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| ANDRIY LEVKIVSKY/FACEBOOK |
The Russian
bombardment of some places in Ukraine is so intense that towns and cities are
being forced to unceremoniously bury dozens of civilian victims in mass graves.
Nowhere is this grim reality of war more apparent than in Mariupol, a key port city devastated by constant shelling, where several burial sites have been hastily dug in the
past two weeks."We
can't bury [the victims] in private graves, as those are outside the city and
the perimeter is controlled by Russian troops," Mariupol's deputy mayor
Serhiy Orlov told the BBC by phone.
Locations
include a retired city cemetery that has now been re-opened, Mr Orlov said.
Warning:
This article contains images that some may find upsetting
On Sunday,
the city council said the civilian death toll had risen above 2,100. The heavy
Russian shelling has prevented any mass evacuation from Mariupol, despite
efforts to open a safe exit route.
Mr Orlov
could not give a total for dead civilians buried in mass graves, but said 67
bodies were at one site. "Some we can't identify but some had
documents."
Thousands of
residents are hiding in cellars and in some cases, he said, people are burying
family members privately in courtyards or gardens.
The battered
city's street cleaners and road repair teams were collecting bodies in the
streets, he said, as municipal services had collapsed. "Some people were
killed during those collections. We've had no electricity, or heating,
sanitation, water, food for 11 days," he said.
Four-hundred
miles to the north west, on the edge of the capital Kyiv, a mass grave was dug
near a church in the town of Bucha, local MP Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivska
said. It contains more than 60 bodies.
Video of the
burial was posted on Facebook by a doctor working in nearby Irpin, Andriy
Levkivsky. Doctors buried the victims, who had been brought to Irpin hospital.
Ms
Skoryk-Shkarivska told the BBC that a "ritual service" was conducted
at the hospital before burial. Not all had been identified and "nobody
knows exactly where the relatives are," she said.
"Now
we're discussing with volunteers how to create a digital system to identify
people and trace missing relatives," she said.
Russian
troops captured the hospital on Saturday and told the doctors to leave, she
said, speaking by phone from western Ukraine. Bucha and half of Irpin are now
in Russian hands, she said.
The return
of mass graves is a shock for Ukrainians. Many have bitter family memories of
World War Two, when Jews and Soviet partisans were murdered by Nazis, and the
Holodomor - the famine created in Ukraine by Soviet seizure of grain and
livestock in the 1930s.
"My
uncle is 92 and even he compared it with his childhood in the war," said
Ms Skoryk-Shkarivska, who emphasised it is "important for us to bury
relatives traditionally, the Christian way, with praying".
"Even
now in war people sometimes ask priests to do that," she said.
In northern
Ukraine the cities of Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Sumy are surrounded by
Russian troops and relentless shelling has killed many civilians there too.
On 6 March Oleksandra
Matviichuk, a civil liberties campaigner, tweeted a
photo of coffins in a trench, accompanied by the message: "Thus, civilians
killed in the Russian bombing of Chernihiv are buried in trenches. Since the
main city cemetery in Yatsevo is under constant shelling by the Russian
occupiers, the victims are buried in the Yalivshchyna forest."
Oleksandr
Lomako, secretary of Chernihiv city council, told the BBC that victims of
Russian air raids and shelling were being buried in a temporary cemetery. He
confirmed that the city's main cemetery was now inaccessible, with Russian
troops surrounding the city on three sides, the nearest about 10km (six miles)
away.
"After
the war we will rebury the dead," he said, estimating the city's civilian
death toll in the Russian bombardment to be about 200.
One air raid
killed 45 people in Chernihiv - the worst toll, Mr Lomako said - adding that
nightly bombing was killing seven civilians on average. "The planes drop
three to four bombs on residential blocks. Also one hit the hospital, but it is
still working. Dozens of housing blocks have been destroyed on the edge of the
city."
As well as
evidence of mass burials, there are accounts of makeshift graves.
A mother and
son were buried in the courtyard of their new apartment block in Irpin, which
has been heavily shelled by the Russians. A photo of the grave was widely
shared by Ukrainians, and a
tweet by journalist Olga Rudenko showed Marina Met and her son Ivan
enjoying life in Kyiv before the invasion.
For those
whose loved ones have suffered the effects of siege and shelling at the hands
of invading forces, burial in makeshift graves will no doubt feel like the
final indignity.
Source:https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60729206
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