PMore than 1,500 corpses of Russian soldiers have been discovered in morgues in the industrial city of Dnieper, the city’s deputy mayor, Mikhailo Lyssenko, said on Wednesday. “Today we have more than 1,500 dead Russian soldiers in the Dnieper morgues, which no one wants to recover,” he said in an interview with Russian-language media Nastoïashchee Vremia (Current Time), funded by Washington. . “They lie in mortuary refrigerators,” he continued, saying he hopes “Russian mothers can come and pick up their sons.”
“Whatever you think, they are someone’s children. Their mothers raised them […]they loved them, they took them to school on the 1ster September”, the day of the new school year in Russia, he continued. ” I have a request […] : we will organize everything, but let the Russian mothers collect the corpses of their sons, ”he added, appearing to address the Russian authorities.
Russia has been very tight-lipped about the extent of its losses since the start of the invasion of Ukraine. The latest official report, communicated on March 29, reported 1,351 dead and 3,825 wounded, but the Kremlin spokesman acknowledged last week that the country “suffered significant military losses”. Dnieper, an industrial city of one million inhabitants crossed by the Dnieper River, marks the limit of the eastern regions of the country and could, according to experts, be an upcoming target of the Russian army which has decided to refocus on east of the country.
Ukraine is a ‘crime scene’
The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the British Karim Khan, described Wednesday Ukraine as a “crime scene”, during a visit to Boutcha, near kyiv. “Ukraine is a crime scene. We are here because we have good reason to believe that crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court are being committed. We must pierce the fog of war to get to the truth,” he told reporters during a tour of the city, where hundreds of civilians, according to Ukrainian authorities, were found dead after the attack. Russian occupation.
Karim Khan clarified that an ICC forensic team was preparing to work “so that we can really separate truth from fiction”. “We have to keep an open mind and trust the evidence,” he added. “The law must be mobilized and thrown into battle to protect civilians. »
Journalists from Agence France-Presse who were able to go there from April 2 saw the bodies of twenty men dressed in civilian clothes scattered over several hundred meters in a city street. One was lying on his bike, others had shopping bags next to them. Another, lying on his side, had his hands tied behind his back. At least two of these corpses had large head wounds. They have been attending for several days the exhumation of bodies from mass graves in Boutcha and in other localities in the suburbs of kyiv which had been occupied for several weeks by Russian troops.
The Boutcha massacre drew horrified condemnations from around the world and prompted kyiv’s allies to take new sanctions against Russia. Russia denies any responsibility for these deaths and describes as “fake” the accusations of civilian murders by Russian soldiers.
Fighting in Mariupol
On the same day, Russia announced the surrender of more than a thousand Ukrainian soldiers in Mariupol, a very strategic port city that its forces have been besieging and bombarding for more than 40 days and encircling for more than a month. “1,026 Ukrainian soldiers from the 36and marine infantry brigade voluntarily laid down their arms and went “to the area of a metallurgical plant, of which 150 were injured and were taken care of, said the Russian Ministry of Defense. Overnight Tuesday-Wednesday, a Russian state television report announcing the surrender showed men in camouflage uniforms carrying wounded on stretchers.
The capture of this city would be an important victory for the Russians because it would allow them to consolidate their coastal territorial gains along the Sea of Azov by linking the Donbass region, partly controlled by their supporters, to the Crimea that Moscow has annexed in 2014. If some military experts consider its fall inevitable, Ukrainian soldiers continue to resist the Russians, the fighting now being concentrated in the gigantic industrial zone of this city, of which between 20,000 and 22,000 inhabitants have died in total. after Pavlo Kirilenko, the Ukrainian governor of the Donetsk region. Russian aerial bombardment of Mariupol continued, targeting in particular the port and the vast Azovstal metallurgical complex, the Ukrainian army said on Wednesday.
