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LYMAN, Ukraine (AP) — Covered from head to toe in protective suits, medical examiners disposed of several bodies wrapped in black plastic from a mass grave Tuesday in the devastated Ukrainian city of Lyman as part of an arduous effort to gather evidence of what happened during more than 4 months of Russian occupation.
Ten bags were next to a trench about 30 meters (one hundred feet) from which the government said 32 bodies had been exhumed in the town in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
The bodies were Ukrainian infantrymen who had been buried together in a mass grave, Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of the Donetsk region’s army administration, told Lyman on Tuesday.
Twenty-two other civilians were exhumed from individual graves at the burial site, on the edge of a cemetery in a wooded domain outside Lyman. More exhumations are planned.
The burial site was discovered at the time in Lyman until now, Kyrylenko said, adding that initial investigations indicated the bodies were buried by local citizens and not Russians.
“We have already recovered more than 50 bodies of infantrymen and civilians,” he said. “We have a long trench or a mass grave. . . We have bodies and framed portions here. “
Lyman was liberated through Ukrainian forces in late September as part of an immediate Ukrainian counteroffensive that recaptured swathes of the Donetsk, Kharkiv and Kherson regions from Russian control.
When the Ukrainian government entered the city, it discovered that many civilian citizens had been killed by the shelling. Others, mostly elderly, had died in the Russian profession due to lack of food and medicine, Mark Tkachenko, a police communications inspector in the Kramatorsk district of the Donetsk region, told The Associated Press last week.
The destruction of Lyman, a key rail and transit hub, is so widespread that large portions of the city have been completely destroyed. Lately, the Ukrainian government is rushing to repair critical infrastructure and investigate how civilians lived and died during the Russian occupation.
On Tuesday, forensic investigators pulled a black plastic bag from the ditch and decompressed it to reveal a decomposed body in a bloodied uniform of the Ukrainian armed forces. to the trench.
Officials said children were found among the dead and that most of the sick appeared to have succumbed to heavy shelling that besieged the city for months.
They were cautious in describing whether any of the bodies exhumed on Tuesday showed signs of execution or torture, stressing that the investigation is still in its early stages.
Other Ukrainian cities liberated from Russian profession, such as Bucha, northwest of the capital Kyiv, and Izium in the Kharkiv region, are now the scene of war crimes investigations.
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Follow the entire AP on the war in Ukraine in https://apnews. com/hub/russia-ukraine.