A cemetery with 445 graves was found in de-occupied Izyum. Many of those buried were tortured. How the victims of the Russian invasion are dug up in the Kharkiv region — photo report by “Babel”

On September 11, the Defense Forces of Ukraine liberated the city of Izyum in the south of Kharkiv region. It became one of the hundreds of local settlements from where the Ukrainian military pushed back the Russian invaders during the counteroffensive. On September 14, President Zelensky came to Izyum and raised the Ukrainian flag together with paratroopers. On September 16, at a briefing, the head of the National Police Igor Klymenko announced that 10 torture chambers had been discovered in the de-occupied Kharkiv region, six of them in Izyum. A mass burial site with approximately 445 graves was also found in the city. Representatives of the US and the EU commented on the find. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said it was a "horrific part of the history of ongoing Russian atrocities in Ukraine." EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell tweeted that he was "deeply shocked" by the burials. On September 16, experts began exhuming bodies from a mass grave in Izyum. The head of the Kharkiv Regional State Administration Oleg Syniegubov said that 99% of the bodies exhumed on the first day had signs of violent death. “Babel” shows how it all happened in a photo report by Yevgen Zavhorodnyi.