IZIUM, Ukraine – Hundreds of graves have been butchered in the sandy soil of a pine forest, isolated and unexplored for months. A chilly wind blew through the branches. The police officers spoke in a discreet voice. And the newly dug up bodies lay sprawled on the forest floor.
Ukrainian investigators on Friday began exhuming hundreds of bodies was found after the Russian forces fled the city of Izium was in turmoil last weekend. It was the first step that officials said would be an arduous process to find out how people died during their three-week siege of the city and six months of Russian occupation that followed. .
The site includes about 445 individual graves and one mass grave, where the soldiers appear to have been buried. Several people were killed when a Russian air strike leveled an apartment building in March, residents said. Serhiy Shtanko, 33, said: “These are my neighbors and friends.
Among the bodies that have been exhumed is a family – mother, father, daughter and two grandparents – who were killed in Russian shelling in the spring, Ukrainian officials said.
Serhiy Bolvinov, chief investigator of the Kharkiv regional police force, said the others died more recently and showed signs of strangulation.
It is not clear how or when the soldiers died, but Dmytro Lubinets, the human rights commissioner for Ukraine’s parliament, said they were “stacked up and buried”.
Russian forces took control of Izium in late March, turning it into a military stronghold and base for the offensive into eastern Ukraine. They run away like Ukrainian forces drove the Russians across the northeast and cleared thousands of square miles of terrain.
Officials invited journalists to witness the excavation on Friday, to call attention to what they see as evidence of more atrocities by Russian soldiers. “The whole world should see this place,” Mr. Lubinets said. “For us, it shows that the Russians have committed a crime, and not only a crime, but also a genocide of the Ukrainian people. In this place we see women and children.”
Raisa Derevianko, 65, a retiree who lives across the street from the graveyard, said the Russians would send the dead into the woods almost every night.
“We didn’t see the person they buried,” she said. After the Ukrainian army repelled the Russian forces, she walked into the woods and found the mass grave. “A big stinking hole,” she said.
The forest graves are next to an older cemetery, but not within its grounds.
Crosses from rough planks with only a number written on them stand over most individual graves. The mass grave is marked with a cross that says “Seventeen Ukrainian Army Soldiers.”
Some individual graves bear names and dates of birth and death. Flowers have been placed near the burial places of several people whose identities have been identified.
The job of identifying the dead is difficult, time-consuming, and grim. In Bucha, where forensic experts have been working since the spring, they have yet to identify all those killed.
The investigators in Izium wore blue hospital gowns over their uniforms, rubber gloves, and a mask of disgust. Soldiers assisted them in digging with shovels until they reached a body, then crept up to clear the sand around the edges.
Two or three soldiers and police would then climb into the grave to pull the bodies out of the dust.
At one point, they groan and heave a dried corpse, dressed in winter coats and pants, to the surface.
A police investigator unlocked his jacket and rummaged through his pockets for items that could have been helpful in identifying the victim, finding eye drops, a crumpled piece of paper and a lighter.
