A story of Izyum, a city in Kharkiv region, which became yet another place of Russian war crimes
Posted on 09/28/2022 4:46:12 PM PDT by UMCRevMom@aol.com
March 31, 2022 went down in history as the point of no return in the war. It was on this day that the city of Bucha, in Kyiv region, was liberated from the Russian invaders. At the same time, the world was shaken by the terrible footage of Russian crimes: hundreds of bodies of civilians brutally killed and tortured by the Russian occupiers, known as the Bucha Massacre.
It was a shock that the next day, April 1, 2022, Russian invaders captured the city of Izyum, which is in Kharkiv region. The city used to be unremarkable and unknown to the average European... until September 11, 2022, when the Ukrainian military liberated it in a successful counter-offensive.
Izyum was of exceptional tactical importance for the Russian occupying forces, as well as an extremely important transport and logistics hub. The city had been under Russian occupation for five and a half months. Russian propaganda tried to portray the Russians as "helping local residents" and that "Russia is here forever" in every possible way. However, the objective essence of the "Russian peace" is that it leaves behind only death, terror, and destruction.
Ukraine had previously repeatedly stated that the humanitarian situation in Russian-occupied territories could be catastrophic beyond even the horrors of Bucha, especially due to the fact that Russia had created an information blockade and did not provide any real data about the state of the local population. As expected, Russia's stay in Izyum turned into a series of bloody crimes against Ukrainians, or simply genocide. Izyum is now gaining the same terrible infamy as Bucha. 447 bodies have been discovered in mass graves: people were buried right in a local pine grove. Hundreds of people remain missing with no information on their whereabouts.
We traveled to Izyum to see with our own eyes as bodies are exhumed, as well as how the city itself is living after the occupation. "Mom, I'm not hungry! Everything is OK! Don't worry," a young Ukrainian serviceman shouts into his mobile phone at a checkpoint near Izyum. While the police were checking my details and passing them along, I decided to go over to a working Starlink terminal to send a few messages.
We must be honest, this invention of Elon Musk is the only way anyone can communicate: the military, journalists, and civilians. After all, since March 2022, there has been no electricity, water, or gas in Izyum, not to mention such fundamentals of modern life as mobile communication and the Internet. In fact, local residents are deprived of the main benefits of civilization. That is why so many people gathered at this place. I didn't have time to connect to the Internet before the policeman started waving at me briskly. "You were allowed to enter the mass burial site and Izyum itself. Come on, drive faster, before people "upstairs" change their minds," he shouted. I didn't have to be asked twice. The mass grave
After a few minutes, my car is already turning from the asphalt road to the pine forest. After driving a couple of hundred meters, I saw several parked buses, cars, and two refrigerators. In both of them, the label "Cargo 200" was pasted on the windshield (a military code word used in the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet states referring to the transportation of military fatalities. Officially, the term "Cargo 200" is military jargon to refer specifically to the corpses of soldiers contained in zinc-lined coffins for air transportation. Unofficially, it is used to refer to all bodies of the dead being transported away from the battlefield). The drivers of these refrigerator trucks sat nearby and smoked cigarettes one after the other. Thanks to the special red and white ribbons tied to the trees, I understood where to go.
I stood for a few minutes, gathered my strength, and went to the mass burial site. Several rescuers and police officers came to meet me. One of them turned to me with the words: "You have to wear a mask, otherwise you simply physically cannot bear being near the graves". I have to admit, I prepared myself and pulled out of my pocket a special mask from the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the rescuers handed me a small box. "Take this ointment and rub it near your nose. After all, the corpses are in a semi-decomposed state. There is a very strong corpse smell. Believe me. This ointment will save you," he said. I opened this box and applied the ointment near my nose. It smelled very strongly of menthol. But it really killed all my nerve receptors. So I came to the mass grave. Many people were already working here. A few meters away from me, a voice sounded: "Come on, guys, let's go on the count of one-two-three-four." It was an employee of the State Emergency Service, working with others to pull another body out of the pit. They pulled him or her out. What remained of the body was wrapped in rags. Even further, I hear someone counting in the same way, but in French. "French experts must also be working here," I thought. Other workers carefully placed the body in black plastic bags.
Four rescuers carry a freshly exhumed corpse. One of the guys can't stand it, throws down the body, and starts vomiting loudly. But no one pays attention to it. He is immediately replaced. I approached a group of investigators standing nearby. A young woman, sobbing, says to her colleague, "It's just terrible, it's just terrible. There,"she points with her hand into the depths of the forest. "The corpses of an entire family lie on the ground: a grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, and two children. The corpses of the children were stacked on top of each other and wrapped in some kind of rag."
And she begins to cry even harder. Her colleague tries to calm her down, but in vain. No wonder why, when you look at the entire burial site and see hundreds of crosses. Another corpse has just been pulled from the ground. The police officers dragged him to the gathering point. "It's already the tenth," says one of the investigators. He diligently writes down all the information. The investigator preempted my question about the numbers on the plates. "It was the locals who buried people and numbered the crosses on the graves so that later it would be possible to somehow understand who lies there." The hard work continued.
