New Delhi: Hundreds of graves with simple wooden crosses have been found in a wooded area of the northeastern city near Ukraine's Kharkiv region. A mass grave site was found last week in a newly liberated town Izium in war-torn Ukraine.
According to a report by the Associated Press, the graves have dozens of bodies of adults and children who died in a Russian airstrike on an apartment building. One of the larger graves had a marking indicating that there were 17 Ukrainian soldiers.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said investigators had discovered new evidence of torture in the case of people buried in Izium, Reuters reported.
"More than 10 torture chambers have already been found in the liberated areas of Kharkiv region, in various cities and towns," Zelensky said in a video address late on Saturday, the report mentioned.
"Torture was a widespread practice in the occupied territories. That's what the Nazis did - this is what (the Russians) do," he added. "They will answer in the same way - both on the battlefield and in courtrooms."
Moscow has not commented on the discovery of the site, however, it continues to deny committing any torture against civilians or in the war. According to Reuters, Vitaly Ganchev, the head of the pro-Russian administration that abandoned the area earlier this month, accused Ukrainians of staging the atrocities at the city of Izium.
"I have not heard anything about burials," Vitaly Ganchev told Rossiya-24 state television, Reuters reported.
Though Russian President Vladimir Putin has not responded to the accusations, he brushed off Ukraine's swift counteroffensive. He said that invasion is a necessary step to prevent what he said was a Western plot to break down Russia, Reuters reported.
"The Kyiv authorities announced that they have launched and are conducting an active counteroffensive operation," Putin said on Friday after a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in the Uzbek city of Samarkand. "Well, let's see how it develops, how it ends up," he said, according to the report.