After the departure of the Russians from the town of Izium, in Ukraine, police, military and deminers They found this Friday more than 400 graves of Ukrainians allegedly killed by the Russian Army and a dozen alleged Russian torture chambers in the recently liberated territories in the Kharkov region.
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The city of Izium, with some 45,000 inhabitants before the war and some 120 kilometers southeast of the regional capital, Kharkov, was of crucial importance for the Russian troops, who planned to launch the final offensive against Kramatorsk and Sloviansk in the neighboring Donetsk region. However, they were forced to withdraw from the town a week ago in the face of a counter-offensive from kyiv.
After the liberation of the troops, local authorities announced this Friday that a total of 450 graves were found, including a grave with the remains of 17 Ukrainian soldiers.
“99% of the exhumed bodies showed signs of violent death”, said the regional governor Oleg Sinegubov. “There are several bodies with their hands tied behind their backs and one person is buried with a rope around his neck. Obviously these people were tortured and executed,” he said on Telegram.
According to him, a total of “450 civilian bodies with traces of violent death and torture” were buried at this site. “There were also children” among the bodies exhumed during the day by the “200 agents and experts” who worked at the scene, he added.
Oleg Kotenko, government official for the search for missing persons, said that the graves were dug during the fighting that occurred at the time of the capture of the city by the Russians in March and also during the occupation.
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But this is not the only discovery of alleged war crimes in Izium. Anton Guerashchenko, advisor to the Minister of the Interior, denounced this Friday that the remains of 47 people were also found in this city under the rubble of a building destroyed by Russian bombs.
In addition, the head of the Ukrainian National Police, Ihor Klymenko, denounced the presence of “at least 10 torture chambers in localities of the Kharkov region, six of them in Izium and two in Balakliya”. And the Ukrainian Deputy Minister of the Interior, Yevgeny Yenin, revealed in an interview with the Ukrainian radio station Radio NV that prisons were found in the Kharkov region “with the help of the local population”, in which the detainees were in inhumane conditions.
According to the Ukrainian Ombudsman, Dmitro Loubinets, “probably more than 1,000 Ukrainian citizens were tortured and killed in the liberated territories of the Kharkov region”.
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strong condemnation
The discoveries generated immediate international condemnation. The Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelenski, promised this Friday a “terribly fair punishment” to those responsible for the alleged crimes committed in Izium.
The president stressed the importance of “the world knowing what is really happening” and stated that “Russia only leaves behind death and suffering.” “Assassins. torturers. Deprived of everything human (…). Revenge will be terrible for every tortured soul,” Zelensky said.
For his part, the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, declared that Russia is acting in a “horrible way and it is seen and repeated every time the Russian tide recedes from parts of the territories it occupied in Ukraine. ”.
The European Union was “deeply dismayed”. “This inhuman behavior of the Russian forces (…) must stop immediately,” said the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, in a statement.
And it is that the images of this Friday are reminiscent of those recorded after the Russian Army abandoned Bucha in April, north of kyiv, where the photographs showed the corpses of dozens of civilians, many of them handcuffed, who had been abandoned in the streets for days.
assassins. torturers. Deprived of everything human (…). Vengeance will be terrible for every tortured soul
After the scandal caused by said massacre, Russia categorically denied its involvement and assured that it was a setup. This Friday, his pro-Russian allies did the same with the discovery of Izium.
“It was clear to us that Ukraine would try to repeat Bucha’s script,” the Russian-appointed head of the Kharkov region administration, Vitali Ganchev, told Russia’s TASS agency.
“Ukraine simply sacrificed the civilian population for selfish purposes, to create a postcard for the Western reporter who is already filming his stories today so that tomorrow the kyiv regime can receive more weapons,” he alleged.
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The UN human rights mission in Ukraine has already announced the intention to visit Izium. “Our mission is following up on these allegations and will organize a visit to Izium to determine the circumstances of the deaths of these individuals,” UN Human Rights Office spokeswoman Liz Throssell said in Geneva.
The objective of the mission, as in Bucha, will be to establish whether the victims were military or civilian, whether they were killed, died in combat or of natural causes, explained Throssell.
The Ukrainian authorities also announced this Friday that “the necessary procedural actions have already been initiated” and that “the bodies found will be subjected to an autopsy.”
Fighting in Lugansk
Meanwhile, in the Lugansk area, “positional battles” continued, and in the neighboring Donetsk region, Russian bombardments, in particular on Bakhmut, caused five deaths and six injuries, the Ukrainian presidency said.
On the southern front, where the Ukrainian forces are facing greater resistance than in Kharkov, “the situation remains difficult”, although the kyiv army continues to bombard the bridges used by the Kremlin troops, according to the same source.
After the invasion started on February 24, the Westerners adopted a long series of sanctions against Russia and provided arms to kyiv.
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In this framework, Washington validated on Thursday a new military aid package for Ukraine of 600 million dollars. So far, the United States has delivered more than $15 billion in military aid to kyiv.
In a visit to kyiv this Thursday, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, promised that the EU will be at Ukraine’s side “as long as it takes”, and advocated in an interview with a German channel that the president Russian, Vladimir Putin, will one day appear before international justice.
Putin met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Uzbekistan during a regional summit, in which he highlighted on Friday the growing influence of the “new centers of power” against the West.
In recent months, Moscow has made efforts to strengthen its ties with Asia to counter Western sanctions imposed in retaliation for the invasion of Ukraine.
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
*With information from AFP and EFE
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