IZIUM, Ukraine — The hundreds of graves had been cut into the sandy soil of a pine forest, isolated and unexamined for months. A chilly wind blew through the tree branches. Police officers spoke in hushed tones. And newly dug up bodies lay all about on the forest floor.
Ukrainian investigators on Friday began exhuming hundreds of bodies found after Russian forces fled the city of Izium in disarray last weekend. It was the first step in what officials said would be a painstaking process of figuring out how people had died during a three-week siege of their city and the six months of Russian occupation that followed.
The site consisted of around 445 individual graves and one mass grave where soldiers appeared to have been buried. Some had died when a Russian airstrike leveled an apartment building in March, residents said. “Here are my neighbors and friends,” said Serhiy Shtanko, 33.
Among the bodies already exhumed were a family — a mother, father, daughter and two grandparents — killed in Russian bombardments in the spring, Ukrainian officials said.
Others had died more recently and bore signs of strangulation, said Serhiy Bolvinov, the lead investigator for the Kharkiv regional police force.
It was unclear how or when the soldiers died, but Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament’s commissioner for human rights, said they had been “heaped into a bunch and buried.”
Russian forces took control of Izium in late March, turning it into a military stronghold and staging ground for its assault on eastern Ukraine. They fled as Ukrainian forces routed the Russians across the northeast and reclaimed thousands of square miles of terrain.
Officials invited journalists to witness the exhumation process on Friday, to call attention to what they claimed was evidence of more atrocities by Russian soldiers. “The whole world should see this place,” Mr. Lubinets said. “For us, it shows the Russians made a crime, and not only a crime, but genocide of the Ukrainian population. In this place we see women and children.”
Raisa Derevianko, 65, a retiree who lived across a street from the grave site, said that the Russians would bring the dead to the forest nearly every night.
“We didn’t see whom they burying,” she said. After the Ukrainian army pushed the Russian forces out, she walked into the forest and found the mass grave. “One huge hole was stinking,” she said.
The graves in the forest were located next to an older cemetery, but not on its grounds.
Crosses from rough-hewed boards with only a number written on them stood over most of the individual graves. The mass grave was marked with a cross saying “Seventeen Ukrainian Army soldiers.”
Some individual graves bore names and birth and death dates. Flowers had been laid near the burial locations of some of the people whose identities had been determined.
The task of identifying the dead is difficult, time-consuming and grim. In Bucha, where forensics experts have been working since spring, they have yet to identify all those killed.
Investigators in Izium wore blue hospital gowns over their uniforms, latex gloves and face masks against the reek. Soldiers assisting them dug with shovels until they reached a body, then gingerly moved away sand around the edges.
Two or three soldiers and police would then climb into the grave to pull the bodies from the dirt.
At one point, they grunted and heaved a desiccated corpse, dressed in a winter jacket and pants, to the surface.
A police investigator unzipped the jacket and searched the pockets for items possibly useful in identifying the victim, finding eye drops, a crumpled piece of paper and a cigarette lighter.
