Russian forces forbade Izium residents from burying their dead early in occupation
OLENA ROSHCHINA – TUESDAY, 20 SEPTEMBER 2022, 01:15
Russian forces banned local residents from burying the dead during the early days of the Russian occupation of Izium, Kharkiv Oblast. Later on, they allowed them to do so as it was increasingly difficult to take all the bodies to the forest.
Source: Le Monde, a French news outlet, citing Vitalii, an Izium funeral service worker
Details: A total of 445 individual graves were found when Ukrainian experts began to clear a pine forest on the outskirts of the recently liberated city of Izium from mines.
55-year-old Vitalii, who has been providing funeral services in Izium since 2004, told Le Monde journalists that he and his nine colleagues buried nearly 750 bodies in the past six months, including the 445 bodies at the mass burial site.
It is five times the number of burials compared to the period before the war. Vitalii said that the majority of people he buried were civilians.
Vitalii recalled that the streets were "piled with dead bodies" following the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion on 24 February and its attacks on the city of Izium. In mid-March, 114 bodies were found after a Russian attack on two residential buildings by the river.
"At first, the occupiers forbade us from burying anyone, saying that they would do it themselves," Vitalii said.
However, the bridge that connected the two parts of the city was also destroyed, so the bodies had to be carried one at a time, on foot, over a wooden pedestrian bridge. The Russian army simply gave up [in the face of this labour], and granted Vitalii and his team permission to bury the dead.
Russian occupiers set up one of their bases in the pine forest [on the outskirts of Izium]. Undertakers were not allowed to approach the Russians’ strategic facilities near Izium cemetery, so the dead had to be buried outside the cemetery.
This is likely to be only one mass burial site among several in the city of Izium.
Background:
- Russian forces withdrew from the city of Izium, in Kharkiv Oblast, on 10 September, leaving behind many units of military equipment.
- On 15 September, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that mass burial sites had been found in Izium following its liberation.
- On 19 September, 146 bodies were exhumed from the mass burial site in Izium, including the bodies of women and children. Russian occupiers tortured civilians in the local police department and at other sites throughout the city.
- Ukrainian law enforcement officers are still discovering bodies with marks of violent death, including broken ribs and skulls, men with hands tied behind their backs, with broken jaws, with their genitals cut off.
- The UN is preparing to send a team of its experts to inspect the mass burial site in Izium.
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