In Moscow, China's President Xi
Jinping and Russia's
Vladimir Putin shaking hands
and stressing close ties.
As a three day state visit gets underway.
And this is the first visit
by the Chinese leader
since Russia invaded Ukraine last year.
According to Russian state media,
the two leaders met
for more than 4 hours today.
China has a vaguely worded proposal
to end the conflict in Ukraine,
but it stopped short of calling
for Russia's withdrawal.
A key demand of Ukraine and the West.
The talks
come just days
after Putin was indicted for war crimes
tied to alleged abduction
of Ukrainian children.
US Secretary of State
Antony Blinken says
his visit shows
China is intent to provide, quote,
diplomatic cover
for alleged Russian atrocities
in Ukraine.
And tonight,
for the first time
you will see one attack by Russia
under investigation.
And the Ukrainian city of asylum,
an attack remarkably caught on camera.
The exclusive report now
from CNN's Ivan Watson.
From a
battlefield in eastern Ukraine,
a desperate call for help
as a Ukrainian woman
pleads for her wounded husband's life.
Footage from last June shows the moment
when a Ukrainian couple took
a wrong turn
towards an active front line.
Their car came under fire
from nearby Russian forces,
badly wounding the driver,
Valerio Ponomaryov, his husband.
You're reading a struggle of our own.
I saw
his head was injured
and immediately
began to bandage his head.
The incident captured on video
by a drone piloted by Ukrainian soldiers
and later compiled into a documentary
by the Ukrainian director,
Lubomir Levitsky.
Yep.
Overall, just just yesterday
I turned it fell on my knees
and just screamed
with the most agonizing cry.
I didn't know whose drone it was,
our forces or the enemy.
The pilot taped a sign
saying Follow me on his drone
and directed Ponomaryov Air to safety.
She made the agonizing decision
to leave her wounded
husband behind as she followed the drone.
Russian soldiers
emerged to approach her car.
They took her husband, Andrey,
and dumped him in a ditch.
This is the intersection
where that terrible shooting
took place in June.
The Ukrainian military subsequently
liberated the area,
allowing Ukrainian police
to come in and launch
an investigation
into an alleged Russian war crime.
Ukrainian police investigator
said he
Bovino says
he has gathered evidence
to accuse a 26 year
old Russian army
officer of the war crime
of attempted murder of a civilian.
It tells us that
he is a company
commander of the second
motorized rifle division
first tank army
Western military district.
We established his identity as Mr.
Moscow for police to work here.
Sappers first had to clear
the area of land mines
who then
police conducted
forensic and ballistic analysis
of the crime scene.
Ukrainian police
say the Russian troops
were stationed here
on this side of this wall.
And it's from here that they opened fire
on the car.
Inspector Baldwin of shows me
what he says
are incriminating telephone
intercepts of their chief suspect
calling his wife
Julia that she know
they'll do
the war
The question.
All right.
Well,
John, but if you sure
you know your phone
that it certainly does
burn for
mention it provided
and
drinking certain nuclear
high and
Ukrainian police say
the weapon was a 30 millimeter
cannon aboard this type of infantry
fighting vehicle.
Police say they've also tracked down
photos of the officer and his wife
from their social media accounts.
On that dark day Valeria Ponomaryov
followed the drone
to safety,
stepping around deadly landmines
until the Ukrainian soldier met her.
It was too dangerous for troops
to retrieve Andrei, Bahamas.
Is this where they brought the victim?
The Russian soldiers, that.
But that's not the end of Andrea's story.
Miraculously,
he somehow survived
after spending the night
badly wounded in the ditch.
I felt dreadful.
Then I looked around
and realized
I was lying in some kind of a ditch.
The next day,
he limped to safety
It took 30 or 40 minutes.
I stopped a lot because I
was in a lot of pain.
Andrei is still in treatment
for multiple shrapnel wounds.
To the head, chest and spine.
The alleged attempted murder
of a Ukrainian civilian
at these crossroads,
just one of hundreds
of potential war crime cases
being investigated
by police in Ukraine's Kharkiv region.
But it's perhaps the only incident
that has been so incredibly
well documented
Well, incredible reporting.
Ivan Watson joins us now from Ukraine.
Ivan,
we know the International Criminal Court
has issued an arrest warrant
for President Vladimir
Putin for the alleged war
crime of kidnaping children.
What other kinds of investigations
are Ukrainian police
and prosecutors conducting
Well, that's what was so remarkable
about this interview
with this police investigator
in the Kharkiv region.
He is in charge of
more than 900 other investigators
and says that after every
Russian artillery or rocket strike
on a Ukrainian town or village,
if it's safe,
his investigators will go in.
They'll collect information and evidence.
They'll do the ballistics reports.
They'll see the
the damage to infrastructure, to homes.
They'll find out
about civilian casualties
and their collecting cases.
He says more than half of their work
right now
is collecting cases
for potential war crimes prosecution.
So it's not just the Ukrainian army
that the Russian military is fighting.
It is police and prosecutors.
And the message
they're sending with this report.
And this potential prosecution
is that there is somebody taking names.
There's somebody gathering evidence,
as we've seen from the ICC.
They're
issuing an arrest warrant
all the way up for the Russian
president himself.
But you also have police and prosecutors
who can figure out
individual battalions
and brigades on the Russian side
and potentially name
the officers behind some of these actions
and attacks.
It will potentially put
psychological pressure on these people.
We don't know how
the final chapter of this war
will be written,
but somebody is taking note
and it sends a powerful message.
Even if these individuals are for now,
beyond the reach of Ukrainian law.