Between the intense green of the exuberant beauty of a pine forest and the sound of the birds, the white suits of the men who were digging on Monday to exhume the seven bodies of a new mass grave found in the town of Vozel, within the Bucha district, stood out. , on the outskirts of Kyiv. The same district where in early April, after the withdrawal of Russian troops, hundreds of bodies were found in the street, in houses or buried in other graves.
The gruesome job of unearthing the remains coincided yesterday with the revelation by the Ukrainian police that they have opened criminal proceedings to investigate the deaths of more than 12,000 Ukrainians, most of them found in mass graves, announced the head of the National Police, Ihor Klymenko. The figure triples the count kept by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights of 4,395 civilians killed in Ukraine since the Russian invasion began on February 24, although the agency always warns that the number is considerably higher.
In an interview with the local agency Interfax-Ukraine, the police chief assured that they keep 1,200 bodies, also found in mass graves, which have not yet been identified.
Klymenko added that a large number of civilians were found dead in their houses and apartments. “As a rule, these people died from mine blast injuries,” he explained. As for the mass graves, as Klymenko underlined, it is still too early to quantify the bodies found, as law enforcement officers locate several bodies each week.
Like the seven bodies that lay on the forest floor in Vozel on Monday. The corpses, covered with remnants of clothing and dirt, attracted flies. Two of them had their hands tied behind their backs with adhesive tape and shots to the knees and head. “The shots in the knees tell us that people were tortured,” Kyiv regional police chief Andriy Nebytov told the assembled journalists. And the tied hands indicate that “these people were held (hostage) for a long time and (enemy forces) tried to get information from them.” “This is another sadistic crime of the Russian army in the Kyiv region,” Nebytov later wrote on his Facebook.
Since the withdrawal of Russian troops from the region in late March, authorities say they have discovered the bodies of more than 1,500 people, many in mass graves in the forest and elsewhere. “In Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel, Borodianka, (localities on the outskirts of the capital) there were many dead lying in the streets: snipers shot at them from tanks, from armored vehicles, despite the white armbands that the Russian army forced them to wear. the people,” reported the head of the National Police.
“In Bucha, 116 people were buried in one of those graves; there were smaller burials, five to seven people each. Residents collected the bodies of the dead and buried them in parks,” he described in the interview. According to the head of the National Police, in total approximately 75% of the dead are men, about 2% are children and the rest are women: “it is a civilian population, these people had nothing to do with the military structures or police in the country,” he clarified.
Speaking about the procedure for exhuming bodies, the head of the National Police spoke of the complexity of this process. “This is a long process, quite laborious, because many bodies are in an advanced state of putrefaction. We selected the DNA of those relatives who contacted us through the information telephones and then compared the profiles of these relatives with the profiles of the dead, buried, shot, who could not be identified”.
In the case of the seven people found Monday, investigators say it will take time to identify their bodies because they were decomposed.
Russian authorities have dismissed reports of mass graves in Bucha, calling them the product of a “fabrication” organized by the Ukrainian authorities. Russia says it is not targeting civilians in what it calls a “special military operation.”
