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Ukrainian authorities have exhumed more than 530 bodies of civilians in territories reclaimed from Russian troops in the country’s northeast since the start of its military counteroffensive, Kharkiv police said on Thursday.
We counted and removed from the liberated territories the bodies of 534 civilians, including 226 women, 260 men, 19 children and 29 more people whose gender has not yet been established,” said Sergey Bolvinov, head of the Kharkiv police investigation department, at the conference. presses.
Bolvinov said the figures included bodies exhumed in the woods near Izyum, where about 440 unmarked graves were discovered after the Russian withdrawal on September 16.
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Ukrainian authorities also say they discovered dozens of alleged torture chambers and detention centers where prisoners were held in inhumane conditions.
This was announced on Wednesday by the National Police of Ukraine. investigates 928 alleged war crimes committed by Russian troops during the occupation of Kharkov.
Russian forces are accused of numerous abuses in the territories of Ukraine under their control, in particular in Bucha near Kyiv, where the corpses of civilians were found after their withdrawal from the area in late March.
Moscow denied the commission of these crimes and considered the discovery of bodies in Izyum a lie.
Having received Western weapons, Ukrainian troops launched a counteroffensive at the end of August, which allowed them to return part of the territories under the control of Moscow.
The Ukrainian army has already recaptured most of the Kharkiv region in the northeast and is now advancing in the east of the country, where it recently recaptured the Limansky railway junction, and in the south, where it aims to capture the city of Kherson. .
“Ukrainian armed forces have liberated more than 400 square kilometers of the Kherson region since the beginning of October,” said Natalya Gumenyuk, spokeswoman for the military command in the south, quoted by the French news agency AFP.
Kherson is one of four Ukrainian regions that Russia annexed at the end of September as part of the invasion of Ukraine that began on February 24 this year.
In addition to Kherson, Donetsk, Lugansk and Zaporozhye regions were annexed to Russia, where the largest nuclear power plant in Europe is located.
The Moscow army said this Thursday in its daily report that “the enemy is removed from the line of defense of the Russian troops” in the Kherson region.
According to Moscow, Ukrainian forces deployed four tactical battalions to this front and “made several attempts to break through the Russian defenses” in the Dudchan, Sukhanovo, Sadok and Bruskinskoe areas.
Information about the course of the war disclosed by both sides cannot be immediately verified independently of each other.
