Torture evident in mass grave of 445 in Ukraine

Bodies found in a mass burial site outside the recently liberated Ukrainian city of Izyum show signs of torture, Ukrainian authorities said — a grim echo of the grisly discoveries made after the liberation of Kyiv’s northern suburbs in April.

The site, on the outskirts of the city, contained 445 graves, according to Ukrainian police. Some bodies discovered there had their hands tied behind their backs and rope around their necks, said Oleksandr Filchakov, head prosecutor for the Kharkiv region.

“Bucha, Mariupol, now unfortunately Izyum,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly address Thursday. “Russia leaves death everywhere. And it must be held accountable for it.”

‘Tell the world’

“We want the world to know what is really happening and what the Russian occupation has led to,” he added.

Reporters from The Associated Press witnessed at least 400 wooden crosses marking graves in the forest outside Izyum.

While authorities said they believe most of those buried there were civilians, one grave was marked as the burial place of 17 Ukrainian soldiers.

“We haven’t counted them yet, but I think there are more than 25 or even 30,” Oleg Kotenko, a Ukrainian official, said of the soldiers believed in the grave.

Investigators and witnesses said some among the dead were shot, others were killed in artillery barrages, by airstrikes and by land mines.

Marked, numbered

Sergei Gorodko, an Izyum resident, said that among the dead were dozens of adults and children killed in a Russian airstrike on an apartment building. Gorodko said he’d pulled some of them from the rubble with his own hands.

Despite the gruesome echoes of the war’s earlier atrocities, the Izyum site differs from those uncovered in the spring in Bucha and other northern towns.

In the Kyiv suburbs, bodies of civilians appeared to have been thrown together into unmarked graves. At the recently discovered Izyum site, graves were marked and numbered.

Russia did not immediately comment on the reports. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied allegations its forces are targeting civilians.

With an estimated 445 bodies, the Izyum mass grave would be the largest found in Europe since the brutal Balkan wars of the 1990s.