Researchers from Mariupol Destruction and Victims have discovered another concealed mass grave which, they believe, dates back to 2022 and Russia’s relentless siege of the city. Russia has imposed a near total information blockade and used various methods to hide its crimes in occupied Mariupol and to conceal the real number of deaths. This is precisely why the Mariupol Destruction and Victims Foundation use satellite imagery, other open sources and geolocating tools to ensure that the truth is known.
The mass burial site is around 50 metres in length and located on low-lying land within the territory of the Stary Krym Cemetery in Mariupol. It is around three kilometres from residential buildings and two kilometres from the improvised ‘morgue’ on Zaporizke Highway where the invaders brought bodies in 2022. The researcher, identified only as Serhiy, explained to Vilne Radio that he first noticed a small ditch on satellite maps in 2023, however at that stage, he assumed this could be from soil having been taken away or a trench used by Ukrainian defenders before 2022. What began as a ditch soon turned into a pit, and then a mound. This was the first update to the Google map after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and it was later established as having appeared between 29 March and 9 May 2022.
Serhiy explains that there appeared to be construction rubble on the site and points out that there was no good reason for this given that this was on the territory of the cemetery, and far from any construction sites. The rubble was used to conceal the graves, until undergrowth appeared to serve the same purpose. It is evident that the graves were to be hidden as no attempt was made to mark out the territory, nor to ensure paths to it as the mound became covered in grass. All of this points to a ban on approaching the burial site, he says, adding that the ditch was dug up at the beginning of May, and then filled in during the summer of 2022.
It seems likely that the grave was used to bury the victims from 127 Prospect Myra [‘Peace Avenue’] which was destroyed in a Russian missile strike around the time that the ditch first appeared. Since the mound at the site became larger with time, the Russians probably used the site to bury victims of other bombings.
Residents of Mariupol were forced to risk their lives trying to bury relatives, neighbours or others killed in Russian airstrikes in courtyards, or park areas. This, however, was about giving some semblance of a proper burial, with the victims clearly marked, and not mass graves hidden under construction rubble and a supermarket, in which the Russians essentially dumped the bodies of victims.
The first evidence of a mass grave was seen on satellite images released by Maxar Technologies on 21 April 2022, with it reported that the area (around 300 metres in length) could contain around 200 graves. At the time, the Mariupol City Council estimated that the fresh graves could contain the bodies of between three and nine thousand Mariupol residents, with this based on a comparison with the area of an exhumed mass grave in Bucha, containing the bodies of 70 victims of the Russian invaders. Over subsequent months more satellite images emerged.
It is likely that Russia did not even attempt to bury all of its victims. The Mariupol City Council pointed to the specific haste with which the Russians demolished buildings in the centre of Mariupol and swiftly blocked any access to the area around the Drama Theatre in which up to a thousand civilians may have been sheltering on 16 March 2022 when Russian dropped two bombs on it. The pilot dropping the bombs would have been able to see the signs very clearly written in front of and behind the building saying, in Russian, CHILDREN. There may well be bodies of the victims underneath the new ‘theatre’ which the Russians built on the site.
Given Russia’s systematic efforts to hide the scale of its crimes, and to try to rewrite the history, blaming Ukraine, the work carried out by the Mariupol Destruction and Victims Foundation. The site provides a timeline of events; details about victims, about the destruction which Russia wrought, etc. and there is also a YouTube site.
