New Delhi: About 300 people are buried in a mass grave in Bucha, a city on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, its mayor told AFP on Saturday after Ukrainian forces had gained control of Russia's major city.
"In Bucha, we have already buried 280 people in mass graves," mayor Anatoly Fedoruk told AFP by phone. According to him, the streets of the city, heavily destroyed, are littered with corpses.
The bodies were scattered over several hundred meters, with unknown cause of death until now, the AFP agency said.
Russian troops recently withdrew from several locations near Kyiv, failing in their attempt to encircle the capital. Ukrainian officials announced that Bucha had been "liberated".
The fighting and bombing left an apocalyptic panorama, with massive holes in residential buildings and wrecked cars in various parts of the city.
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Sixteen of the 20 bodies were on or next to a road sidewalk. Three were in the middle of the road and one in the courtyard of the house. A Ukrainian passport was located near the bound corpse.
All the dead wore civilian clothes: coat, coat, jeans or jogging pants and sneakers or shoes. Two were lying in the vicinity of the bicycle and the other near an abandoned car. Some were face to face and others were on their backs.
On Saturday, Pope Francis condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine in Malta, where he plans to visit at the invitation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and called for a "shared" response in the face of a growing immigration emergency.
"Once again, some potentate, sadly caught up in anachronistic claims of nationalist interests, is provoking and fomenting conflicts, whereas ordinary people sense the need to build a future that, will either shared, or not be at all," he said during an event in Malta.
"We had thought invasions of other countries, savage street fighting and atomic threats were grim memories of a distant past..."
"However, the icy winds of war, which bring only death, destruction and hatred in their wake, have swept down powerfully upon the lives of many people and affected us all," he added.