Vowing that there will be no letup in Ukraine's counteroffensive against Russia, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv's troops are reclaiming towns and cities from Moscow.

During his nightly address, he said “Maybe now it seems to some of you that after a series of victories we have a certain lull but its preparation for the next series... because Ukraine must be free — all of it.”

Warning that Moscow is likely to increase attacks on civilian targets, the British defence ministry said Russia will retaliate against battlefield defeats.

Repelling attacks by Russian troops in the areas of the Kharkiv region in the east and Kherson in the south, Ukraine’s military command said its forces secured the eastern bank of the Oskil River.

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While Russian artillery and air strikes kept pounding targets across Ukraine's east, Ukrainians who returned to the northeastern area retaken in Kyiv's lightning advance earlier this month were searching for their dead.

Brushing off Ukraine's swift counteroffensive, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow would respond more forcefully if its troops were put under further pressure.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/choice-of-a-real-man-russia-attracts-volunteer-soldiers-with-mobile-trucks-incentives-517471" hreflang="en">'Choice of a real man': Russia attracts volunteer soldiers with mobile trucks, incentives</a>

Blaming each other for shelling around Europe's largest nuclear power plant Zaporizhzhia, power lines needed to keep it cooled and safe have been disrupted.

After visiting a base in Poland aiding Ukraine's war effort, US Army General and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley called for vigilance on Sunday.

As opposed to reinforcing the front line, Russian forces in Donetsk continue to conduct “meaningless operations” on villages, according to the Institute for the Study of War.

The residents of Izium have been searching for dead relatives at a forest gravesite following the discovery of a mass grave containing the bodies of 17 soldiers. 
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(With inputs from agencies)

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Vowing that there will be no letup in Ukraine's counteroffensive against Russia, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv's troops are reclaiming towns and cities from Moscow.

Vowing that there will be no letup in Ukraine's counteroffensive against Russia, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv's troops are reclaiming towns and cities from Moscow. During his nightly address, he said “Maybe now it seems to some of you that after a series of victories we have a certain lull but its preparation for the next series... because Ukraine must be free — all of it.” Warning that Moscow is likely to increase attacks on civilian targets, the British defence ministry said Russia will retaliate against battlefield defeats. Repelling attacks by Russian troops in the areas of the Kharkiv region in the east and Kherson in the south, Ukraine’s military command said its forces secured the eastern bank of the Oskil River. × While Russian artillery and air strikes kept pounding targets across Ukraine's east, Ukrainians who returned to the northeastern area retaken in Kyiv's lightning advance earlier this month were searching for their dead. Brushing off Ukraine's swift counteroffensive, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow would respond more forcefully if its troops were put under further pressure. Also read | 'Choice of a real man': Russia attracts volunteer soldiers with mobile trucks, incentives Blaming each other for shelling around Europe's largest nuclear power plant Zaporizhzhia, power lines needed to keep it cooled and safe have been disrupted. After visiting a base in Poland aiding Ukraine's war effort, US Army General and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley called for vigilance on Sunday. As opposed to reinforcing the front line, Russian forces in Donetsk continue to conduct “meaningless operations” on villages, according to the Institute for the Study of War. The residents of Izium have been searching for dead relatives at a forest gravesite following the discovery of a mass grave containing the bodies of 17 soldiers. (With inputs from agencies) Watch WION's live TV here: ×

No let-up in taking back Ukrainian towns from Russian forces: Volodymyr Zelensky

Every culture wants to memorialize its dead. Every family needs the missing to be identified to reach closure. Perhaps that is why a wartime mass grave offends something so deep in the human conscience. Little can be said with certainty about the hundreds of bodies discovered last week at Izium, in a pine forest in northeastern Ukraine, other than that they are the beginning of a long story.

Restoring human dignity to the most dehumanising of scenes; heaped anonymous corpses, the reduction of lives to nothing, and the stench of abandonment is a painstaking forensic endeavour.

For many months, perhaps years, the work will continue to match DNA samples, collate the scraps, establish the cause of death, and determine what crimes may have been committed by the Russian forces who fled a week ago.

Any mass grave from Bosnia to Rwanda, from Argentina to Guatemala demands of our humanity the reconstitution of the individual lives ended there.&nbsp;

“On one side in Britain you see the Queen’s dignified burial and on the other this mass grave stemming from mass violence,” said Anjli Parrin, the Kenyan deputy director of the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. “They are two extremes that remind us that the idea of someone missing, buried anonymously, is a violation of a fundamental instinct to honor the dead.”

When President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia retreats, evidence of possible atrocities surfaces. That now seems to be a pattern of Moscow’s war in Ukraine, most recently in Izium. The post-apocalyptic scene last spring in Bucha, near Kyiv, of dozens of corpses arrayed in black plastic bags beneath weeping birches laden with mistletoe has proved to be the prelude to another troubling landscape.

