AFP journalists present on Friday in Izium, a town recently recaptured from Russian forces, saw hundreds of graves in a nearby forest, where the bodies of civilians and soldiers who died during the fighting and the occupation were buried.
According to local authorities, a total of 443 graves were discovered on this site, including a grave containing the bodies of 17 Ukrainian soldiers. Two men in white uniforms were digging the bottom in the sandy soil there on Friday, near a cross with the inscription: “Ukrainian army, 17 people. Izioum, from the morgue”.
According to Oleg Kotenko, government official for the search for missing persons, these graves were dug during the fighting when the city was taken by Russian forces in March and during the Russian occupation, which ended last week. Some graves could contain several bodies.
“The graves that don’t have names are those of people (found) on the street,” Kotenko said, adding that “there are a lot of people who died of starvation.” “This part of the city was isolated, without supplies. People were stuck, nothing was working.”
“There are also other cemeteries in the city, but we didn’t go there. So we don’t know what the situation is” as a whole, he added.
The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights of the United Nations immediately indicated that it wanted to send a team “soon” to Izioum to “determine the circumstances of the death of these people”.
“Torture Rooms”
The Ukrainian police chief, Igor Klymenko, announced to him the discovery of ten “torture rooms” in localities taken back from the Russians in the Kharkiv region, including two of them in the town of Balakliïa.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to Izium on Wednesday for his first visit to this Russian border region in the northeast of the country since the departure of Russian forces, driven out by a counter-offensive launched in early September. on several fronts.
Presidential adviser Mykhaïlo Podoliak assured Friday on Twitter that these graves are “only one of the massive burial sites discovered near Izioum”, where “for months, terror, violence, torture and mass murder reigned supreme.”
AFP had already visited Izioum, a town of some 50,000 inhabitants before the war, shortly after the departure of Russian forces on the night of Saturday to Sunday. The destruction there was significant with houses and administrative buildings devastated by the fighting and carcasses of armored vehicles strewn on the roads.
Mr. Zelensky compared Thursday the discovery to that made in Boutcha, a city on the outskirts of kyiv, where the corpses of civilians coldly executed had been discovered after the departure at the end of March of the Russian forces. Moscow has denied committing these abuses.
On the front Friday, 12 people were injured in “massive” Russian shelling in areas recently retaken from the Russians in the Kharkiv region, and four more people in the city of Kharkiv itself, according to regional authorities.
“Position fights”
In that of Dnipropetrovsk, in the center-east of the country, a person was injured in the bombardments which targeted the towns of Nikopol and Kryvyi Rig, the city of birth of Mr. Zelensky, where the Russian forces damaged in a strike hydraulic infrastructure on Wednesday, causing a flood of the Ingoulets River and flooding.
In the east, “positional battles” were taking place in the Luhansk region, while in the Donetsk region, Russian bombardments, in particular on Bakhmout, left five dead and six injured, according to the Ukrainian presidency.
On the southern front, where Ukrainian forces are encountering more resistance than in Kharkiv, the “situation remains difficult”, but Ukrainian forces continue to bombard the bridges used by Moscow forces, according to the same source.
After the invasion launched on February 24, the West imposed a series of sanctions against Russia while providing arms to kyiv, a crucial support, for which Washington validated on Thursday a new part of up to 600 millions of dollars.
On a visit to kyiv, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, promised on Thursday that the European Union will be at Ukraine’s side “as long as it takes”, then pleading on television in favor of an appearance of Russian President Vladimir Putin before international justice.
The latter met Thursday with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Uzbekistan, on the sidelines of a regional summit where he hailed Friday the “new centers of power” emerging in the world facing the West.