The men digging in the dusty ground looked visibly sickened by the gruesome task they had been dealt. The rotted bodies were mangled and the smell poisoned the fresh forest air. One corpse had a rope around the neck.
Those on a break mostly stood with their spades and goggles, looking on at their colleagues from the state rescue services who were red in the face from the hard labour of tugging the bodies out of the graves and sweating from their blue plastic overalls.
In woods a few miles from the centre of Izium, the north-eastern Ukrainian town recaptured by Kyiv last weekend, hundreds of police detectives, prosecutors, forensic doctors and journalists gathered at the site of hundreds of burials revealed after the Russian retreat.
“We have found 445 graves here in this place alone,” said Oleksandr Filchakov, the chief prosecutor of the Kharkiv region that includes Izium. “Then, a few meters away, we found a big grave containing 17 Ukrainian soldiers buried together. Most of the civilians were buried individually.”
Locals say those being exhumed from the site were killed by Russian forces, who occupied the strategic city for six months, using it as a base for its assault on the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
The rescue workers digging in the earth read out details of their finds to police and prosecutors, who took notes and filmed the process from above. People living nearby arrived with drawn faces to bear witness from afar.
Ukrainian authorities say there could be more grave sites and that their investigation into events in Izium under Russian occupation is just beginning.
Many of the graves were simply marked with numbers, not names and dates that could be used to identify the deceased. Tamara Volodymyrovna, the head of an Izium funeral home that operated throughout, said she was instructed by the occupying forces to write numbers instead of names and to record both in a journal. She said the new Russian administration did not provide the materials to make proper grave markings.
Out of those Volodymyrovna handled, she said at least 100 were killed in the spring during the Russian assault on Izium, most by Russian bombs during the first weeks. She said this included at least 20 children, some of whom died because they failed to reach their basements in time.
But Volodymyrovna had just one of what could be several journals containing the names of those who died during Russia’s occupation. “We had a journal and the volunteer [buriers] had a journal,” said Volodymyrovna. She said the police had taken hers and she knew the police had been in touch with the volunteers.
“It was a complete catastrophe,” said Volodymyrovna, describing how people buried bodies wherever they could during the heavy bombing which then had to be reburied.
Multiple people, including Volodymyrovna, said Moscow had captured the town through heavy bombardment that began in early March. “After that there was still shelling but people died more rarely,” she said.
The Guardian saw the body of one civilian being unearthed with a rope around its neck. Police at the scene said they also suspected torture.
Volodymyrovna said she did not know of torture victims but she, like everyone the Guardian spoke to in Izium, said she knew of former military people and their families being rounded up in the town. They were taken to unknown locations. Their fate, to date, remains a mystery.
“I knew that in the building where I lived there was one man who fought in the Donbas,” said Serhiy Shtanko, 33, who was witnessing the exhumation. He lived on the first floor of a block of flats that was split in two by a Russian bomb, which reportedly killed more than 40 people, many of whom were buried under the rubble.
“But in the end, when they came to search the flats, they kidnapped two other veterans who had fought in the Donbas that I was not aware of. I was shocked to see the amount of information that they gathered.”
Other townspeople suspected by Russian forces of pro-Ukrainian sentiments took their own lives after severe interrogation, she said.
“Maybe because they were tortured or beaten and couldn’t process it emotionally,” said Volodymyrovna.
She said not all the deaths in the town were handled by her. “We buried territorial defence and a few soldiers. The rest of the [Ukrainian] soldiers we didn’t bury because they didn’t allow us to. Where their bodies went, I don’t know,” she said.
Volodymyrovna said she prayed the Russians would not return. Izium has for centuries acted as the gateway to the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and, from there, to the Black Sea. Before the war it had a population of 46,000.
Izium fell to Russian forces on 1 April and Moscow turned it into the main launching point for the Russian assault against the remaining Ukrainian troops in Donbas. Local authorities managed to evacuate part of the population but, according to officials, approximately 10,000 people remained trapped.
Some who had gathered to witness the exhumation came because their relatives were buried at the site, next to an existing cemetery.
Hrehoriy Pryhodty, 72, started to weep when recalling his wife, Luba, who was killed by a Russian bomb in the first week of March. “There hasn’t been and won’t be anyone like my Lubochka,” he said.
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