A mass grave with dozens of Ukrainian civilian bodies was found on Saturday in Buzova, a village on the outskirts of Kiev recently vacated by Russian troops, a local official said.
Taras Diditch, head of the Dmitrivka community, which includes Buzova and other neighboring villages west of the Ukrainian capital, told local broadcaster ICTV that the bodies were found in a ditch near a gas station. The exact number of bodies at the scene is not yet known.
“Now, we are returning to life, but during the occupation […] many civilians died,” Diditch said.
A reporter from the AFP news agency was at the scene and reported seeing two bodies in civilian clothes. Police and soldiers were working with a water truck to suck water from the ditch.
A woman approached the scene and recognized one of the bodies through the victim’s shoes. “My son! My son!” she screamed.
Last week, local media reported that around 30 bodies were found scattered across and around Buzova.
Similar scenes have been recorded in other villages on the outskirts of Kiev, as Russian troops vacate the region and move to battlefronts in Donbass, eastern Ukraine controlled by pro-Russian separatists since 2014.
In the village of Butcha, bodies were found last week with signs of execution, sparking international outrage and increasing pressure for investigations into alleged Russian war crimes.
More than 1,200 bodies have been found in the Kiev region, a Ukrainian prosecutor said on Sunday.
The Kremlin denies targeting civilians and accuses the Ukrainian government of fabricating the atrocities in order to gain support from other countries.
Faced with the failure of its campaign to take Kiev, Russia changed its tactics in the war and began to concentrate its troops in the Donbass.
In Dnipro, in eastern Ukraine, the civilian airport was bombed on Sunday and was “destroyed”, according to the governor of the region.
“New attack on Dnipro airport. There is nothing left. The airport itself and nearby infrastructure have been destroyed. And the missiles are still flying,” regional governor Valentin Reznichenko wrote in the Telegram, indicating that the number of victims.
Dnipro airport had already been the target of Russian bombing on March 15, after which the runway was destroyed and the terminal damaged.
Dnipro is an industrial city of one million inhabitants, crossed by the Dnieper River (Dnipro in Ukrainian), which marks the limit of the eastern regions of the country.
