It will take another two weeks to exhume all of the bodies from hundreds of unmarked graves Ukrainian officials discovered after recapturing the northeastern city of Izium, the city’s mayor said on Sunday.
The mayor, Valery Marchenko, told Ukrainian media outlets that the sheer number of bodies that must be recovered means the effort will take time.
“Employees of all services carry out exhumations, dig up the buried,” he said. “If there is an opportunity, they are identified,” he said. No additional grave sites have been found, he said, but workers are looking.
Ukrainian officials estimated that as many as 1,000 people died in Izium during the occupation, many from a lack of medicine and medical care. The largest burial site, in a pine forest, had about 440 individual graves cut into the sandy soil.
The discovery of the mass burial sites last week cast a renewed spotlight on potential war crimes and prompted fresh calls to hold Russia accountable for any abuses committed during their occupation of the city.
Serhii Bolvinov, the head of the investigative department of the regional police force in Kharkiv, said the bodies would be exhumed and forensically examined as part of an investigation into whether Russian forces committed war crimes during their occupation.
“The whole world should see this,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine wrote in a Telegram post on Friday alongside images of investigators working at the site. He said that among the bodies were soldiers, children, victims of missile attacks and corpses bearing signs of torture.
