kyiv, Ukraine (AP) — Satellite images released Thursday showed what appeared to be mass graves near Mariupol, with local authorities accusing Russia of burying up to 9,000 Ukrainian civilians there in order to hide the ongoing carnage. in the siege of the port city.
The images appeared hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed victory in the battle for Mariupol, despite the presence of some 2,000 Ukrainian fighters still holed up in a giant steel mill. Putin ordered his troops not to storm the bastion, but to seal it “so that not even a fly gets through.”
Satellite imagery provider Maxar Technologies released photos that it said showed more than 200 mass graves in a town where Ukrainian authorities say the Russians have been burying Mariupol residents who have died in the fighting. The images showed long rows of graves stretching from an existing cemetery in the city of Manhush to the outskirts of Mariupol.
Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko accused the Russians of “concealing their military crimes” by taking the bodies of the city’s civilians and burying them in Manhush.
The graves could hold up to 9,000 dead, the Mariupol City Council said in a post on the Telegram messaging app on Thursday.
Boychenko called the Russian actions in the city “the new Babi Yar,” referring to the site of multiple Nazi massacres that claimed the lives of nearly 34,000 Ukrainian Jews in 1941.
“The bodies of the dead were brought in by trucks and were actually just dumped in heaps,” a Boychenko adviser, Piotr Andryushchenko, told Telegram.
The Kremlin has not commented on the alleged graves so far. When mass graves and hundreds of dead civilians were discovered in Bucha and other towns around kyiv after the withdrawal of Russian troops, Russian officials denied that their soldiers had killed civilians there and accused Ukraine of staging the atrocities.
In a statement, Maxar said a review of earlier images indicates the Manhush pits were excavated in late March and enlarged in recent weeks.
After nearly two months of shelling that has left Mariupol virtually in ruins, Russian forces appear to be in control of the rest of the strategic southern city, including its vital but now badly damaged port.
But a few thousand Ukrainian soldiers, according to Moscow estimates, have stubbornly held out for weeks at the steel plant, despite attacks by Russian forces and repeated demands to surrender. According to Ukrainian officials, some 1,000 civilians are also trapped there.
Rather than send troops to finish off the defenders in a potentially bloody frontal assault, Russia appears intent on maintaining the siege and waiting for the fighters to surrender when they run out of food or ammunition.
Boychenko refuted the notion that Mariupol has fallen into Russian hands.
“The city was, is and remains Ukrainian,” he declared. “Today our brave warriors, our heroes, are defending our city.”
The capture of Mariupol would represent the Kremlin’s biggest victory so far in the Ukraine war. It would help Moscow secure more of the coastline, complete a land bridge between Russia and the Crimean peninsula — which it seized in 2014 — and free up more forces to join the larger and potentially more consequential battle to come. it is being fought over Donbas, the industrial heartland of Ukraine.
Associated Press journalists Mstyslav Chernov and Felipe Dana in Kharkiv, Ukraine; Yesica Fisch in Kramatorsk, Ukraine; Danica Kirka in London, and Robert Burns and Aamer Madhani in Washington contributed to this report, as did AP journalists in other parts of the world.
