Russia leaves behind it mass graves, and stories of torture and abuse (Photo:REUTERS/Gleb Garanich)
IZYUM, Kharkiv Oblast – Those who have been in war zones or at natural disasters where many have perished, know that dreadful, unmistakable stench of death which seems to cling to your clothes and feels like it has seeped into your flesh. The memory of the scent lingers for days and haunts the imagination.
That is the smell that assaults you in a forest clearing at the edge of Izyum, one of the largest towns liberated from Russian occupation by Ukrainian forces in a spectacular counter-offensive this month in the country’s north east.
Townspeople took Ukrainian soldiers and police to the sea of freshly dug graves containing the victims of the Kremlin’s aggression since Russian forces besieged Izyum in the early spring, pummeling it with merciless shellfire. They then occupied it until abandoning it in headlong flight as Ukrainian forces advanced last weekend.
Serhiy Bolivnov, head of the investigative department of Kharkiv region police, said that they had found 445 graves marked with individual crosses containing at least one body. They seemed to be mostly civilian men, women and children, killed by Russian shelling and air attacks as Moscow’s troops fought for control of Izyum.
However, he said there were also mass graves where excavations had only just begun and that had revealed what seemed to be the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers – some bearing signs of torture before death.
He pointed to a man’s corpse with hands roped behind his back pulled from a mass grave: “We view this as evidence of torture. Every examination is recorded on video and you can see that as every corpse is being removed, two medical-legal experts are present, as well as a representative of the prosecutor-general’s office Ukrainian war crimes investigators.”
Others corpses had blue and yellow ribbons, Ukraine’s national colors, wound around their wrists.
He said the bodies will be taken to morgues in Kharkiv for comprehensive autopsies and results will be shared with international investigators from the United Nations and other bodies, to be used for likely war crimes trials.
Ukrainian MP and his government’s ombudsman for human rights, Dmytro Lubinets, visited the exhumations site. He said that the dead were all victims of Kremlin aggression whether they had been killed by shelling or execution.
The grisly revelations were a reminder of the…
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