by Francesco Battistini
They are the largest mass graves that have been discovered in Europe since Srebrenica: children are among the 445 corpses
If that’s a dead man. The torn body folded into a sort of them, a mass of muddy and faded rags to wrap around, a noose around the neck. They lift him in two out of the forest’s rich earth and slowly, be careful, you’ve got to be careful handling those buried subjects. More fragile than the lives they contained. Carrying truths too heavy for their thin bones. dr Vitali Kravchenko is a retired coroner. They called him to help at this mass graves morgue, and he’s a big man. But when he kneels on that rag of a man, he grows small like us. Bowed too, under the banality of a tremendous evil. He has shed his mask and all disgust: he digs for three days and can no longer distinguish the fresh pine scent from the rotten stench of corpses. «I had never seen so many and all together…». He cleans the dirt with his hands and seems to caress the dead. Try to find a face that’s gone. A document in his pockets, a ring on his fingers, something you identify. anything. All that’s left is the white body bag and the black marker to give the only possible identity: 321.
smell and silence
They take us en masse to see to believe. journalists and judges. Order of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who wants thousands upon thousands of witnesses to the war crimes committed by the retreating Russians. The secret of the Izyum Forest is no longer a secret. It is the gun smoking, Ukrainians say, that may not bring Putin to the Hague court, but some of his hierarchs will. Bucha had pretended it was all fake, Irpin and Mariupol had even denied the truth, but a horror show is being staged in Izyum that, as soon as you enter the forest, gives you proof that no videos or satellite photos are required to view are : In the stillness of the pine forest lies only the sweetish stench of 445 corpses already found and others, who knows where. The largest mass graves ever discovered in Europe since Srebrenica and the Balkan Wars. The corpse found with the noose says that “99% are not people who died under the circumstances of the war,” says Oleh Kotenko, who has been responsible for investigating the disappeared in recent months: “Lots of corpses show signs of violence, some we dug up with hands tied behind their backs. Even several children. In Izyum and in the villages of the Kharkiv region there were 10 torture chambers”.
Everything is carefully inspected as eighty percent of the buildings in the area are destroyed and the other twenty are often mined. Survivors say they suffered beatings and electric shocks. “They didn’t bury me in the woods just because they ran away first,” says Maxim, who is wearing a T-shirt that reads Unleash the Beast, letting the beast go without knowing he was seeing it too wildly: ” They kept me in a dungeon. One day I passed out. I was sure I was dying ».
Investigator Kotenko promises that “we will get to the bottom, a UN team will also arrive to understand how many of these bodies went through this violence”. And the certainty, he adds, is that there are other mass graves nearby. The Russians did nothing to hide the massed corpses: in Srebrenica the Serbs had dismembered them and scattered them all over Bosnia (so much so that many of the victims have not been recognized to this day…). And therefore Izyum risks invading the geography of Katyn, Bergen-Belsen, historical slaughterhouses left to the horror of memory. On the main street and up to the square, in front of a surreal neon that reads I love Izyum in Cyrillic, not even a wall is intact. All around only old people queuing for lunch and humanitarian aid: “I don’t care if they bring Putin to The Hague – screams Ivan, 83 -. It’s important to me to know if I’ll find bread tomorrow!». He doesn’t even care that the Russians destroyed the Izyum Technical Institute, a small brutalist monument that in USSR times allowed young Zhukov, Stalin’s invincible and most loyal Marshal, to study here (by disfiguring, on the facade of the Urban Cinemas, the men of the Z left a black and white explosion of a Nazi parade): “I have lived many lives – says Ivan – but I did not expect this ending”.
Employees with shovels
Immediately to the right is the largest mass grave, about 70 corpses and many soldiers. All around it is clearing, and every 5 minutes there is a rumble in the silence of the forest. The team of diggers in blue plastic is exhausted: “We work 72 hours a day – says Ihor, 26, who speaks a few words of Italian because of his studies in Catania – it’s the worst that can happen. But a lot of us are volunteers, we don’t get a penny. We know that it is necessary to look at this crap ». There are 200 wooden crosses. Some with the name: Novikov Yakiv Genadiyovin, born 1976… And too many with the number: unknown 93, unknown 94… Not only the Russians dug the graves, they tell Izyum: “They brought about fifty collaborators with shovels.” All People have fled across the border after this East was retaken. “It was normal that they chose the forest,” says a man in a Russian navy shirt who lost his wife. The city cemetery is a few meters away, he says, and the dead of Izyum have always settled here. But who says they are only tortured underground? “We will do the DNA of all the corpses – promises Kharkiv governor Oleh Synehubov – we will compare them with that of the missing.”
A little further there is a small cemetery for dogs. The only pastor. The only one that the Russians didn’t trample, and full of flowers. It is only at the end of the visit on the hills of loose earth, between shovels and masks, that anyone remembers these 445 killed like dogs, buried unknown, without burial until the investigation is complete. A lady brings a bouquet of sunflowers, soaked and fallen over. He puts them on the deepest of the pits. You have no perfume. And they don’t erase the smell of shame.
September 16, 2022 (Change September 16, 2022 | 23:27)
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