President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that bodies unearthed at a new mass burial site in Ukraine included people who were tortured, some with broken limbs and ropes around their necks.
The burial site in an area recently recaptured from Russian forces contained both civilians and military dead, he said.
“Children and adults. Civilians and military. Tortured, shot, killed by shelling,” Mr Zelensky said. “Even entire families are buried there: Mother, father and daughter.”
He cited evidence of atrocities, such as a body with a rope around its neck and broken arms. He said more than 400 graves have been found at the site in Izium.
Mr Zelensky, who visited the Izium area on Wednesday, said the discoveries showed again the need for world leaders to declare Russia a state sponsor of terrorism.
Digging in the rain, workers hauled body after body out of the sandy soil in a pine forest. Protected by full body suits and rubber gloves, they gently felt through decomposing clothing, apparently looking for something that might identify the dead.
Ukrainian forces got access to the site after recapturing the north-eastern city and much of the wider Kharkiv region in a counteroffensive that suddenly shifted the momentum in the nearly seven-month war.
Some of the bodies had their hands tied behind their backs and ropes around their necks, said the region’s chief prosecutor, Oleksandr Filchakov. Ukrainian officials said they also found evidence of torture elsewhere in the region.
Associated Press journalists who visited the burial site on Thursday saw graves amid the pine trees, marked with simple wooden crosses. Most were numbered – and the count went past 400.
It was not clear who was buried in many of the plots or how all of them died, though witnesses and a Ukrainian investigator said some were shot and others were killed by artillery fire, mines or air strikes.
The majority of the people buried were believed to be civilians, according to Ukrainian officials. But there was at least one mass grave, with a marker saying it contained the bodies of 17 Ukrainian soldiers.
In his nightly televised address on Thursday, Mr Zelensky spoke about the site, invoking the names of other Ukrainian cities where authorities said retreating Russian troops left behind mass graves of civilians.
“Bucha, Mariupol, now, unfortunately, Izium,” he said. “Russia leaves death everywhere. And it must be held accountable for it.
“We want the world to know what is really happening and what the Russian occupation has led to.”
The marking of individual graves with wooden crosses differed from some other burial sites discovered earlier in the war and seen by AP reporters – including some around Kyiv that are being investigated as sites of possible war crimes. Bodies found outside the capital in the town of Bucha and elsewhere after Russian forces withdrew had been dumped together and buried without markers.
Izium resident Sergei Gorodko said that among the hundreds buried in individual graves were dozens of adults and children killed in a Russian air strike on an apartment building.
He said he pulled some of them out of the rubble “with my own hands”.
Sergei Bolvinov, a senior investigator for Ukrainian police, told Sky News that some of the people buried were shot, while others died from artillery fire, mines or air strikes.
The mass grave could contain more than the 17 bodies mentioned on its marker, said Oleg Kotenko, an official with the Ukrainian ministry tasked with reintegrating occupied territories.
“We haven’t counted them yet, but I think there are more than 25 or even 30,” he said, basing his estimate on video footage of the site that Russian soldiers posted on social media.
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Mr Kotenko also said that individual graves marked with crosses contained civilians who died. He said he expected the bodies would be exhumed for DNA testing.
Before exhumation work could start, investigators with metal detectors scanned the site for any hidden explosives. Soldiers strung red and white plastic tape between the trees to mark off parts of the site. A few graves had wreaths of flowers hanging from the crosses, and some bore people’s names.
Izium was a key supply hub for Russian forces until they withdrew in recent days.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia would press on with the war despite the success of the recent Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Speaking to reporters after attending a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, Mr Putin said the “liberation” of the entire territory of Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland of Donbas remains Russia’s main goal.
He added that “we aren’t in a rush” to achieve the stated goals, noting that Russia has only engaged volunteer soldiers in the operation.
