The Chernihiv oblast enlistment office refused to disclose information about the burial of the deceased serviceman Volodymyr Srebrodolskyi to Slidstvo.Info, claiming that the journalists had failed to cite sufficient grounds for the query and did not list the purpose of their probe or who commissioned the story, the news outlet reports.

The journalists requested information as part of the investigation “’We will burn you if you bury him here’: Village opposes burial of a soldier killed in Russian prison”.

The team said they had been trying to locate the soldier’s grave for several weeks, sending information queries to the enlistment office, local authorities, and coroner institutions, but were mostly faced with rejection or contradictory answers.

In its response, the Chernihiv oblast enlistment office claimed that the journalists failed to justify their effort to gather this data and inquired about the media professionals’ motives.

“The query by the NGO Slidstvo.Info cites no justification for the need to produce a news story about the deceased V. I. Srebrodolskyi, i.e. what made the reporting of this information necessary and who is the interested party or the commissioner of the production and publication of the information in question,” the enlistment office wrote in their response.

The enlistment office also said that the serviceman’s relatives had not consented to disclosure of information about him.

However, the journalists learned while working on the investigation that Volodymyr Srebrodolskyi had no close relatives at all. According to people from his village, the man lived alone in Karpylivka, Chernihiv oblast.

Slidstvo.Info said that after the late soldier’s body was repatriated, the burial proved problematic. Some residents of the village where he lived opposed the soldier’s burial at the local cemetery because of a video clip of him that the Russian forces filmed while holding him prisoner. Slidstvo.Info has reported earlier that in it, the prisoner criticised the Ukrainian authorities and said that he did not want to go back to Ukraine, claiming that he would be “handed a machine gun” and “thrown under mortar fire” again and that “was not going to fight and die for who knows what.”

Later, the Jaeger Brigade No. 152, where Srebrodolskyi served, confirmed to the journalists that the soldier had been eventually buried in Pryluky.