By Nick Paton Walsh, Natalie Gallon, Kostyantin Gak, Brice Laine, Jonny Hallam, Brad Lendon, Tim Lister, Yulia Kesaieva, Maria Avdeeva, Victoria Butenko and Ivana Kottasová, CNN
Even heavy rains couldn’t erase the smell of death in the Izium pine forest on Friday afternoon, as Ukrainian investigators made their way through a mass burial site discovered in the eastern Ukrainian city after Russian forces recaptured it.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said at least 440 “anonymous” graves had been discovered in the city in recent days. The country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said Friday that some of the bodies discovered in Izium showed “signs of torture,” accusing Russia. of what he called “cruelty and terrorism. “
Zelensky posted a photo of the ongoing exhumation of the bodies at a mass burial site near the town of Izium. In a text accompanying the photograph on his Telegram channel, Zelensky wrote: “The whole world sees this. A world in which there will be no cruelty or terrorism. But it’s all there. And his call is Russia.
Izium arrived here under intense Russian artillery attacks in April. The city, located near the border between the Kharkiv and Donetsk regions, has become a vital hub for army invaders during five months of occupation. Ukrainian forces regained control of the city on Saturday, dealing with a strategic blow to the Russian army’s attack in the east.
When CNN arrived at the mass burial site Friday afternoon, officials were carrying framed bags and adding one that gave the impression of involving something very small, in a refrigerated truck.
Most of the graves at the burial site are individual tombs, with wooden crosses placed on the head of the earth mounds. Some with names and numbers handwritten on them. An 82-year-old male. An official at the site told CNN that investigations deserve to know when those other people died.
Further down in the forest is what gave the impression of being an old army position, with tank positions dug deep into the ground.
A police officer at the scene told CNN there was a mass grave where 17 bodies were found.
“There are civilian bodies and military bodies further away here,” Igor Garmash, an investigator at the site, said of the express part of the site he was examining, indicating a nearby location.
“More than 20 bodies have been examined and sent for investigation,” he told CNN.
Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communications said Thursday that some of the graves found in Izium were “fresh” and that the bodies buried there were “mostly civilians. “
Dmytro Lubinets, human rights commissioner in the Ukrainian parliament, said in a video from the online page that “there is a full circle of relatives right next to me. . . It’s a circle of young relatives. . . The father was born in 1988, the woman was born in 1991, his little wife was born in 2016.
He said citizens of the domain told investigators that the circle of relatives was killed in a Russian airstrike.
“We also saw here a mass burial of the infantrymen of the Ukrainian army. The way they were buried, see evidence that their hands were tied, they were killed at point-blank range,” Lubinets said.
An Izium resident who lives across the street from the mass burial told CNN that the Russians first attacked a cemetery in the vicinity of the city with an airstrike and then moved in.
“They brought their special machines. They dug trenches for their vehicles. We heard how they were destroying the forest,” Nadezhda Kalinichenko told CNN.
She said she tried not to faint while the city was under the Russian profession because she was too scared.
“When they left, I don’t know if there were fights or not. We only heard a lot of heavy trucks one night a week ago,” he said.
Zelensky said in his speech Thursday that Russia will have to be held responsible for the deaths there and in other cities where gigantic amounts of bodies have been found.
“Bucha, Mariupol and now, unfortunately, Izium. . . Russia leaves death everywhere. And he will have to be guilty of it. The world will have to blame Russia for this war. We will do everything we can for that,” he added.
The governor of the Kharkiv region, Oleh Syniehubov, said that “the scale of the crimes committed by the invaders in Izium is enormous. It is a bloody and brutal terror.
Syniehubov said that “450 civilian bodies with lines of violent death and torture were buried in a forest belt. It’s hard to believe anything like that in the twenty-first century, but now it’s a tragic truth in Izium. “
Syniehubov said that among the bodies exhumed on Friday “99 showed symptoms of violent death. “
“There are several bodies with their hands tied behind their backs and one user is buried with a rope around his neck. Clearly, those other people were tortured and executed. There are also young people among those buried,” he said.
Meanwhile, Oleh Kotenko, Ukraine’s commissioner for missing persons, said in a Telegram article that search operations for the remains of the “fallen heroes” were proceeding cautiously in the region.
“The biggest challenge is that some spaces are still mined. Despite this, we continue to work, because we will have to bring every hero home so that families can honor with dignity the memory of the foot soldiers who died for Ukraine as soon as possible. Kotenko said.
Zelensky visited Izium on Wednesday and told reporters he was “surprised” by the number of “buildings destroyed” and “people killed” as a result of the Russian occupation.
In his late-night speech Friday, Zelensky said the exhumation of the bodies at the mass burial site continues and that it is still “too early to report on the total number of people buried there. “
He added that investigations were underway in all parts of the country that had been taken over by Russian forces and that several civilians, in addition to foreigners, who had been held captive in the occupied towns and villages had been discovered alive.
Among the rescued foreigners were seven Sri Lankan academics, he said. They were reading at the Kupyansk Medical School, but were captured by Russian infantrymen in March and held in a basement. “Only now, after the liberation of the Kharkiv region, that those other people have been rescued and are receiving adequate medical care,” Zelensky said.
A UN source told CNN that a team from the UN human rights watchdog, the OCHR, would control Izium and the surrounding domain as soon as possible.
The war crimes investigation team may stay after that, the source said. His exact fate remains unclear for the time being.
Moscow was Izium as a launching pad for southward attacks in the Donetsk and Kupyansk region, about 48 kilometers (30 miles) north of Izium, and as a railway hub to resupply its forces.
Zelensky also thanked foreign governments for sending investigators and prosecutors to investigate alleged human rights violations through professional forces in Ukraine, adding that all occupied spaces would return.
Ukrainian forces have carried out a sustained military offensive in the northeastern and southern regions of the country.
Zelensky said Tuesday that 8,000 square kilometers (3,088 square miles) of territory have already been liberated by Ukrainian forces, so this month, a portion of the domain is still subject to “stabilization” measures.
El-CNN-Wire™
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