Mass Ukraine burial site reveals horror Russian forces left behind
Soldiers liberating the town of Izyum have found hundreds of bodies, mostly civilian, that bear the scars of occupation.
The speed with which the Russians ran away belied the violence and determination with which they originally assaulted the historic Ukrainian town of Izyum.
As Ukrainian troops threatened to surround them a week ago, the Russians jumped into cars and even on to bicycles to flee down the one road that remained open to them.
An embedded Russian military blogger called Semyon Pegov, whose YouTube handle “War Gonzo” gives a clue about his usual approach to recording his army’s exploits, filmed himself panicking by a car with a flat tyre. “We need to get out of here as soon as possible,” he said to the camera.
Six months earlier it had been a different story. Every building in the centre of Izyum, the town hall, the school, the supermarket, the golden dome of the Church of the Ascension, was smashed or burnt to the ground by the Russian air force and artillery as Moscow’s troops advanced.
The consequences are plain to see now, after the recapture. On Thursday, in the woods a mile from Izyum, the Ukrainians started excavating the mass burial site the Russians dug for the victims of their assault – hundreds of bodies buried with simple wooden crosses amid the trees.
The impromptu cemetery’s scale was announced by President Zelensky in his daily broadcast to the nation. “We want the world to know what the Russian occupation has caused,” he said. Bodies bear the signs of shellfire, mine explosions and bullet holes.
Most are civilian, though scores of Ukrainian soldiers are among the dead. Most are believed to be victims of air and artillery strikes in the original invasion, although some bodies are fresher and some had hands tied behind their backs, seeming to confirm claims made by locals to The Times that residents had been taken away by the Russian authorities and killed.
Dmytro Lubinets, an MP and human rights commissioner for the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, said that an original estimate of 1000 killed in the town from the Russian assault and occupation, given by the town mayor, was probably an underestimate.
“We can’t say an exact number as it’s still under investigation,” he said in the ruined central square, while visiting the scene. “But we can see there are a lot of people missing.”
The authorities believe the mass burial site contains more than 450 bodies.
Izyum was a key point between the Donbas, the area already under Russian control at the start of this year’s invasion in the east of the country, and Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city. The
Russians needed the town both to press an assault on Kharkiv and to protect the front they were developing to seize Ukrainian-held cities to the south-east like Severodonetsk.
The shells rained in for several days before the Russians entered, said Yula, 35, who asked not to give her full name. She was talking outside a small supermarket that had been reduced to its burnt metal frame.
Her own building had its roof torn off by shellfire and all its windows smashed, though she and her neighbours had been safe in the building’s shelter, she said.
In one block on the town’s main street, more than 50 people hiding in the basement were killed together when it received a direct hit in the Russian attack. “My work colleague Yuri was there with his whole family,” Anatoliy Babiy, 31, a resident near by, said. The two men worked together at an optics factory in the town, also now destroyed. Yuri had two children and was killed in the basement along with his wife and other members of his family, Babiy said.
Despite the scale of the makeshift cemetery, most of the bodies are believed to have been buried individually, some by relatives in the town. “All the bodies will be exhumed and sent for forensic examination,” Andriy Yermak, a presidential adviser, said.
The Ukrainian authorities said that they discovered a cellar that had been used to detain and interrogate prisoners, one of ten “torture chambers” in the newly liberated territories, including two in the town of Balakliya.
“The occupiers carried out their atrocities in a small basement, which was lined with linoleum to quickly wash away traces of blood,” Lubinets said. “In one of the corners they placed a table and a chair, behind which the representative of Russia was sitting. The prisoners were tortured, inducing them to co-operate or spy in favour of the Russian armed forces, while the representative recorded the testimony.”
The Times was unable to verify the claims, and the extent of atrocities does not seem to have been on the same scale as in Bucha and other towns briefly under Russian occupation in March.
But Yula said some people were definitely “disappeared”. She said two neighbours went missing in July. The husband’s body was found floating in the river some days later; the wife has not been seen since. Yula asked not to give their names as they had sent their son to live with relatives elsewhere and she did not know whether he had been informed of his parents’ fate.
In peacetime, the town has a population of 50,000 people. Russian tanks and armoured vehicles now sit by the roadsides, some with turrets blown off. Ukrainian soldiers are still coming across strongholds full of unused armour.
Yula, a Russian-speaker herself, said the occupiers she spoke to hardly knew why they were there. Some had thought they were being driven to their factory when they ended up in Izyum and were given guns, she said.
“I never believed it would happen. On February 24 I just went to work as normal,” she said, pointing at the destruction around her. “It’s all so tragic.”
The Times
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