the lawyer told Lenta.ru. Onoprienko himself said, according to ZN.ua and Interfax-Ukraine, that robbery was his motive, that he could have stolen without killing, that he could not explain why he killed and that he never planned what he did.
The second series is remembered for the families. The killings that drew most attention took place in villages and small towns, at night, in houses standing near roads. Espreso described the pattern in 2026: from late October to December 1995 he killed seven people, and during one robbery he killed a family of four that included a three-month-old baby. Lenta.ru, in 2020, placed that killing in Malyn on December 24, 1995, and said the family was that of a former classmate. His trial lawyer said the dead included a child of 10 months. The names of these victims were not reported.
Bratkovychi, a village in the Horodok district of the Lviv region, suffered more than anywhere else. On the night of December 29 to 30, 1995, he shot a family of four there with a hunting gun and set their house on fire to cover the crime, ZN.ua and Interfax-Ukraine reported; another resident of the village was found dead the same night. On January 17, 1996, he returned, and seven more bodies were found in the village. Espreso said they were a family of five and two people who happened to cross his path. In all, Radio Svoboda wrote in 2002, 12 adults and children were murdered in Bratkovychi. ZN.ua noted in 2013 that more people from the village died in those weeks than in the whole of the Second World War.
In early January 1996 he killed several people on the roads of the Vasylivka district in the Zaporizhzhia region in a single day, one of them a police officer, and stole a car, Lenta.ru reported in 2013. Later that month, according to Lenta.ru's 2020 profile, he killed a man, a neighboring woman and her children in Fastiv, in the Kyiv region, on January 30, and some three weeks later he killed a couple and their child in Olevsk, in the Zhytomyr region. In the Malyn district, Lenta.ru reported in 2013, he shot a householder, his wife and the children inside.
His last killings were in Busk, a district center in the Lviv region. Espreso says that on March 22, 1996 he killed a married couple, their small daughter and the wife's sister, who was deaf. ZN.ua and Interfax-Ukraine reported four people found shot dead in Busk, among them a 10-year-old child. (Those two reports give the date as March 21, 1995, a year earlier than the end of the series as the court recorded it.)
The families were ordinary rural households: parents and children, and neighbors who came out to see what had happened. Fear spread through the western regions. Lenta.ru wrote in 2020 that an army regiment was sent to protect the villagers of Bratkovychi and that people kept axes by their beds. Moshkovsky said in 2006 that between December 1995 and the arrest, 43 people had died in Bratkovychi, Malyn and other places.
Ukraine had become independent less than five years earlier, and its police had no experience of serial killings. At first each family killing was investigated as a separate case, Espreso reported. Only after the January 17 killings in Bratkovychi did investigators conclude that the robbery killings were linked and the work of one man, and the Interior Ministry took over the inquiry. Thousands of officers from the police, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the Interior Ministry's internal troops took part in the search, Lenta.ru reported in 2013. Espreso said the ministry set up a dedicated task force, the first of its kind in the country, and that 60 officers were later dismissed for poor work.
The search went badly. Espreso reported that one double killing was first written off as an accident, and that several innocent people were arrested. Onoprienko himself, it said, was stopped more than once and let go.
The worst failure came in Horodok, the district town next to Bratkovychi. On March 27, 1996, officers arrested Yu. M., a 26-year-old car mechanic from Horodok, on suspicion of the murders, Amnesty International and the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group reported. Radio Svoboda said in 2002 that he became a suspect after a mentally ill local woman named him, and that he was arrested by staff of the regional prosecutor's office acting on the instructions of an assistant to the First Deputy Prosecutor General of Ukraine.
He was taken to the detention center of the SBU's Lviv regional directorate. For three days, Radio Svoboda reported, prosecutors and SBU staff tortured him to make him confess to killings he had not committed, and he died of suffocation while being forced into straitjackets. Amnesty International said in November 1998 that he died four days after his arrest, after torture during interrogation about the murders then attributed to Onoprienko. He never confessed.
