Dozens of firemen, police, soldiers in blue plastic protective coverings exhumed hundreds of victims.
By Askold Krushelnycky, Izyum, Kharkiv region
Those who have been in war zones or at natural disasters where many have perished, know that dreadful, unmistakeable stench of death which seems to cling to your clothes and feels like it has seeped into your flesh. The memory of the scent lingers for days and haunts the imagination.
That is the smell that assaults you in a forest clearing at the edge of Izyum, one of the largest towns liberated from Russian occupation by Ukrainian forces in a spectacular counter-offensive this month in the country’s north east.
Townspeople took Ukrainian soldiers and police to the sea of freshly dug graves containing the victims of the Kremlin’s aggression since Russian forces besieged Izyum in the early spring, pummeling it with merciless shellfire. They then occupied it until abandoning it in headlong flight as Ukrainian forces advanced last weekend.
Police forensic staff and war crime investigators documented the exhumations.
Serhiy Bolivnov, head of the investigative department of Kharkiv region police, said that they had found 445 graves marked with individual crosses containing at least one body. They seemed to be mostly civilian men, women and children, killed by Russian shelling and air attacks as Moscow’s troops fought for control of Izyum.
However, he said there were also mass graves where excavations had only just begun and revealed what seemed to be the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers, some bearing signs of torture before death.
He pointed to a man’s corpse with hands roped behind his back pulled from a mass grave: “We view this as evidence of torture. Every examination is recorded on video and you can see that as every corpse is being removed two medical-legal experts are present as well as a representative of the prosecutor-general’s office Ukrainian war crimes investigators.”
Others corpses had blue and yellow ribbons, Ukraine’s national colours, wound around their wrists.
He said the bodies will be taken to morgues in Kharkiv for for comprehensive autopsies and results will be shared with international investigators from the United Nations and other bodies to be used for likely war crimes trials.
Ukrainian MP and his government’s ombudsman for human rights, Dmytro Lubinets, visited the exhumations site. He said that the dead were all victims of Kremlin aggression whether they had been killed by shelling or execution.
The grisly revelations were a reminder of the atrocities discovered in the towns like Bucha and Irpin, near Ukraines capital of Kyiv, which had been under Russian occupation last spring.
Lubinets warned that Ukrainian authorities already have reports of other burial sites containing apparently executed victims in other parts of the newly-liberated areas. He predicted “very many” other such sites will be found.
Maksym, who only gave his first name, said he had remained in the town as the Russian invaders approached to care for his elderly mother and for most of the occupation had managed to evade contact with the occupiers. But on September 3 Russian soldiers took him to a basement where, along with other prisoners, he said he was repeatedly beaten and tortured with an electrocution device.
Maksym described the instrument as “apparatus that looked like an old-fashioned telephone with a hand crank which generated an electric shock by turning the handle. The quicker they turned it, the more intense the shock,” he said.
“They carried out the electrocution in cells where the lights had been turned off so it was completely dark and worked by the flashlights on their helmets. They attached electrodes to my hands and my whole body quivered from the electric shocks and pain.
The interrogators, said Maksym, wanted him to name other people that were sympathetic to the Ukrainian government, which he refused to do.
Maksym, 50, explained he came to the burial site because he wanted to tell journalists about the Russians’s use of torture.
He showed how the tightly-fastened handcuffs and leg irons he was forced to wear during his captivity had deeply cut into his flesh.
He was released as Ukrainian forces approached Izyum and later returned to the building where was tortured and found the electrocution device had been left behind by his captors in their headlong rush to leave Izyum.
Maksym said he handed it over to Ukrainian authorities and hopes it will be used as evidence against Russians in international war crimes trials.
Victims claiming identical electrocution torture have come forward in other areas in the Kharkiv region where Russian occupation forces had recently fled.
Another person at the burial site was 70-year-old Anatoliy Harahatiy who said he was a professional photographer who had for years been a blogger and posted his work and reports about local news on a Youtube channel.
He said that on May 28 he had been arrested by the Russians after being spotted taking a video through his apartment window in the township of Savyntsi, northwest of Izyum.
“I was taken to a prison in the town of Balaklia and held in an underground cell. There were 40 of us and I, myself, saw some 50 other prisoners pass through and we heard people screaming as they were tortured.
He said he was tortured with the same type of device used on Maksym. “They wanted me to use my Youtube channel to say that the Ukrainian government were Nazis and it was our forces who were committing atrocities and that the Russians were the good guys and their rule should be welcomed.”
