Almost three thousand civilians died in the Kharkiv region as a result of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation

As of February 24, 2022, as a result of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation in the Kharkiv region, 2,750 civilians have died, 95 of them are children.

Serhii Bolvinov, head of the Investigative Department of the National Police of Kharkiv Oblast, announced this.

Also, according to him, another 75 killed people have not been identified. Most of the bodies were found at the mass burial site in Izyum.

“448 bodies were exhumed there, which were simply thrown into the ground and buried without coffins, any bags… This is a huge number. And identification work is quite difficult. This is not only for the Kharkiv police or the Ukrainian police in general, it is complex and long-lasting all over the world,” Bolvinov said.

Of the 75 unidentified people, 52 are from the Izyum forest. The police have information about where, by whom and under what circumstances each person’s body was found and when it was buried.

“Legally, they are all considered unidentified. But about 26 of them there is an understanding of who it could be. However, we have no DNA matches. There are different stories. For example, the family moved abroad, and close relatives are still unable to give us a DNA sample. That is, there are certain procedures, and they are in process. In some cases, there are no DNA matches because a close relative provided the sample for comparison,” he said.

Now the case of the Raisin mass burial is being investigated as the murder of 448 people. In addition to him, bodies of dead civilians were also found just in the forest, according to Bolvinov, they were in bad condition.

A mass burial near Izyum was discovered on September 15, 2022, after the liberation of a large part of the Kharkiv region from Russian troops. During the exhumation, 448 bodies were found: 414 civilians (194 men, 215 women, 5 children), 22 military personnel and 11 bodies whose gender could not be determined. Most of the dead died as a result of violent death, and 30 bodies had clear traces of torture.

Graves are located among trees and are marked with wooden crosses with numbers on them. Among the buried were mostly civilians, sometimes children, as well as at least 17 soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Most of the dead died from artillery fire, mines and airstrikes. The bodies also showed signs of torture, including ropes around their necks, tied hands, broken limbs and gunshot wounds, and several men had their genitalia amputated.