Onoprienko was arrested soon afterward. Radio Svoboda put the arrest 17 days after Yu. M.'s death; the Kharkiv group said it came a week after his detention. Lenta.ru reported in 2013 that the men who tortured him were later convicted, and Radio Svoboda said the direct perpetrators were punished. Their names and sentences were not reported.
His parents had lost their only son. In 2001 the Ukrainian parliament's human rights commissioner, Nina Karpachova, sued the regional SBU directorate and the regional prosecutor's office on their behalf. In 2002 the Frankivskyi District Court in Lviv granted the claim in full: 100,000 hryvnias from the SBU directorate and 30,000 from the prosecutor's office, 50,000 and 15,000 for each parent. Radio Svoboda described it as the first time in independent Ukraine that a court had ordered investigative bodies to compensate the family of a person tortured to death. Karpachova said the ruling should become a precedent. The prosecutor's office said it would appeal, arguing that it could be liable only for the three days in detention, not for the death. Karpachova said later that she was satisfied with the ruling but had "no feeling of victory."
Amnesty International reported in 1998 that a second man had been sentenced to death in Lviv for murders that were later attributed to Onoprienko, and that he was released only after Onoprienko's arrest. In Amnesty's view, he was alive only because Ukraine had stopped carrying out executions. Amnesty did not name him, and his name was not reported elsewhere.
Onoprienko was arrested in April 1996 in Yavoriv, at the apartment of his partner. The Suspilne archive and Espreso give the date as April 14; his trial lawyer gave April 16. Accounts of how the police found him differ. Lenta.ru reported in 2013 that a neighbor in Yavoriv told police about a man who came home at night carrying large bags. Its 2020 profile said officers acted on an anonymous tip. Espreso wrote that sources differ on whether he was given away by his brother, named Petro, or by his partner. Lenta.ru said in 2013 that he did not resist.
The search of the apartment turned up the sawn-off gun and a large amount of property taken from the dead. ZN.ua reported that police seized the 12-gauge sawn-off hunting gun and 123 items of physical evidence. Lenta.ru's 2020 profile put the number of the victims' belongings at 122 and said he had passed some of them to relatives as things bought at the market.
Investigator Bohdan Teslia later described the first questioning, as Espreso reported. At first Onoprienko denied everything. He said he lived with acquaintances, traveled abroad often and had bought all the things found in the apartment. Over a long conversation he became confused, and the investigators noticed that the places linked to the crimes were his home village and places where he had lived or worked. When Vitaliy Yarema, head of criminal investigations in Kyiv, took personal charge, Onoprienko confessed to all of the killings, Espreso reported, including some that investigators had not linked to him. In the end investigators counted 52 murder episodes.
He named Rogozin as his accomplice in 1989, and Rogozin was arrested in 1996. Lenta.ru's 2020 profile said he was first charged with 40 murders and later admitted 12 more.
He gave many explanations. He said he heard voices ordering him to kill, Amnesty International and Lenta.ru reported, and he spoke of a divine order to kill 360 people, which his lawyer dismissed as a performance. Later he claimed to have been recruited by special services in 1982 and to have killed on their orders. Rogozin, asked why Onoprienko killed, called him a "hunter" who shot people as he would shoot animals.
Reconstructions at the crime scenes were dangerous. Officers feared that local people would try to kill him, so he was moved under heavy guard and sometimes in a bulletproof vest, and he was not taken back to Bratkovychi, Espreso reported.
The investigation took about two and a half years and filled 99 volumes, according to the Suspilne archive. Moshkovsky said the file ran to about 100 volumes of 250 to 300 pages each.
