More than 1,000 civilian bodies are currently in morgues in the Kyiv region, a Ukrainian official told AFP on Thursday, as Kyiv accuses the Russians of having “massacred” hundreds of civilians during their occupation of the city. region in March.
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“1,020 bodies of civilians, only civilians, are (in morgues) from the whole Kyiv region,” Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Olga Stefanichyna told AFP in the northeastern town of Borodianka. west of Kyiv.
Since the withdrawal of Russian forces from the Kyiv region at the end of March, hundreds of civilian bodies have been found by the Ukrainian authorities, who, along with the West, accuse Russia of “war crimes”, which Moscow denies.
Mme Stefanichyna clarified that this total represented all the bodies of civilians “discovered in buildings, but also in the streets” in the Kyiv region since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24.
Earlier, a Ukrainian military official told a news conference that those civilians had been “killed or tortured to death” by the Russians, saying forensic experts were still examining the bodies.
On April 3, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine Iryna Venediktova announced that 410 bodies of civilians had been found at this stage in the region of the Ukrainian capital, recaptured from Russian troops by Ukrainian forces a few days earlier. A week later, on April 10, she said that more than 1,200 bodies had been discovered in the Kyiv region, without specifying whether they were only civilians.
In the town of Boucha alone, northwest of Kyiv, which has become a symbol of the atrocities of the war in Ukraine, nearly 300 people were buried in mass graves, according to another report announced by the Ukrainian authorities on April 2.
Ukrainian authorities continue to regularly discover new bodies. On Thursday, Kyiv regional police said they unearthed nine new bodies of civilians in Borodianka.
“These people were killed by the (Russian) occupiers and some of the victims show signs of torture,” local police chief Andrii Nebytov said on Facebook.