The exhumation of a burial site in a pine forest, after more than five months of Russian occupation of Izium, has revealed one mass grave of Ukrainian Army soldiers, seventeen of them, according to an inscription on a cross. There were also 445 mainly unmarked individual graves. Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament’s commissioner for human rights, spoke of “genocide of the Ukrainian population.”

But genocide&nbsp;requiring the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnicial, racial or religious group, as such,” in the words of the 1948 Genocide Convention is not easily proved. Other international crimes, including crimes against humanity and extrajudicial executions, may also have occurred.

It took nine years for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to rule that the 1995 Serbian killing of more than 8,000 Bosnian men and boys around Srebrenica constituted genocide. This was the worst single massacre in Europe since 1945. 
It was also a massacre foretold.

For any correspondent covering the war there, as I did, it was clear for a long time that the so-called “safe areas” of Bosnia under the protection of the United Nations were no such thing. The blue helmets of UN troops had become a symbol of impotence. The horror, when it came, was merely a re-enactment, on a different scale, of the eviction and slaughter of the Muslim population of Bosnia by Serbian forces three years earlier, at the start of the war in 1992.

Izium, if the war in Ukraine endures and festers (even for years as seems possible), is unlikely to be the last site of myriad graves lost in the forest. Nor are the horrors emerging in Ukraine new to a nation with a poignant history in this regard, including at Babyn Yar, the ravine in Kyiv where more than 33,000 Jews were massacred in 1941 by the Nazis.

My colleague in Bosnia, Elizabeth Neuffer of the Boston Globe, who was later killed in Iraq, wrote of the Cerska mass grave 27 kilometres&nbsp;northwest of Srebrenica in “Crimes of War,” a book edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff:

“The corpses were dressed in civilian clothes. They had gunshot wounds to the back of their heads. Their decaying hands were bound behind their back.” She continued: “Each part of the human skeleton,&nbsp;some two hundred bones and thirty-two teeth, has its tale to tell.”

They will come to Izium, the forensic pathologists, the ballistic experts, the forensic odontologists examining teeth, the anthropologists, the radiologists, the police investigators, the national and international authorities intent on establishing what violence produced those graves. Establishing the cause and manner and circumstance of death in war is hard. That much I have learned.

“It’s not just the collection of evidence that is difficult, it is preserving it,” Ms Parrin, who has been working on mass graves in the Central African Republic, said. “You are labeling and numbering and photographing under enormous stress and trauma, and you have to demonstrate the chain of custody...who passed what to whom and who locked it in which office and when.” 
It’s easy to get something wrong. Mistaken identity is not unusual.

Before Bosnia, there was Argentina, which I covered in the mid-1980s. Buenos Aires was awakening then to the scope of a national nightmare. Every conversation seemed to end in tears as parents, haunted by desperate imaginings, recalled their children who had been “disappeared” by the military junta. That many of the tens of thousands of “desaparecidos” had been dumped from planes into the South Atlantic between 1976 and 1983 was not yet known.

So did the Argentine military turn “disappear” into a transitive verb and the ocean into a mass grave. I sat and listened. That’s what journalists do: listen through silence, awaiting a clue, the revealing epiphany, the face that crumples like a dynamited building. 
The grief of bereaved parents was overwhelming. Sudden disappearance was too much to bear. There was no farewell and no adequate means to mourn. This twisted minds toward desperate acts.

I took away the conviction that for the bereaved, disappearance into an anonymous mass grave turns every living being into someone with a possible resemblance to a lost child, whose death can never be entirely accepted.

Before Argentina, there was Lithuania. My grandmother came from Zagare, a small Lithuanian town renowned for its cherries. The last Jew there, Aizikas Mendelsonas, died in 2011. When he was born in 1922, there were almost 2,000 Jews in Zagare, with its seven synagogues.

The Nazis ended all that after pushing into Lithuania in June 1941. On October&nbsp;2, 1941, the Jews of Zagare were ordered into the main square before being taken into the woods for execution.

In 1944, the Soviet Red Army, having fought its way into Lithuania, examined a mass grave in the forest outside Zagare and found 2,402 corpses (530 men, 1,223 women, 625 children, and 24 babies), as I discovered in researching a book on my family. A sign in the woods points to the “Graves of the Victims of the Jewish Genocide,” now also commemorated by a monument on the main square.

The hypothetical European fate of my family, had they not left Zagare in time, was to die nameless in a nameless ditch. Perhaps that is why mass graves have haunted me.

These things linger, subliminally or not. Two decades after Srebrenica, a French photographer, Adrien Selbert, showed me photographs of the town, now gathered in a book called “Srebrenica, From Night to Night.” They captured a town overcome by the weight of the past, unable to shake it off, gripped by a kind of sullen idleness. Stray dogs wander empty streets. Neon signs and streetlights glare into vacancy.