The trial opened on November 23, 1998 at the Zhytomyr Regional Court, more than two and a half years after the arrest. Judge Dmytro Lypsky presided and Yuriy Ignatenko led the prosecution. The state assigned Ruslan Moshkovsky of Zhytomyr as Onoprienko's lawyer: in a case that carried the death penalty, a defense lawyer was required, and the state supplied one when the accused could not pay. Moshkovsky was proposed by Stepan Biletsky, head of the court's criminal panel, and was paid 17 hryvnias a day. About 310 witnesses and 150 people recognized as victims took part, Moshkovsky said, and journalists came from many countries. Rogozin sat as his co-defendant for the 1989 episodes.
The case became political before the first witness was heard. In a media interview around the time the trial began, President Leonid Kuchma said, as reported by Amnesty International and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: "As a human being I cannot see any punishment for him other than death." Amnesty said the remark violated the independence of the judiciary and the defendant's presumption of innocence, put Ukraine's halt on executions at risk, and called for an independent psychiatric examination because of reports that he might be mentally ill.
In the first week of December, Onoprienko tried to dismiss his lawyer. ZN.ua reported that he demanded a defender over 50, Jewish or partly Jewish, financially independent and experienced abroad. The court refused, and he then withdrew his earlier agreement to testify. Rogozin, the first witness, told the court that his statements during the investigation were untrue and had been obtained by psychological and physical pressure, and that he had nothing to do with the June 14, 1989 murder of the Melnyk couple. The relatives and witnesses who had been summoned for that episode did not appear, and the court went on without them.
That evening Onoprienko said he had been recruited by the special services. When the court asked whose orders he had followed, since he had earlier said heavenly forces directed him, he answered that he had lied, was lying and would go on lying, and he refused to answer the prosecutor's questions. Lenta.ru, writing in 2013, quoted him as saying "I lied and will lie."
The court worked through the episodes in order. In a hearing reported on December 11, it heard the lesser charges from 1994 and 1995, and then the killing of the 79-year-old woman from Odesa. Onoprienko was by then alone in the cage, ZN.ua noted; the episodes involving Rogozin had been heard. The presiding judge said the question of his psychiatric history would be taken up when the court examined his personality.
Moshkovsky said in 2006 that a psychiatrist, Andrei Tsubera of the Pavlivka hospital, examined Onoprienko in court and concluded that he was sane and was faking mental illness. Lenta.ru also reported that experts found him sane. The defense of insanity failed.
Moshkovsky said he had read the expert conclusions rather than every page of the file, and that his client admitted his guilt and boasted of his crimes, telling him his hands were covered in blood "up to the elbows." The lawyer regarded him as calculating, not insane. In his closing speech he argued that the system had failed, since the police should have stopped Onoprienko long before. The prosecutor asked for death for Onoprienko and 15 years for Rogozin.
The verdict is dated March 31, 1999, the date given by Moshkovsky. The Suspilne archive records that the judge read it on April 1, 1999, and that the reading took 12 hours. The court found Onoprienko guilty on all counts and sentenced him to death by shooting. The counts included the 52 murders, robbery, theft, the burglary in Kyiv, the theft of the rifle and the making of the sawn-off gun; Espreso said they also included rape and banditry. He was 39.
Rogozin was convicted in the 1989 episodes and sentenced to 13 years, Moshkovsky said. Rogozin told Gazeta.ua in 2013 that he still saw himself as guilty only of covering for Onoprienko. Moshkovsky said Onoprienko had protected Rogozin during the trial, and Rogozin recalled that at the first hearing Onoprienko shouted that he should be released because "it's all mine."
Lenta.ru reported in 2020 that relatives in the courtroom shouted so much that the judge needed three attempts to read the verdict. Espreso reported that relatives demanded his execution and many could barely contain themselves.
Moshkovsky considered the sentence fair, he said in 2006, but for professional reasons he filed a cassation appeal to the Supreme Court of Ukraine asking for it to be softened. In August 1999 the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence, ZN.ua and Lenta.ru reported. It reduced Rogozin's sentence to 12 years. Moshkovsky declined to explain the reduction.
