With Russia’s exit from Kherson, Ukrainian investigators find 63 bodies with signs of torture in liberated area

New Delhi: In Ukraine’s recently liberated southern Kherson region, investigators have discovered nearly 63 bodies with signs of torture after Russian military forces left the area, Ukraine’s interior minister said early on Thursday.

“Now, 63 bodies have been discovered in Kherson region, but we must understand that the search has only just started so many more dungeons and burial places will be uncovered,” Interfax Ukraine news agency quoted Denys Monastyrsky as telling the country’s national television.

The Ukrainian minister said teams of law enforcement officers had uncovered 436 instances of critical war crimes during Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory. Eleven places of detention too had been discovered, including four which revealed that torture of civilians had been carried out there.

“Investigators are currently examining them and setting down every instance of torture. Exhumations are also taking place of the bodies of those who were killed,” Monastyrsky told national television, according to Interfax.

A prosecutor in the Kherson regional prosecutor’s office, Andriy Kovalenko, has gone on record and told the New York Times that testimony had been gathered on 800 detentions by the Russian military in the region. He said that the most common types of abuse inflicted on detainees were electric shocks, beatings with plastic or rubber nightsticks, and suffocation by pinching the breathing hose on a gas mask placed over a prisoner’s head.

War crimes have been carried out in a majority of areas occupied by Russian troops since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February, according to both Ukrainian and international investigators who have found evidence of civilians being tortured in several Ukrainian regions.

Russia, on the other hand denies its soldiers targeted civilians or have committed heinous war crimes. Mass burial sites have been found in other parts previously occupied by Russian troops, including some with civilian bodies showing signs of torture.

In a first positive sign for Ukraine so far, Russian forces left parts of Kherson last week – the southern Kherson region had been one of the first areas seized by Russia since the war broke out earlier this year.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in his nightly video address last Sunday, said investigators had uncovered more than 400 crimes in Kherson. He said the Russian army left behind corpses, broken infrastructure and landmines in what he described as “the same savagery it did in other regions”.

With inputs from agencies.

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