In the Kharkiv region, exhumation of bodies from the site of a mass burial of Ukrainian soldiers began. They died in April during the retreat.
Kharkiv regionʼs police chief Volodymyr Tymoshko wrote about this on his Facebook page.
“According to the testimony of local residents, the raiders collected the bodies in two trucks. They threw it into a pit at the cemetery. In a heap, just like firewood. They didnʼt make a single burial mark,” he said.
On Easter, local residents voluntarily placed crosses at the burial site and continued to take care of the mass grave.
During the exhumation on October 26, due to bad weather, they were able to retrieve the bodies of only three soldiers. In total, there should be about 17 bodies in the grave.
- In the territories liberated in the fall, approximately one thousand bodies of dead soldiers and civilians were exhumed. Exhumation work continues in cooperation with law enforcement agencies, pyrotechnics and search teams created under regional military-civilian administrations.
- The head of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said that 131 bodies have already been exhumed in the liberated territories of the region, but this number will increase, as graves are still being found.
- In mid-October, the Minister of Internal Affairs, Denys Monastyrskyi, said that more than 600 bodies of the dead had already been exhumed in the de-occupied territories of the Kharkiv region.