By 1999 Ukraine had not carried out an execution for about two years. When it joined the Council of Europe in November 1995, it had promised to abolish the death penalty and to halt executions; executions continued for a time, and a halt in practice began in March 1997, according to Amnesty International. The Council of Europe's deadline for full abolition, November 1998, passed while Onoprienko's trial was under way.
On December 29, 1999, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine ruled the death penalty unconstitutional. (ZN.ua gives the date as December 30.) In 2000 parliament removed the death penalty from the Criminal Code, and life imprisonment came into force on April 4, 2000, as the Supreme Court of Ukraine later stated. The Suspilne archive says Onoprienko's sentence was replaced with life imprisonment after Kuchma signed the abolition into law in 2000. Lenta.ru and Espreso reported that Kuchma sought an exception for Onoprienko from the Council of Europe and was refused. The date of the order that changed his own sentence was not reported.
Onoprienko spent the rest of his life in Zhytomyr prison No. 8, a prison built in 1914 that by 2011 held more than 160 men serving life sentences, LB.ua reported. Most of them shared cells in pairs. He was held alone. Lenta.ru reported in 2013 that he refused to work, read books, and argued about the Bible with a visiting priest, and a former guard told the outlet that other prisoners had tried more than once to kill him. Moshkovsky said in 2006 that guards described him as well behaved, sitting quietly and, in the lawyer's words, waiting for some chance of his own. He told staff, Lenta.ru reported, that he wanted to be released and would kill again.
Residents of Zhytomyr periodically spread rumors that he had escaped, LB.ua wrote in 2011. A life prisoner in Ukraine could apply for a pardon only after 20 years; none had reached that point by 2011. Espreso reported that he spent about 13 years in solitary confinement and that he once tried to seize the camera of the photojournalist Yefrem Lukatsky, who photographed him in his cell as he held up his hands and said he had killed 52 people with them.
He died on August 27, 2013, in the Zhytomyr prison. His death was recorded at 17:15, Interfax-Ukraine reported, and the preliminary diagnosis was a heart attack. Ihor Andrushko, an assistant to the head of the State Penitentiary Service, confirmed the death and said he had had heart problems before. A guard found him unconscious in his cell in the life-sentence unit, and medics could not revive him, Lenta.ru reported; his body was sent for a forensic examination. Lenta.ru noted that journalists who had visited earlier in 2013 had been told he had never been ill in 17 years in prison, and that the prison service had no information that anyone else was involved. He was 54.
Rogozin was released in 2008, five months early, for good behavior, he told Gazeta.ua. In 2013 he was living in Dniprorudne, caring for his elderly parents. He said he had divorced his wife when he was sentenced, had spent months looking for work, and for three years had to prove to the police that he was not a bandit. Onoprienko's former wife and son also lived in Dniprorudne, he said, and Onoprienko had caused them a great deal of trouble.
In March 2021 Metropolitan Pavel (Lebed), then the abbot of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, said in a televised interview with Oksana Marchenko that a man who later turned out to be Onoprienko had confessed killings to him years earlier in a church in Novovolynsk, had asked him to report him to the police, and that he had not done so. Glavcom reported that Pavel forgave him and warned him that he would be caught if he killed again, and that Pavel gave the number of dead as 56. His account has not been tested, and it does not match the court's count.
The case left marks on Ukrainian law. The death of Yu. M. in custody produced the first award of damages by a Ukrainian court against the investigating bodies as a whole for a death under torture. And the trial took place as Ukraine was being pressed to keep its promise to abolish the death penalty; the President's own call for an execution in this case became part of that debate.
Proven by final judgment: 52 murders, nine in 1989 and 43 in 1995 and 1996, and the related robbery, theft and weapons counts (Zhytomyr Regional Court, March 31, 1999; upheld by the Supreme Court of Ukraine, August 1999). Rogozin's conviction covers the 1989 episodes only; he has always denied taking part in the killings themselves.
