"Barbaric War Crimes"

'The biggest war crime of the 21st Century was committed in Mariupol. This is the new Babyn Yar."

"Then, Hitler killed Jews, Roma and Slavs. Now, Putin is destroying Ukrainians."

"Unfortunately, we have seen that the bodies of dead Mariupol residents have begun to disappear from the streets of our city."

"And there [30 meter-long (98-feet-long) ditches] they bury them, bring the bodies of the dead by trucks and throw them into these ditches," 

"Unfortunately, it is not possible today to evacuate civilians from Azovstal, because we are asking for a stable ceasefire. Somewhere we need one day to be able to accommodate those residents who have been hiding there for 57 days in a row, and they are being bombed, bombed and bombed."  

Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko

A satellite image from April 3 shows what appears to be a newly dug mass grave site, next to the cemetery.

Another mass grave discovered. This one may carry at minimum an estimated thousand bodies of Ukrainian citizens murdered by Russian troops as they attacked Mariupol. An estimated 100,000 people still remain in the besieged port city that stands in the way of Moscow capturing and annexing Mariupol and Odesa, as it did the Crimean Peninsula and Sevastopol, in eastern Ukraine, where Russian troops are massing to target the Donbas and proclaim the Donetsk and Luhansk regions firmly in Russia's possession.

 

The newer, much larger mass grave has been unearthed in the village of Manhush, roughly 20 kilometres distant from Mariupol. Another piece of evidence that Russian troops are committing war crimes against civilians in Russian-occupied areas. Images provided by Maxar Technologies highlight rows of graves in four sections, each one of which measures close to 85 metres.

 

In reviewing the images the company dates the graves having appeared between 23 March and March 26; and that over 200 burial plots exist alongside an existing cemetery. Officials on the Mariupol City Council believe that up to 9,000 civilians could be buried in the mass grave. Russian forces "dug new trenches and filled them with corpses every day throughout April", stated the Council. 

In addition, according to the Council, information exists indicating that the bodies were "buried in several layers". It is the belief of Ukrainian officials that 20,000 people at least, were killed in Mariupol since the beginning of the invasion, that the new mass grave is significantly larger than graves discovered in Bucha, the Kyiv suburb strewn with corpses on the street following the Russian withdrawal.

 

Some Ukrainian troops are holding out at the Azovstal steelworks. Photograph: Mariupol City Council/Reuters

 

In speaking of the discovery of the mass grave site, Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko compared it to the largest mass graves in Europe that were located in the Kyiv outskirts during World War Two, where 33,000 Jews were slaughtered in 1941 by Nazis in the larger extermination program meant for European Jewry that ultimately annihilated the lives of six million Jewish children, women and men.

According to Mayor Boichenko, Russian trucks collected corpses from Mariupol streets to transfer them to Manhush in an effort to cover evidence of "barbaric war crimes" on Moscow's part. Investigators throughout Ukraine have begun painstaking work to identify the murdered Ukrainian civilians to document war crimes being committed by Russian troops.

When Russian troops withdrew from satellite towns and suburbs around Kyiv, mass graves were found in numerous places such as Bordyanka, Vorzel, Moshchun and Makariv. Public authorities in Mariupol had themselves buried roughly 5,000 people killed in Mariupol by mid-March. Russian troops were accused of dumping bodies in plastic bags down an embankment identified in the satellite images.

A destroyed residential building in Mariupol on 22 April. Russia is effectively now in control of the devastated port. Photograph: Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters