They don’t yet know how many bodies lie here – the military and officials say 90 to 100 bodies, without giving details.
The signs of the fighting are present all around. The roof of the hangar pierced with shrapnel shards was smashed by the destroyed turret of a tank, which flew before crashing into the empty cages of the chicken coop.
An icy wind blows dust on the scattered cement bricks, while the few Ukrainian soldiers guarding this place wince each time one of their tanks fires a shell in the direction of Russia.
Teams of deminers arrived at the site, located near the small town of Kozatcha Lopan, two kilometers from the border. The alleged site of a mass grave has so far remained undisturbed.
“The soldiers who came to our village told me that they saw a burial site for the soldiers, but they did not say how many,” said Lioudmila Vakoulenko, head of the local administration. “They said a unit of specialists was going to look into all of this.”
The medical examiners are expected there for this week, as soon as the area is sufficiently safe. On Monday, the soldiers on the spot moved cautiously, avoiding unpaved areas and on the lookout for mines and unexploded shells.
If confirmed, the find would come just a week after one made in a forest near Izium, where Ukrainians uncovered hundreds of graves after Russian forces left. A total of 447 bodies were exhumed there, almost all of them civilians.
According to the governor of the Kharkiv region, Oleg Sinegoubov, the majority of these corpses showed signs of violent death and 30 showed “signs of torture”.
– Bunker and trenches –
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told US channel CBS News on Sunday that kyiv had discovered “two more mass graves, large ones with hundreds of people”, but it’s unclear whether he was referring to the one that might be in Kozatcha Lopan.
At the moment, the Ukrainians do not know which bodies lie in the farm. Soldiers told AFP they also expected to find Russian soldiers in addition to their Ukrainian brothers in arms and local civilians.
Mrs. Vakoulenko says for her part that the military expects to find soldiers there. She even has an idea of who might be lying there.
According to her, on April 22, a unit of the Ukrainian 72nd Mechanized Brigade had counter-attacked against Russian forces entrenched in the farm, but had suffered heavy losses and had to retreat.
She also says that she received a call last weekend from a certain “Olena”, who claimed that her relatives and friends had died on April 22 and wanted to receive official information about them.
The area was finally recaptured from the Russians in September. While it is not yet known who lies beneath the farmhouse, it is easy to find out who was there when the burials took place: the shed is full of signs of the Russian occupation.
Deep trenches were dug under the floors of some buildings, each the size of a tank that might have been concealed there. A Russian tanker’s helmet hangs from a pole and a Russian army coat lies in the mud.
According to Ukrainian forces, the unit holding this position was recruited from Abkhazia, a pro-Russian separatist republic of Georgia, de facto controlled by Moscow.
In the workshop of the farm, a bunker was dug under the concrete floor and the occupants of the premises set up a gym with a concrete dumbbell and a punching bag made from car tires.
A shell hole pierces a corner of the roof, now letting a ray of sunlight enter the gloomy darkness.