Claimed and never tested: a higher total. Onoprienko spoke of orders to kill hundreds, and Metropolitan Pavel spoke of 56 dead. Lenta.ru wrote in 2013 that the unofficial toll may have been higher than 52, without evidence.
Dates that differ between sources: the arrest (April 14 or April 16, 1996); the verdict (dated March 31, 1999, read April 1; Espreso's "March 3" is a misprint); the Busk killings (March 22, 1996 by the court's series; March 21, 1995 in Interfax-Ukraine and ZN.ua in 2013); the Constitutional Court ruling (December 29 or 30, 1999); the hospitalization in Kyiv (1992 by his lawyer's account, 1994 by Espreso's); and Rogozin's sentence (13 years at trial, 12 after appeal; Rogozin himself recalls 12). Both the ZN.ua and Interfax-Ukraine reports on his death say he was sentenced in 1996 to life imprisonment, which is wrong on both points: he was sentenced to death in 1999.
How he was found: a neighbor's report (Lenta.ru, 2013), an anonymous tip (Lenta.ru, 2020), or his brother or partner (Espreso). No reported court record settles the point.
The motive: he gave robbery, voices, heavenly orders and recruitment by the special services at different times, and called the last a lie in court. Court psychiatrists found him sane.
1959: Anatoly Onoprienko is born in Lasky, Narodychi district, Zhytomyr region (July 25, by Lenta.ru's account).
1989: meets Serhiy Rogozin in Dniprorudne, Zaporizhzhia region.
June 14, 1989: the Melnyk couple are killed in the Synelnykove district, Dnipropetrovsk region.
Summer 1989: the Vasiliuk couple from Bialystok, Poland, are killed in the Korets district, Rivne region.
By August 16, 1989: five people from Bilopillia, Sumy region, including an 11-year-old boy, are killed in the Zaporizhzhia region. Nine dead in the first series.
About 1989 to 1995: lives in western Europe; expelled more than once.
1990s: held in a Kyiv psychiatric hospital after being sent back to Ukraine.
September 2, 1994: burglary of an apartment in Kyiv.
October 5, 1995: the second series begins, by the court's count.
October 14, 1995: steals a hunting rifle in Narodychi and makes a sawn-off gun from it.
October 28, 1995: a 79-year-old woman from Odesa is killed.
December 1995: a family of four, including a baby, is killed.
December 29 to 30, 1995: a family of four and another villager are killed in Bratkovychi, Lviv region.
January 1996: killings on the roads of the Zaporizhzhia region.
January 17, 1996: seven more people are killed in Bratkovychi; the Interior Ministry takes over the inquiry.
January 30, 1996: killings in Fastiv, Kyiv region.
February 1996: killings in Olevsk and the Malyn district, Zhytomyr region.
March 22, 1996: four people, including a child, are killed in Busk, Lviv region; the last killings.
March 27, 1996: Yu. M., 26, is arrested in Horodok; he dies under torture in SBU custody within days.
April 14 or 16, 1996: Onoprienko is arrested in Yavoriv, Lviv region. He confesses to 52 killings.
1996: Rogozin is arrested.
November 23, 1998: trial opens at the Zhytomyr Regional Court; President Kuchma calls for death.
March 31, 1999: verdict dated; read out on April 1. Death sentence for Onoprienko; 13 years for Rogozin.
August 1999: the Supreme Court of Ukraine upholds the death sentence and cuts Rogozin's term to 12 years.
December 29, 1999: the Constitutional Court rules the death penalty unconstitutional.
April 4, 2000: life imprisonment enters the law; his sentence is replaced with life.
2002: a Lviv court orders the SBU directorate and the prosecutor's office to compensate Yu. M.'s parents.
2008: Rogozin is released.
August 27, 2013: Onoprienko dies in Zhytomyr prison No. 8, aged 54.
March 2021: Metropolitan Pavel says Onoprienko confessed to him before his arrest.