At least 17 people – civilians and military – were found buried in a grave in a Kharkiv Oblast village that was recently liberated from the Russian invaders, the Interior Ministry reported on its portal yesterday. On the first day of work, investigators recovered the bodies of three servicemen.
“Preliminarily, we have data on at least 17 dead bodies. Locals say that our soldiers died in battle and were buried here. The Russians did not mark the grave and did not allow the villagers to do so. People were allowed to come to the cemetery only on Easter. People found three crosses, and marked the perimeter of the grave in this way,” said Dmytro Soyma, deputy head of the investigative department of the National Police in Kharkiv Oblast.
Residents of the village of Kopanky, Borova district, bordering Luhansk Oblast, informed the police about the mass burial. According to the villagers, the occupiers collected the bodies of the dead throughout the district and brought them to the village on April 13 in two trucks. They dug a hole up to 3 meters deep with an excavator and dumped all the bodies there, and then leveled the burial place with tanks.
The police, the prosecutor’s office, and the SSU in Kharkiv Oblast continue to work at the scene of yet another abhorrent Russian war crime.