“I didn’t agree to do that, which made them angrier and they beat me more and used electric shocks. But after a few days they realised I wasn’t going to give in but they kept me prisoner for 100 days until they suddenly unlocked us and fled themselves last Sunday.”
Anatoliy said: “The Russians come here and call us Nazis but it is [Russian president] Vladimir Putin who is behaving exactly as the Nazis. Hitler would be proud of them.”
Anatoliy’s release came after a surprise offensive by Ukrainian forces, intended initially to take a modest amount of Russian-occupied territory in the Kharkiv region, rapidly gained momentum and turned into a rout for Moscow’s troops.
Ukrainian forces have recaptured large tracts of territory, liberating more than 150,000 of their fellow citizens and pushing some of the occupying forces back to the Russian border they had streamed across as the invasion erupted on February 24.
A Ukrainian tank tests a newly-lain pontoon bridge.
Izyum is an important rail and highway hub and was vital for supplying the Russian forces not only in the Kharkiv region but further south. One of Ukraine’s most important highways runs from Kharkiv to Kramatorsk and Slovyansk in the Donetsk Oblast.
That is the heart of “eastern front” and the Donbas area (consisting of Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts) that Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin has vowed to take. Fierce battles have raged there since the start of the Russian invasion. Moscow had captured most o fLuhansk Oblast and was enjoying success in Donetsk Oblast because of its huge superiority in numbers of artillery pieces.
However, sophisticated and precise western-provided artillery and rocket systems enabled Ukraine to stem the Russian advances and to launch counterattacks.
The scale of the Russian defeat in Kharkiv Oblast was apparent from the scores of burned-out tanks, their turrets blown off, and other armoured and thin-skinned vehicles wrecked along the 75-mile drive from Kharkiv to Izyum.
And the chaos of their retreat is told by the huge number of Russian armoured vehicles, trucks, towed artillery and massive quantities of ammunition to feed them, abandoned intact. Ukrainians said they had even found highly-secret encryption laptops left by fleeing Russians.
Russian vehicles, many more modern than Ukraine’s mostly Soviet-era tanks, are recognisable by the letter “Z” emblazoned on them. Those have been spray-painted over and replaced with a white Ukrainian cross and sent to other areas in the Kharkiv region and in the country’s east and south where Ukrainian forces are attempting to push back their enemy as far as possible before winter freezes front lines.
Izyum residents believe many of the dead in the forest burial ground people were killed when two apartment blocks collapsed after being hit by fierce Russian artillery strikes last spring.
Valentina Ivanivna (73) said she and her friend Nadezhda lived in an apartment which had itself been blasted by shelling which wounded four residents.
They continued to live in the basement. “We are Ukrainians so we always have stores of food and jars of pickles.
“There were terrible battles here with shells flying in every direction. They were using Grad missiles. During the Russian shelling two multi-story buildings collapsed like houses of cards. Entire families were wiped out. Over the following days our firemen pulled out around 400 men, women and children.”
Valentina said: “When the Russians first entered there were endless columns of tanks and armoured carriers. They kept saying they were a fraternal nation. Some fraternal nation! We never dreamed an invasion could happen.
“We tried to have as little contact as possible with the Russian soldiers. They were very young, some only 18, just children. They said they had been told they were going for training and didn’t ’t realise they were being sent to war.”
Her voice brimmed with emotion as she described her feelings on seeing the first Ukrainian soldiers entering Izyum: “We were so happy to see the Russians leave and Izyum become Ukrainian again. Many people cried – I did.”
Many residents, including military age men, left Izyum before the Russians arrived and the town’s pre-war population of some 50,000 has plunged to around 12,000 with the elderly a great proportion of those remaining. Presently the town has no gas, electricity or water.
One elderly woman, Yevdovika, whose apartment burned down from Russian shelling moved her hand in a wide, circular sweep, she pointed to the devastation in every direction; a landscape of rubble where buildings, including multi-story apartments, had stood, the charred skeletons of houses, shops and banks on Izyum’s main street.
In a bitter tone she said: “The Russians, what swine, why did they come here to our Ukraine? They destroyed everything . They said they were here to liberate us.
What did they liberate us from? – from a pleasant life in our town that was so wonderful a few months ago.”
Yevdokiva said she cried in joy when she saw the first Ukrainian soldiers “They are wonderful, such brave lads – we owe them such a debt. They have given us freedom and life again.”
And tears once more rolled down her cheeks.
Askold Krushelnycky is a freelance journalist. He has worked as a foreign correspondent for several newspapers, including the Sunday Times, the Independent, and the Chicago Tribune. He also serves as an analyst and special correspondent for From The G-Man.
Photo credits: Askold Krushelnycky