Vladimir Putin's forces have dumped the bodies of dozens of Ukrainian civilians in a supermarket in Mariupol and left them to rot, it has emerged.
Bodies have been strewn across the city, causing the soil to get poisoned, eventually getting into underground water and into rivers and the sea.
Russian forces have since washed the corpses above ground in an attempt to restore running water to the ruined city, according to Petro Andryushchenko, the Mariupol mayor’s adviser.
He said the volume of bodies being washed out of the ground was too large, and forces were unable to bury them.
Mr Andryushchenko wrote on his Telegram social media channel: "The Russians are bringing the bodies of the dead here [in the supermarket], bodies which were washed out of graves and partially exhumed in an attempt to restore water supply.
"They are just dumping them like garbage.”
Photographs from the Shchyryikum supermarket show decomposing and discoloured bodies in civilian clothes littered across the floor.
Andryushchenko said there is a "catastrophic" shortage of people to bury the corpses and dig makeshift graves, so there has been a "separate recruitment campaign for pathologists" launched in Moscow.
Ukrainian authorities said on Tuesday that while digging through the rubble they found more than 200 bodies in Mariupol, which faced some of the worst aggression from Putin's forces in the last few months.
Before the war, Mariupol had a population of around 500,000 people and was a cosmopolitan city famed for its beaches.
The estimated 100,000 remaining residents of Mariupol are living among rubble and dead bodies without medicine, running water or electricity.
Little remains following months of siege and Ukrainian officials have said the city has been reduced to “ashes of a dead land."
Russian forces destroyed almost "80% of the city’s infrastructure in 22 days, of which 30% can no longer be rebuilt", they continued.
Mariupol Mayor Vadim Boychenko estimated more than 20,000 civilians had been killed during the final weeks of the aggressive fighting.
He said this was twice the number of deaths recorded in the entire two-year Nazi occupation of the city during World War Two.
He said: “Putin is a bigger evil than Hitler and we must stop him."
Putin's forces were unabashed with their violence in the port city.
They struck maternity wards and bombed a theatre, clearly marked as a refuge for hundreds of civilians. Officials claim their actions amount to war crimes.
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing or targeting of civilians.
Many of those killed were buried in shallow graves by whoever was available to aid and it is these bodies that Mr Andryushchenko said are now being washed out of the ground and thrown in supermarkets.