The City of Izyum itself
I decided to go into the city. After crossing the pontoon bridge, I saw an apocalyptic picture: houses destroyed to their foundations, holes blasted in apartment buildings, parks and squares burned. I did not see a single building which survived undamaged. Eyewitnesses who were lucky enough to survive the Russian occupation say that Russian aircraft dropped bombs directly on high-rise buildings where civilians still remained... Dozens of families died under the rubble, and the exit from the city was blocked by Russian troops, who occupied the city. The men were interrogated with particular brutality, and the Russians were especially desperate to identify military personnel or those who participated in the anti-terrorist operation (Ukraine's struggle against Russian aggression in Donbas from 2014-2022). There were also rapes that took place in the first days of the occupation, and women were put in danger, even if they just came out of shelters. Destruction and unsanitary conditions reigned in the city, the occupiers painted the letter Z on Ukrainian symbols. And the Russian servicemen turned one of the Orthodox churches into a toilet.
I parked my car in the city center. There I saw a man and a woman sitting on a bench waiting for humanitarian aid from volunteers. Calling himself Oleksandr, he refused to be photographed, because he was afraid of the Russians returning and retaliating. "The Russians were constantly shelling the city. What is more, they shot exclusively at residential buildings. There were planes and missiles here. My nine-story building fell down on March 9 while I was at home. The building started to burn. First I pulled out my mother, then my trapped neighbor. We rescued those we could pull out, but other residents died instantly. When the rescuers started to retrieve the corpses, my mother, me, and a neighbor were those who recognized them. Then they were picked up by a car and taken to the cemetery. When it was cold, we lived in a neighbor's country house, and then we returned to the house in the surviving neighboring apartment - I sealed the windows there. From our house, there were 30 or 35 people who died in that basement. I don't have any emotions right now. All my tears shed long ago. No more nerves left," says the man.
Having heard our conversation, another man approached us. He also shared with us his story. His relatives died in Izyum during an airstrike on a five-story building. "The brothers were found in the basement, and the aunt and her brother's wife were found on the landing. It did not happen immediately, but already in April when people had begun to decay. People were buried in sacks and without coffins. The Russians bombed the entire city and destroyed almost all of its population," - he added.
The woman sitting on the bench also approached us. Olga, as she called herself, began to cry, talking about her experiences and misfortunes that happened during the Russian occupation. "We had finally started to live. We were building roads. We had started to earn money and go abroad. And here they are... These Russians. Who invited them to come here? Look around, they bombed everything here. How many people were killed by Russian shells?! Just for you to understand, corpses of people killed by the Russian shells were lying on the streets for weeks. No one removed the bodies for a long time. Only then did Russians force local mortuary workers to bury people in the forest. Look at what they did to us. We are all like savages. We cook food on fires, we do not remember the last time we took a shower or simply washed... I hate Russians. Let them know it".
We started the story by mentioning Bucha for a reason. The events in Izyum prove that in every settlement that is or was under Russian occupation, the Bucha tragedy, which became a symbol of Russian evil and hatred for Ukrainians, repeats and even surpasses itself.
I'll be honest: if someone in Hollywood wants to make apocalyptic films, then there is no need to spend money on creating scenery because the City of Izyum is the best option.
Russia fired 10 times more missiles at Izyum than at Mariupol. Now, this city is like a ghost. There is nor a single surviving building here. There are no communications, infrastructure, shops, or pharmacies. Nothing. Izyum is unfit for life, especially given the approaching winter. People who lived for six months without electricity, gas, light, water, and normal food, are like zombies. All of them are traumatized and demoralized to the extent that they are even afraid to talk about the "bacchanalia" created by the Russian military here. If hell exists, then part of it has definitely been recreated in Izyum.
A story of Izyum, a city in Kharkiv region, which became yet another place of Russian war crimes
Hint.
War crimes graves usually aren’t individual graves, marked by a cross, near the front lines and dug by hand.
They are usually mass graves, dug deep with machines, bodies stacked and with lye, done in secret, not marked and far away from the front lines.
Could these possibly be Ukrainian KIAs that the Ukrainians didn’t bury before they evacuated the city?
From the article.
Russia to Announce Annexation Regions Next Week.
108,000km added that produces 95% of Ukraine’s overall GDP and contains the bulk of Ukraine’s industry and resources.
“The only thing I’m glad about is that I didn’t write to Zelensky at that time. And now I understand why: you can’t write and ask not to kill children to someone who gives orders to shell Donetsk, Gorlovka, Alchevsk and other cities. You cannot write to a president who sends thousands of his soldiers to their deaths without sparing them, gives orders for terrorist acts and the murder of children. You can’t write to the president who started this massacre and lost half of his country. You can’t write to a loser. Every day children die in the Donbas, Kherson and Zaporozhye. And he has only himself to blame. A president who will lose everything........”
http://thesaker.is/banderastan-sitrep-by-faina-savenkova/
This IS a real reporter...
