Russian forces withdrawing from the Kyiv region have left the bodies of more than 900 civilians killed in Ukraine, local authorities said on Friday.
Most of the victims in the area around the capital were “simply executed” in a shootout, police said. The grim number of corpses continued to grow as corpses were found under the rubble and in mass graves.
Andriy Nebitov, head of the Sofia regional police, estimated that 95 per cent of the bodies left stranded in the region had been shot, and citizens who expressed strong pro-Ukrainian views had been persecuted and killed.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused occupation forces in the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions of doing the same.
“The occupiers think it will be easier for them to control this territory. But they are very wrong. “They are deluding themselves,” Zelenski said. “Russia’s problem is that it has not been accepted – and will never be accepted – by the entire Ukrainian people. Russia lost Ukraine forever.
The news of the staggering death toll coincided with another grim revelation, as Zelensky told CNN on Friday that between 2,500 and 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in the invasion and about 10,000 wounded.
Officials provided updates on the atrocities after Russia’s defense ministry vowed to step up airstrikes against the capital in retaliation for the destruction of the main warship that was sunk by Ukrainian missiles on Thursday.
The loss of the 12,500-ton Black Sea flagship is the latest embarrassment to the armed forces of the alleged superpower during its unprovoked invasion. U.S. intelligence officials suspected the ship was carrying nuclear warheads at the time of its sinking, CNN reported.
Locals ride bicycles as the body of a civilian killed during the Ukraine-Russia conflict lies on the street near the Ilyich metallurgy in the southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine, on April 15, 2022. Reuters
Russia has also accused Ukraine of killing seven people and damaging 100 apartment buildings with attacks on its Bryansk region, just beyond the nation’s common border, as it prepares to resume attacks on disputed territories in the east.
“The number and scale of missile strikes on targets in Kyiv will increase in response to the Kiev nationalist regime, which carries out terrorist attacks or sabotage on Russian territory,” Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov told the state news agency TASS.
Ukrainian defenders have strongly opposed Russian progress on the besieged port of Donbass, Mariupol, while shelling a neighborhood in Kharkov has killed seven people – including a baby – and injured 34 others, local leaders said.
Bucha still appears to have suffered the most atrocities, with 350 people found tied up and shot.
U.S. lawmakers toured the Bucha area this week, citing “indisputable evidence of Putin’s war crimes.”
Relatives mourn the death of Alexander Mozhaiko, a dead soldier in the Territorial Defense, who was killed by the Russian army on March 5 during his funeral in Irpin, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine on April 15, 2022. AP
With postal wires
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