Russia has been hiding evidence of its “barbaric” war crimes in Mariupol by burying the bodies of civilians killed by shelling in a new mass grave, the city’s mayor said on Thursday, as a US satellite imagery company released photos that appeared to match the site.
The mayor, Vadym Boichenko, said Russian trucks had collected corpses from the streets of the port city and had transported them to the nearby village of Manhush. They were then secretly thrown into a mass grave in a field next to the settlement’s old cemetery, he said.
“The invaders are concealing evidence of their crimes. The cemetery is located near a petrol station to the left side of a circular road. The Russians have dug huge trenches, 30 metres wide. They chuck people in,” he said.
Later on Thursday, the US company Maxar Technologies released images of what appeared to be a mass grave in the same area. The site had been expanded in recent weeks to contain more than 200 new graves, Maxar said.
The mayor estimated that more than 20,000 Mariupol residents had been killed since Russian forces began attacking the city during the early days of Vladimir Putin’s invasion. Most bodies had now been removed, he said, with some disposed of in mobile crematoriums.
Boichenko denied claims by Putin that the city had been “liberated” by Russia. He said Ukrainian soldiers remained holed up in the Azovstal steel factory on Mariupol’s left bank, with between 300 and 1,000 civilians, including women and children.
“We don’t know the precise civilian figure because we haven’t been able to get them out. We need a day’s ceasefire for this to happen,” he told the Guardian. The civilians were living in desperate conditions in a network of underground tunnels, surrounded by Russian troops.
Speaking in Moscow on Thursday, Putin ordered his forces not to storm the sprawling factory complex, after his defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, admitted that the Russian army was still fighting thousands of Ukrainian soldiers there.
The Russian president described a plan to penetrate the complex as impractical, and called instead for a blockade of the area “so that a fly can’t get through”. Putin told Shoigu, in remarks broadcast on state television: “There is no need to climb into these catacombs and crawl underground.”
Western officials estimate Moscow has somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 troops in the Mariupol area, some of whom can now be freed up to go north and envelop the Ukrainians defending the Donbas region. Ukrainian forces there are already outnumbered by three to one.
The officials also said they were gearing up for “a prolonged period of conflict” in the Donbas region and that the war could last “much of the rest of the year”.
Ukraine, however, scoffed at the idea that a Russian victory in Mariupol was already achieved. “This situation means the following: they cannot physically capture Azovstal. They have understood this. They suffered huge losses there,” said Oleksiy Arestovich, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Boichenko said that about 100,000 people remained in Russian-occupied areas in Mariupol. Another 100,000 had successfully escaped, mostly in private cars, while 40,000 had been forcibly deported to Russia. Others were being held in Russian “filtration camps” outside the city, he said.
The mayor said 80 people managed to get out on Wednesday in four buses and successfully crossed into Ukrainian government-controlled territory. No evacuation took place on Thursday, he added, because Russia shelled the meeting point where residents were told to gather.
“People are being tortured in these camps. Not just men but also women are being filtered. It’s a terrible ghetto. They are looking for people connected with the municipality. Russia is using the same fascist methods employed by the Nazis. It’s fascist Russia,” he said.
In the face of stubborn resistance, the Kremlin appears to have made a tactical decision to starve Mariupol’s last Ukrainian defenders into submission. After failing to take Kyiv, Moscow says its new war aim is to seize the administrative borders of Donetsk and Luhansk.
The Russians have shifted part of their attacking forces from Mariupol farther north. In its latest intelligence update, the ministry of defence said Russian battalions were likely to make “significant” advances in time for 9 May and the annual Victory Day parade in Red Square in Moscow. Two key targets are the eastern Ukrainian cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk.
In the absence of a clearcut victory, a Russian T-80 tank crew performed a celebratory spin in a Mariupol square, crashing through a barrier. The encircled Ukrainian army has practically run out of ammunition, limiting its ability to counterattack.
A Russian T-80 in Mariupol.
— Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 (@IAPonomarenko) April 21, 2022
Note the specific gas turbine sound. pic.twitter.com/RdcxM4FuBq
Chris Parry, a retired British rear admiral, said: “The Russian agenda now is not to capture these really difficult places where the Ukrainians can hold out in the urban centres, but to try and capture territory and also to encircle the Ukrainian forces and declare a huge victory.”
He said this amounted to a change in operational approach. “They’ve realised if they get sort of held up in these sort of really sticky areas like Mariupol, they’re not going to cover the rest of the ground.”
The apparent change in Russia’s approach might also be a reflection of the mounting casualties it has suffered in the war.
The Russian defence ministry has refused to say how many sailors died on board the Moskva cruiser, which sank last week, leading angry parents of soldiers to go public with demands for the government to find their children.
Putin’s public appeal to “protect the lives” of Russian soldiers mighty indicate that the Kremlin is concerned it appears indifferent to its losses, critics said.
“When Putin says something publicly, it is almost always a consequence of the fact that the [Kremlin] has taken measurements of public opinion and has come to the conclusion that now it is necessary to speak in order to earn political points,” wrote Leonid Volkov, an ally of the jailed opposition politician Alexei Navalny.
Andrei Turchak, the head of the ruling United Russia party, appeared in a Mariupol school this week to declare that “victory will be ours, the enemy will be defeated”.
Andrei Kolesnikov, of the Moscow Carnegie Centre, wrote: “It is logical to assume that Putin should equate his ‘victory’ with victory in 1945 and celebrate it on 9 May. But judging by the way the operation is going, he may prolong the hostilities, and 9 May will be just a day to achieve intermediate goals.”
Additional reporting by Dan Sabbagh
