People in the eastern Ukrainian town of Rubizhne have started exhuming bodies that were hastily buried in courtyards at the height of battle, anxious to be able to lay them to rest with dignity.
Rubizhne is part of the Luhansk region of Ukraine where Russian forces established full control in early July, more than four months after president Vladimir Putin launched what he called his “special military operation” in Ukraine.
Men with spades removed soil on Friday outside a damaged apartment block in the town of 50,000 people.
Lilia Ai-Talatini, 48, watched as the workers pulled out a blanket covering her mother, who had been quickly interred after attacks that started in March and divided the town in two, Reuters reports.
Ai-Talatini said the fighting at that time had prevented her for 10 days from reaching her parents’ apartment.
She said her mother was unwell, and when she died, she and her husband had no spades and therefore, as shells flew, had to drag the corpse to an open trench in the ground, burying her in what she described as “inhuman conditions”.
“Now she is going to the cemetery, we have a plot there,” she said.
The breakaway Russian-backed Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR), one of Moscow’s proxies in eastern Ukraine, is coordinating the search for bodies.
Anna Sorokina, an LPR official, said a team had been working in Rubizhne for 10 days and exhumed 104 sets of remains.
“It’s clear that shrapnel wounds predominate but there are also bullet wounds,” she said, estimating there were a total of 500 unofficial graves in the city.
Boris Kovalyov, 44, a forensic expert from the southern Russian region of Rostov, said examples of genetic material would be stored to help identify unknown corpses.
- The US has expressed concern to India that it was used earlier this year to break economic sanctions imposed on Russia during a high-seas transfer of fuel made from Russian crude, according to a local central banker.
A Russian tanker on the open sea reportedly handed over oil to an Indian ship, which was then processed in India and finally exported to the United States, the deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Michael Patra, said on Saturday at a financial conference in the state of Odisha.
“You know there are sanctions against people who buy Russian oil. Here’s what we were told by the US Treasury Department,” Patra told his state and financial industry audience.
“An Indian ship hit upon a Russian tanker in the open sea, picked up oil, called at a port in the state of Gujarat. The oil was in processed at this port and turned into a distillate used in the manufacture of single-use plastic,” the central banker said.
The Indian ship took over the freight again, left the port and was only informed about its destination, New York, on the open sea.
“That’s how war works,” Patra summed up. He did not name the ship. The US Embassy did not comment, Reuters reported.