JAKARTA - Ukrainian authorities continue to evaluate and examine what has occurred in Russian-occupied areas for months, before recent weeks of counter-attacks hit and chased them away.
At an extensive emergency cemetery in the forest near the re-taken city of Izium, Ukrainian forensic experts have so far excavated 146 bodies buried without coffins, regional governor Kharkiv said by Synehubov, Monday, cited from Reuters, September 20.
"Some bodies have cruel signs of death. There were bodies with bound hands and used torture marks. The bodies were also found to have explosive wounds, bullet fragments and stabs," he wrote on Telegram.
Earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said about 450 graves had been found on the site.
"To this day, 450 people have died, buried (in the northeastern Kharkiv area). But there are others, separate burials from many people. People are tortured. All families in certain areas," he said last weekend.
Spreading groups under trees, workers used shovels to dig up partially rotting bodies, some of which local residents said had lay on the streets of the city, long after they died before burial.
The government has not said how most people died, although officials said dozens of people died in the shooting of an apartment building, and there are signs others were killed by shrapnel.
According to preliminary examinations, four people showed signs of torture, with their hands tied behind their backs, or in one case tied with a rope around their neck, Serhiy Bolvinov, head of investigative police in Kharkiv's territory, told Reuters at the burial site.
Bolvinov said most of the bodies appeared to be civilians. Locals have identified their bodies by matching names with numbers on thin wooden crosses that mark graves.
"The hands of the soldiers are tied up, there are signs of torture of civilians," said Bolvinov. Ukraine says 17 soldiers were in mass graves at the site.
Separately, the Kremlin on Monday denied Russia was to blame for the atrocities Ukraine says were found in the territory it was recaptured.
"That's a lie, and of course we will defend the truth in this story," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov argued, comparing the allegations to previous incidents in the war in which Russia claimed without evidence of atrocities committed by Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials announced last Friday that they found mass graves with hundreds of bodies in the territory being recaptured from Russian forces.
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