(Reuters) – Ukrainian investigators have completed the exhumation of soldiers in one of two mass graves discovered after Russian troops retreated from the town of Lyman in eastern Donetsk region, police said on Friday.
“Police have removed the bodies of 34 Ukrainian defenders from the mass grave,” Donetsk regional police said in a statement. “Work continues at a second location where more than 120 civilians are buried. The fate of each person who died will be determined.”
The soldiers’ bodies have all been transferred to a morgue and will be returned to their relatives for burial once identification has taken place and the cause of death is determined, the police said.
Since Sept. 29, Donetsk police said they had found the bodies of 144 people, 85 of them civilians, with 108 exhumed from makeshift graves, and the rest found in buildings or on the streets.
“Most of the dead — 85 — are civilians,” they said. “Some of them have signs of violent death, in particular shrapnel injuries.
Ukraine’s top prosecutor told a joint news conference with International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan in The Hague on Thursday that Ukraine had 28 investigative teams on the ground in areas recently recaptured by Ukrainian forces.
Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin said retreating Russian troops had left evidence of illegal detention and torture of civilians and deportations. Khan, who opened an ICC investigation in March, would not be drawn on when his office might file its first case, saying he would move forward “when the evidence is sufficient”.
In Lyman, graves marked as holding the bodies of people killed in May, when Russians were battling to seize Lyman, include those for children as young as one, Reuters reported this week. Reuters could not independently determine the causes or timing of the deaths.
Ukrainian authorities have repeatedly accused Russian troops of committing atrocities in occupied territories, a charge Moscow denies.
(Reporting by Elaine Monaghan; Editing by David Gregorio)