“My interview from Donetsk on the people’s eagerness to vote to join Russia”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpkiN06jdiE
https://www.youtube.com/c/EvaKBartlett/videos
To the Russian war crimes the U.S. adds one of its own with the sabotaged Nordstrom pipeline.
From an independent reporter on the ground in Ukraine...
“Hotels Targeted In The Russia - Ukraine War (Explained)”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCtRAAmRjxY
Patrick Lancaster is no just “independent reporter on the ground”
YouTuber Patrick Lancaster former US Navy sailor, has been embedded with the Russian army while reporting on the Russo-Ukrainian War. He posts video reports that are most frequently described as Russian propaganda and disinformation. Most amazingly, Patrick has often mistakenly exposed information of Russian war crimes & even revealing identities of their perpetrators. Also, he spreads Russian propaganda by knowingly filmed staged events.
Don’t let the facts and the ‘truth’ get in the way of your continued propaganda peddling, we certainly can’t let that happen, can we?
Everyone is entitled to know facts about author. Then, their is a choice whether to accept or reject information presented. I personally find Patrick Lancaster unreliable.
I live in FL. My internet Is constantly going off & on.
If you would like comment or send Freep mail. I
I will try to respond later :)
Hint:
Survivors have lead the Ukrainian troops to these grave sites. If your read article at site, you will see mouring villagers as well.
I don’t think anyone denies there are thousands of people in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions who really really really did want Russian federation membership, and are celebrating right now.
But I’m willing to bet that they’re massively outnumbered by those who didn’t want this war and aren’t celebrating.
Over 4 million displaced people left the region for safety in Europe and the Ukrainian held regions. How many voted yes to this proposal and didn’t have to do it at gunpoint?
Posted results for the Zaporizhzhia referendum have under 40,000 votes in total. And footage from a russian news broadcast showed a count where the woman on camera was saying “da” and putting the sheets into the yes pile... Sheets that had no tick anywhere on them.
If the Russian annexation was so resoundingly popular across the entire Russophone population you’d expect a far higher turnout in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. And you’d expect the ballot count to not need to be inflated with UNUSED sheets.
Where are the petitions in Zaporizhzhia city, to give their endorsement? Total absence of protest at being denied a vote.
Where are the celebrations in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, even in Russian held territory? All I’m sending is weary, grim fatalism.
Why are there more refugees in Zaporizhzhia city from the south of the Oblast, resolutely staying put, than there were yes votes?
Is it really plausible that after 3 days of voting, there were fewer than 700 no votes, fewer than 40,000 yes votes, and no abstentions? Is the region so depleted of Russophones that you could fit them all into Enerhodar’s service accommodation with rooms to spare?
Get with the Serbian’s and ask them their thoughts on the creation of Kosovo, then get back with me/us, kthx?
“Do you hear them laughing in Belgrade?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1jUHqTHkBc
I don’t know why you’re incessantly propagating that one video.
Kosovo was a complete failure on all levels. Like Ukraine it was kicked off by internal conflict and reports of genocide. Like Ukraine it involved invasion and bombing. Like Ukraine it closed with a bogus vote thar led to declaration of independent statehood.
My position on it is straightforward.
If you are convinced that invasion, bombing and fraudulent Kosovo independence was an unconscionable violation of Serbian sovereignty but don’t think this Russian invasion, bombing and fake referendums is equally unconscionable and for the exact same reason, then you are an unprincipled mutt.
Alternatively, if you think that annexation of the Ukrainian Oblasts is entirely fine but Kosovo’s independent statis is a sham, you are an unprincipled mutt.
You’re an unprincipled mutt if you cannot see that BOTH are right or BOTH are wrong; there’s no reasonable way that one is moral and the other not.
Did you get with them Serbians yet.
Stop making excuses for US and NATO hypocrisy on the matter of ‘fake referendums’, etc. cause I and tens of millions of others are buying that BS.
Did you get with them Serbians yet?
Stop making excuses for US and NATO hypocrisy on the matter of ‘fake referendums’, etc. cause I and tens of millions of others are NOT buying that BS.
I should’ve added, for “you” read Galloway. He is absolutely correct on Kosovo but bizarrely argues that this proves Russia is the good guy when it demonstrates the exact opposite.
EU/NATO in Kosovo = Russia in the Donbas.
Not a chance. Principles aren’t your strong point.
Electoral fraud is bad.
Postal vote fraud is bad.
Ballot stuffing is bad.
Counting of votes for X as if for Y, is bad.
Refusing to Investigate blatant steal is bad.
All these bad things apply to the last US presidential election.
They also apply to Russia’s bullshit fake referendums.
Let me heavily indicate to you what Russia and Putin think about the US, UK, EU, UN, NATO, G20, OECD, Ukraine, and the rest of the world concerning the Referenda in Ukraine:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DYesjcvU8AAzPOr.jpg
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