Investigators seeking a mass burial in Ukraine have uncovered evidence that some of the dead were tortured, adding bodies with damaged limbs and ropes around their necks, Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky said Friday.
The site near the northeastern city of Izyum, recently retaken from Russian forces, appears to be one of the largest discovered in Ukraine.
Zelensky spoke in a video he released just hours after the exhumations began, supposedly to underscore the seriousness of the discovery. He said more than 440 graves had been found at the site, but the number of casualties was not yet known.
Digging in the rain, staff extracted frame after frame from the sandy soil of a misty pine forest near Izyum. Protected with full leggings and rubber gloves, they gently felt the decaying remains of the garments on the bodies, hunting for things that could identify them.
The Associated Press hounds who saw the graves saw the graves marked with undeniable wooden crosses. Some of the tombstones had people’s names and hanging flowers.
Before digging, steel-sniffed researchers scanned the site for explosives and infantrymen spread red and white tape among the trees.
Zelensky said many civilian adults and children, as well as soldiers, were discovered near Izum’s Pishchanske cemetery after being tortured, shot or killed with artillery fire.
He cited evidence of atrocities, such as a frame with a rope around its neck and damaged arms. In another imaginable sign of torture, a man was discovered with his hands tied, according to Serhiy Bohdan, head of police investigations for Kharikiv, and Ukraine’s Huguy rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets.
The Ukrainian government has warned that its investigation has just begun and that the scale of the killings may increase dramatically.
“The hard truth indicates that the death toll in Izyum may be several times higher than in the Bucha tragedy,” Oleg Kotenko, an official with Ukraine’s ministry on the reintegration rate of the occupied territories, told Telegram.
Bucha is a suburb of Kyiv where the government said 458 bodies were recovered after a 33-day Russian occupation. Authorities say they have found the bodies of more than 1,300 people elsewhere, many in mass graves in the forest of the Kyiv region.
Zelensky, who visited the Izyum region on Wednesday, said the findings show world leaders’ desire to claim Russia is a state sponsor of terrorism.
Meanwhile, in his first public comments on Ukraine’s recent gains on the battlefield, Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed to continue the war and warned that Moscow could step up its moves on the country’s important infrastructure if Ukrainian forces target services in Russia.
“If it evolves in this way, our reaction will be more serious,” Putin told reporters Friday after attending a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Uzbekistan.
Russia has reported explosions and fires at civilian infrastructure sites near Ukraine, as well as ammunition depots and other facilities. Ukraine claimed responsibility for some of the attacks and refrained from commenting on others.
The “liberation” of the entire Donbass region of Ukraine is once again the main objective of Russia’s military, Putin said.
“We are not in a hurry,” he said, adding that Russia had deployed volunteer infantrymen to fight in Ukraine.
Some hard-line Russian politicians and army bloggers lamented the paucity of hard work and suggested that the Kremlin stay at the head of Ukraine and order a broad mobilization to bolster the ranks.
Ukrainian forces gained access to the site near Izyum after retaking the city and much of the Kharkiv region in a meteoric advance that replaced the momentum of the war for nearly seven months. Ukrainian officials also uncovered evidence of torture elsewhere in the region.
The U. N. human rights said it would investigate, and human rights organization Amnesty International said the discovery of the mass burial site showed “our darkest fears. “
“For any and all unlawful killings or other war crimes, there will have to be justice and reparation for the victims and their families and a fair trial and accountability for the alleged perpetrators,” said Marie Struthers, the group’s director for Eastern and Central Europe. Asia.
Most of those buried at the site were thought to be civilians, but a marker on a mass grave indicated it contained the bodies of 17 Ukrainian soldiers.
The Russians have strayed from duty for the site.
The Russian governor of the Khariv region, Vitaly Ganchev, told Russia’s Tass news firm that Ukrainian forces, the Russian ones, were to blame for civilian casualties in Izyum. Tass also quoted a member of the Russian parliament, Alexander Malkevich, as saying that Ukrainian troops had abandoned their dead, so Russian forces buried them.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, the war continued to claim lives and wreak havoc. Zelensky’s workplace said the Russian bombing killed five civilians and wounded 18 others in 24 hours. Missile movements were also reported, with Kryvyi Rih’s Zelensky among the targets for the third day in a row on Friday. Air raid sirens also resounded in the capital, Kyiv.
Other killings of pro-Russian separatist leaders have been reported in spaces under the influence of secessionists. The separatist government said an explosion killed the prosecutor general of the self-proclaimed republic in the Luhansk region, which is part of Ukraine’s central-eastern Donbass. Moscow’s backed government said two Russian-installed officials were also killed in Berdiansk, a city in the Zaporizhzhia region occupied earlier in the war. And the local government reported that another 3 people were killed in a Ukrainian missile attack on an administrative construction in Russia. Kherson busy.
At the Izyum burial site, the marking of individual graves with wooden crosses differed from other burial sites discovered earlier in the war and noted through hounds, adding some around Kyiv that are being investigated as imaginable war crimes sites. The gates of the capital in Bucha and elsewhere after the withdrawal of Russian forces were thrown in combination and buried without markers.
An Izyum resident, Sergei Gorodko, said that among the charges buried in individual graves, there were dozens of adults and youth killed in a Russian airstrike on a building.
He pulled some of the rubble “with my bare hands. “
Izyum was a key source for Russian forces until they withdrew in recent days. City councilman Maksym Strelnikov told reporters at an online briefing from an undisclosed location this week that many other people had been killed in the fighting and after Russia captured the city in March. they couldn’t get a proper burial, he said.
His claims may simply not be verified, but similar scenes spread to other cities captured by Russian forces, adding the southern port city of Mariupol.
National police leader Ihor Klymenko said “torture chambers” had been found in recovered towns and villages in the Kharkiv region. The allegation may simply not be independently verified.
Seven Sri Lankan academics who fell into Russian hands in Kupiansk, Kharkiv region, also said they had been mistreated, he added.
“They’re scared, they’ve been mistreated,” Klymenko said. They come with “a woman who can barely speak” and two with broken nails.
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