Yevhenii Yenin: In the courtyard of a private house in the village of Pravdino in Kherson region, a burial with the remains of six people with traces of torture was found
During the inclusion in the live broadcast of the TV marathon “Yedeni Novosti”, the First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine spoke about the work of law enforcement officers to identify mass burials in the de-occupied territories of the Kherson region and the identification of persons killed as a result of the military aggression of the Russian Federation.
“In the village of Pravdino, Kherson district, a burial was found in the courtyard of a private house, where the remains of six people with traces of torture, gunshot wounds, etc. were found. Discovered corpses are exhumed and sent for forensic examination. Another 36 graves were found in the cemetery in the settlement of geologists in Kherson. There is a mass burial, where there are bodies of servicemen of the Armed Forces, in particular, TRO. In total, during the occupation period, about 700 bodies have passed to the morgues, of which about 100 — with bodily injuries received as a result of military actions, 12 of them have not been identified so far,” Yevhenii Yenin said.
According to him, work is underway to quickly collect DNA samples of relatives to establish the faces of the dead. However, complications often arise because the relatives of many of the dead are abroad or there is no connection with them.
In addition, Yevgeny Yenin once again emphasized that from the first days of large-scale aggression, Russian terrorists have ignored the norms of international humanitarian law: it is about taking hostages of rescuers who do not have weapons and do not exert any military resistance, and about cruelty to civilian population, which the Russian military has repeatedly demonstrated through social networks.
“The Russian occupiers are simply mad. And quite often they committed violence against civilians, flaunting it, sending photos and videos to their relatives in Russia, posting on social networks. But this will in the future be a tool in the formation of the evidence base regarding the war crimes committed by them. Unfortunately, the horror that we have already seen in the liberated territory of the Kherson region can only be a small part of what will be revealed to us after the liberation of the rest of the occupied territories,” the First Deputy Minister noted.
Separately, he reported on the results of the exhumation of bodies in the city of Izyum in Kharkiv region.
“More than 450 bodies of the dead have been recovered from the burial sites: about 200 bodies of men, slightly more bodies of women, more than 20 bodies of military personnel, seven children and the remains of 12 people whose gender, age and identity cannot be determined. It is preliminarily established that among these individuals there are those who died from violent death: gunshot wounds, explosive injuries. Signs of torture were found in at least 40 people. The police examined 450 corpses, assigned the same number of forensic examinations to determine the causes of death, the presence of bodily injuries, as well as special signs that can be used as an additional factor in the identification of the bodies. Biological samples were selected for molecular genetic examination of DNA in more than 200 individuals. And 456 forensic and molecular genetic examinations on biological samples of corpses were assigned,” Yevhenii Yenin said.
He stressed that the pre-trial investigation is ongoing: law enforcement officers are carrying out all necessary investigative actions and measures aimed both at identifying the bodies and establishing the circumstances under which these persons died and those responsible for these terrible war crimes.
Department of Communications of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine
