About 200 rotting bodies have been buried in the basement of a Mariupol skyscraper as Ukraine continues to clean up the horrors of the port city.
Key points:
- Mariupol was a key focus of the war
- He fell in Russia last week after soldiers at the Azovstal steel plant took their last position
- More than 21,000 lives are believed to have been lost in the conflict
Petro Andryushchenko, an aide to the Ukrainian mayor of Mariupol now operating outside the Russian-controlled city, told television that they were still dead among the rubble of the building.
Andryushchenko said locals had refused to pick them up and that Russian authorities had left the place, leaving a stink all over the district.
Russia now has control of an unbroken strip of eastern and southern Ukraine, but it has yet to achieve its goal of seizing all of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Mariupol has been the subject of intense fighting over the past three months. (Reuters: Alexander Ermochenko)
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, tweeted that the “ruthless” offensive in the Donbas showed that Ukraine still needed more Western weapons, especially multi-rocket launch systems, long-range artillery and armored vehicles.
Russia’s three-month invasion, the largest attack on a European nation since 1945, has seen more than 6.5 million people flee abroad, turning entire cities into rubble and causing severe economic sanctions. to Moscow.
In neighboring Moldova, where a pro-Western government has warned of the risk of riots spreading to a border region controlled by pro-Russian separatists, investigators searched the office and home of former Russian President Igor Dodon.
Local media reported that the searches were related to an investigation into alleged corruption and treason. Dodon’s Socialist Party said the allegations against him were unfounded.
Kharkiv has been the site of much of the conflict. (AP: Bernat Armangue)
In Russia itself, where criticism of the war is banned and the independent media has been shut down, jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny used a court appearance for a video link from a prison colony to denounce the “Stupid war that started your Putin.”
“A madman has put his claws in Ukraine and I don’t know what he wants to do there, this crazy thief,” Navalny said.
Read more about the Russian invasion of Ukraine:
Ukraine is gathering the bodies of dead Russian soldiers scattered among the ruins of formerly occupied cities and is using everything from DNA to tattoos to verify their identities in hopes of exchanging them for prisoners of war.
Volunteers have helped the army gather 60 bodies in the northeastern region of Kharkiv, where Russian forces have been withdrawing in recent weeks, stacking them in a refrigerated railway wagon.
Sometimes the bodies are used as part of the exchanges of prisoners and others in exchange for Ukrainian bodies, said Anton Ivannikov, captain of the military-civilian cooperation branch of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which coordinates the effort. .
The bodies of high-ranking officials can be especially valuable for an exchange.
Ivannikov said his forces were “collecting all the documents, all the credit cards,” anything that would help identify a body, including tattoos and DNA.
“In the future, this will tell us which soldier, which brigade, was in that region, for further exchange,” he said.
The bodies will travel by train to Kyiv, where the team that negotiates the exchanges is based.
Russian forces launch a total assault
Russian forces were launching a total assault on Tuesday to encircle Ukrainian troops in twin cities straddling a river in eastern Ukraine, a battle that could determine the success or failure of Moscow’s main campaign in Moscow. ‘East.
Exactly three months after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, authorities in the second largest city of Kharkiv were expected to open the underground subway, where thousands of civilians had taken refuge for months under relentless bombing.
The reopening is a symbol of Ukraine’s greatest military success in recent weeks, which pushed Russian forces out of the Kharkiv artillery camp, as they did from the capital Kyiv in March.
The Kharkiv metro resumed service on Tuesday morning after it was closed for more than two months during Russian attempts to capture the city. (AP: Bernat Armangue)
But the decisive battles of the last phase of the war unfold even further south, where Moscow is trying to seize the Donbas region of two eastern provinces, Donetsk and Luhansk, and trap Ukrainian forces in a pocket on the eastern front. main.
The easternmost part of the pocket of the Ukraine-controlled Donbas, the city of Sievierodonetsk on the east bank of the Siverskyi Donets River and its twin Lysychansk on the west bank, have become the main battlefield with Russian forces. advancing from three directions to encircle them. .
“The enemy has focused its efforts on carrying out an offensive to encircle Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk,” said Serhiy Gaidai, governor of Luhansk province, where the two cities are among the last remaining territories in Ukraine.
“The intensity of the fire in Sievierodonetsk has increased several times, they are simply destroying the city,” he said on television, adding that there were about 15,000 people in the city and that the Ukrainian army maintains control.
Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to search, up and down arrows for volume. Clock time: 1 minute 40 seconds 1m 40s A Russian soldier receives life imprisonment for killing an unarmed civilian in the first trial for war crimes in the Ukrainian war.
Reuters
Posted 4 hours, 4 hours ago, Tuesday, May 24, 2022 at 2:22 PM, updated right now, Tuesday, May 24, 2022 at 7:19 PM