In a Ukrainian forest, Russian retreat means digging up the dead

 

Sept. 19, 2022, 2:19 PM +0530

By Erin McLaughlin, Hyder Abbasi and Bill O'Reilly

IZYUM, Ukraine — The stench of death hangs over a small forest in northeastern Ukraine.

Already, hundreds of bodies have been retrieved, including those of children, Ukrainian forensic technicians here say.

Here in Izyum, one of 20 towns and cities liberated in the recent surprise Ukrainian counteroffensive, investigators are struggling to keep count of the bodies being recovered from beneath the forest floor.

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More than a dozen sweat-soaked workers, wearing bulletproof vests and helmets under their biohazard suits, exhumed bodies from a makeshift gravesite over the weekend, taking frequent cigarette breaks. One worker was seen dry-heaving multiple times. 

Police officers and war crimes prosecutors from the Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office looked on, along with local residents searching for graves as they walked around. None reacted as the sound of bombing was frequently heard in the distance. 

Some of the graves bear wooden crosses, inscribed with the names of the dead and sometimes floral tributes. Others have numbers.

But most graves bear no remembrance of the dead.

“They buried the bodies in bags, without coffins, without anything,” Volodymyr Kolesnyk, a resident of Izyum, told Reuters.

A forensic technician closes a body bag in a forest on the outskirts of Izyum, Ukraine, on Friday.Sergey Bobok / AFP - Getty Images

At first, he said, he was not allowed to visit the woods — it was too dangerous, the occupiers claimed.

“The Russians said it was mined and asked to wait,” Kolesnyk added. “And there was a lot of them in the woods, so it was scary to come here.”

Although the people of Izyum are now free of their occupiers, they are surrounded by reminders of what happened when the Russians came here in March. There is hardly a building untouched by war, and now they must face the horror of finding their loved ones from among the shallow graves in the forest.

Last week, one officer said, a police officer who took a shortcut through the woods to get to the graves stepped on a landmine, losing a leg. 

On Friday, police found one mass grave with the bodies of 17 Ukrainian soldiers. Many had broken bones, hands tied behind their backs and other signs of torture. But civilians have been buried here too.