Ukrainian authorities announced on Wednesday that they had exhumed around 1,000 bodies in the recaptured territories during the counter-offensive against the invading Russian forces.
The Ministry for the Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories reported this finding on its Telegram social network account, and explained that the department’s commissioner in charge of missing persons, Oleg Kotenko, was in charge of detecting mass graves in the region.
“As part of the search, around 1,000 bodies of dead heroes and civilians have already been exhumed,” the ministry said.
Nearly half of the bodies now exhumed, 450, were found in a mass grave in Izium, Kharkiv province, after Ukrainian forces recaptured that town on September 10.
“Among the dead there are not only soldiers, but also civilians, adults and children. The exact data will only be known after the examinations have been completed,” the Ukrainian government said.
The Ukrainian counteroffensive launched at the beginning of September in the east of the country allowed kyiv to recover hundreds of cities occupied by the Russian army, in the provinces of Kharkiv and Donetsk.
The Ukrainian Minister of the Interior, Denys Monastyrsky, had already reported, on October 17, the exhumation of a total of 600 dead in the Kharkiv region -including the tombs of Izium-.
Four days later, the Ukrainian police announced that, after the completion of the exhumation work in Lyman, the bodies of 111 civilians and 35 soldiers had been recovered in this town in the Donetsk region.
The military offensive launched on February 24 by Russia in Ukraine has already caused the flight of more than 13 million people -more than six million internally displaced persons and more than 7.5 million to European countries-, according to the most recent data from the UN, which places this refugee crisis as the worst in Europe since the Second World War (1939-1945).
The Russian invasion – justified by Russian President Vladimir Putin, with the need to “denazify” and demilitarize Ukraine for Russia’s security – was condemned by the generality of the international community, which has responded by sending weapons to Ukraine and imposing them on Russia. political and economic sanctions.
Source: TSF
