199, 164 and 174. Mr Kolesnyk lost his cousin Yuri Yakovenko, Mr Yakovenko’s wife Svitlana and his mother Natalya in early March. Each of these numbers represented one of their bodies. Moscow blamed the Ukrainian airstrikes, but said this was obviously untrue as Kiev forces were operating in the region at the time and were being hit by the Russian military. As next of kin, the Russian soldiers gave Mr Kolesnyk a choice – pay for a proper burial plot or the bodies would be thrown into roughly numbered graves in the undergrowth of the pine forest with the other countless victims of the war. “We were told, if you want to bury them properly, the price was 7,000 Ukrainian hryvnias (£166), but we didn’t have that money at the time,” Mr Kolesnyk told the Telegraph – one of the few Western outlets to make a profit. access to the newly recaptured eastern city. “They didn’t give me their death certificates when I asked, they just gave me grave numbers. I visited today for the first time because I was afraid to go there (when the Russians were here) as I heard there were mines,” Mr Kolesnyk said from his home on Saturday, as gunfire and explosions rang out ominously nearby. . He made the journey to replace numbers with names, giving his relatives the respect they had been denied in death.
Zelensky: “Russia leaves only death and suffering”
Ukrainian forces have regained a swath of territory in recent days in a lightning counter-offensive in the east, liberating several towns from Russian forces and exposing a grim legacy of occupation. The forest has become a sea of white crosses, each marked with a number associated with a victim. Officials have so far counted 450 hastily dug graves. “Russia leaves only death and suffering. Murderers, torturers,” Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, said of the scenes in Izyum. Some of the remains exhumed, he said, included children and people who were likely tortured before they died. Mr Zelensky posted a photo of the exhumation along with the words: “The whole world needs to see this. A world in which cruelty and terrorism should not exist. But that’s all there. And her name is Russia.”
