200 decomposing bodies found in basement in Mariupol’s ruins

 

200 decomposing bodies found in basement in Mariupol’s ruins

By Edward Era Barbacena

The decomposing bodies of 200 people were found in the basement of a bombed-out apartment building in battered Mariupol, authorities said Tuesday, marking the latest in a series of dismal discoveries since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began three months ago.

Mayoral adviser Petro Andryushchenk said local residents had refused Russian demands to collect the bodies of the dead, so Russia's Ministry of Emergencies left the bodies amid the rubble. 

International observers have accused Vladimir Putin's forces of deliberately targeting civilian buildings in their effort to crush Ukrainian resistance during the three-month-old conflict. 

The bodies were decomposing and the stench hung over the neighbourhood, said Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to the mayor. He did not say when they were discovered, but the sheer number of victims makes it one of the deadliest known attacks of the war.

Heavy fighting, meanwhile, continued in the Donbas, the eastern industrial region that Moscow´s forces are intent on seizing. Russian troops intensified their efforts to encircle and capture Sievierodonetsk and neighbouring cities.

Mariupol was relentlessly pounded during a nearly three-month siege that ended last week after some 2,500 Ukrainian fighters abandoned a steel plant where they had made their stand. Russian forces already held the rest of the city, where an estimated 100,000 people remain out a prewar population of 450,000, many of them trapped during the siege with little food, water, heat or electricity.