It was clear that all the bullets the Serbs emptied into their male victims constituted equal violence upon their female survivors, who were left with the hurt of the unsayable.

What Russia has done, in Izium and elsewhere, is forge a Ukrainian national identity that is more powerful than ever, along with wounds that will be refracted down through the generations.

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)

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Every culture wants to memorialize its dead. Every family needs the missing to be identified to reach closure. Perhaps that is why a wartime mass grave offends something so deep in the human conscience.

Every culture wants to memorialize its dead. Every family needs the missing to be identified to reach closure. Perhaps that is why a wartime mass grave offends something so deep in the human conscience. Little can be said with certainty about the hundreds of bodies discovered last week at Izium, in a pine forest in northeastern Ukraine, other than that they are the beginning of a long story. Restoring human dignity to the most dehumanising of scenes; heaped anonymous corpses, the reduction of lives to nothing, and the stench of abandonment is a painstaking forensic endeavour. For many months, perhaps years, the work will continue to match DNA samples, collate the scraps, establish the cause of death, and determine what crimes may have been committed by the Russian forces who fled a week ago. Any mass grave from Bosnia to Rwanda, from Argentina to Guatemala demands of our humanity the reconstitution of the individual lives ended there. “On one side in Britain you see the Queen’s dignified burial and on the other this mass grave stemming from mass violence,” said Anjli Parrin, the Kenyan deputy director of the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. “They are two extremes that remind us that the idea of someone missing, buried anonymously, is a violation of a fundamental instinct to honor the dead.” When President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia retreats, evidence of possible atrocities surfaces. That now seems to be a pattern of Moscow’s war in Ukraine, most recently in Izium. The post-apocalyptic scene last spring in Bucha, near Kyiv, of dozens of corpses arrayed in black plastic bags beneath weeping birches laden with mistletoe has proved to be the prelude to another troubling landscape. The exhumation of a burial site in a pine forest, after more than five months of Russian occupation of Izium, has revealed one mass grave of Ukrainian Army soldiers, seventeen of them, according to an inscription on a cross. There were also 445 mainly unmarked individual graves. Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament’s commissioner for human rights, spoke of “genocide of the Ukrainian population.” But genocide requiring the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnicial, racial or religious group, as such,” in the words of the 1948 Genocide Convention is not easily proved. Other international crimes, including crimes against humanity and extrajudicial executions, may also have occurred. It took nine years for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to rule that the 1995 Serbian killing of more than 8,000 Bosnian men and boys around Srebrenica constituted genocide. This was the worst single massacre in Europe since 1945. It was also a massacre foretold. For any correspondent covering the war there, as I did, it was clear for a long time that the so-called “safe areas” of Bosnia under the protection of the United Nations were no such thing. The blue helmets of UN troops had become a symbol of impotence. The horror, when it came, was merely a re-enactment, on a different scale, of the eviction and slaughter of the Muslim population of Bosnia by Serbian forces three years earlier, at the start of the war in 1992. Izium, if the war in Ukraine endures and festers (even for years as seems possible), is unlikely to be the last site of myriad graves lost in the forest. Nor are the horrors emerging in Ukraine new to a nation with a poignant history in this regard, including at Babyn Yar, the ravine in Kyiv where more than 33,000 Jews were massacred in 1941 by the Nazis. My colleague in Bosnia, Elizabeth Neuffer of the Boston Globe, who was later killed in Iraq, wrote of the Cerska mass grave 27 kilometres northwest of Srebrenica in “Crimes of War,” a book edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff: “The corpses were dressed in civilian clothes. They had gunshot wounds to the back of their heads. Their decaying hands were bound behind their back.” She continued: “Each part of the human skeleton, some two hundred bones and thirty-two teeth, has its tale to tell.” They will come to Izium, the forensic pathologists, the ballistic experts, the forensic odontologists examining teeth, the anthropologists, the radiologists, the police investigators, the national and international authorities intent on establishing what violence produced those graves. Establishing the cause and manner and circumstance of death in war is hard. That much I have learned. “It’s not just the collection of evidence that is difficult, it is preserving it,” Ms Parrin, who has been working on mass graves in the Central African Republic, said. “You are labeling and numbering and photographing under enormous stress and trauma, and you have to demonstrate the chain of custody...who passed what to whom and who locked it in which office and when.” It’s easy to get something wrong. Mistaken identity is not unusual. Before Bosnia, there was Argentina, which I covered in the mid-1980s. Buenos Aires was awakening then to the scope of a national nightmare. Every conversation seemed to end in tears as parents, haunted by desperate imaginings, recalled their children who had been “disappeared” by the military junta. That many of the tens of thousands of “desaparecidos” had been dumped from planes into the South Atlantic between 1976 and 1983 was not yet known. So did the Argentine military turn “disappear” into a transitive verb and the ocean into a mass grave. I sat and listened. That’s what journalists do: listen through silence, awaiting a clue, the revealing epiphany, the face that crumples like a dynamited building. The grief of bereaved parents was overwhelming. Sudden disappearance was too much to bear. There was no farewell and no adequate means to mourn. This twisted minds toward desperate acts. I took away the conviction that for the bereaved, disappearance into an anonymous mass grave turns every living being into someone with a possible resemblance to a lost child, whose death can never be entirely accepted. Before Argentina, there was Lithuania. My grandmother came from Zagare, a small Lithuanian town renowned for its cherries. The last Jew there, Aizikas Mendelsonas, died in 2011. When he was born in 1922, there were almost 2,000 Jews in Zagare, with its seven synagogues. The Nazis ended all that after pushing into Lithuania in June 1941. On October 2, 1941, the Jews of Zagare were ordered into the main square before being taken into the woods for execution. In 1944, the Soviet Red Army, having fought its way into Lithuania, examined a mass grave in the forest outside Zagare and found 2,402 corpses (530 men, 1,223 women, 625 children, and 24 babies), as I discovered in researching a book on my family. A sign in the woods points to the “Graves of the Victims of the Jewish Genocide,” now also commemorated by a monument on the main square. The hypothetical European fate of my family, had they not left Zagare in time, was to die nameless in a nameless ditch. Perhaps that is why mass graves have haunted me. These things linger, subliminally or not. Two decades after Srebrenica, a French photographer, Adrien Selbert, showed me photographs of the town, now gathered in a book called “Srebrenica, From Night to Night.” They captured a town overcome by the weight of the past, unable to shake it off, gripped by a kind of sullen idleness. Stray dogs wander empty streets. Neon signs and streetlights glare into vacancy. It was clear that all the bullets the Serbs emptied into their male victims constituted equal violence upon their female survivors, who were left with the hurt of the unsayable. What Russia has done, in Izium and elsewhere, is forge a Ukrainian national identity that is more powerful than ever, along with wounds that will be refracted down through the generations. (Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.) WATCH WION LIVE HERE:

The singular offense of the mass grave: Story of Izium and beyond

Residents of Izium town of Ukraine continue to search for their dead relatives in a nearby grave site as emergency workers exhume the dead bodies buried in mass graves.

Ukrainians search for their dead relatives at Izium grave site

Disclaimer: A number of claims and counterclaims are being made on the Ukraine-Russia conflict on the ground and online. While WION takes utmost care to accurately report this developing news story, we cannot independently verify the authenticity of all statements, photos and videos.

Disclaimer: A number of claims and counterclaims are being made on the Ukraine-Russia conflict on the ground and online. While WION takes utmost care to accurately report this developing news story, we cannot independently verify the authenticity of all statements, photos and videos. Days after liberating thousands of acres of the occupied region from the Russian troops, the Ukrainian authorities on Friday began the process of examining the mass burial site, discovered a day earlier in the east Ukrainian town of Izyum. The officials stated that 99 per cent of the exhumed bodies found at the burial site had signs of violent death, meaning the Russian troops tortured and mutilated them when killing. "Among the bodies that were exhumed today, 99 percent showed signs of violent death. There are several bodies with their hands tied behind their backs, and one person is buried with a rope around his neck." said Oleg Synegubov, head of the Kharkiv regional administration. Synegubov further stated that these people were obviously tortured and executed by the Russian barbarians. Read more: Mass grave with over 400 bodies found in Izium in Kharkiv region recaptured last week, says Ukraine Additionally, the graves of the buried were not marked with names or dates. The Russian troops simply marked a number while burying the dead, leaving no trail for the Ukrainian authorities to identify the victims. According to locals, those exhumed were most likely killed by the Russian forces who occupied the city for the last six months and used it as the base for launching military operations in the Donbas region. The Russian troops attacked Izyum in April and according to witnesses, over 100 were killed in the first assault as Russian bombs were hurled. The emergency service workers wearing blue plastic may have also stumbled upon the graves of little children, who, according to the locals were one of the earliest casualties in the attack. As reported by WION, after the burial site was discovered by Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky in an address informed that the process of verification will begin the next day. "In Izyum, Kharkiv region, a mass burial of people was found. The necessary procedural actions have already started there, more information, clear and verified, should be available tomorrow," said Zelensky in the address. Read more: Supplying arms to Ukraine 'morally acceptable', says Pope Ukraine compared the discovery to what happened in Bucha, on the outskirts of the capital Kyiv in the early stages of the invasion. Ukraine and its Western allies have accused Russian forces of perpetrating war crimes there. Tens of thousands of civilians were likely killed in a separate Russian assault on the southern port of Mariupol, Ukrainian officials said in April. (With inputs from agencies) WATCH WION LIVE HERE:

Most bodies at mass burial site have signs of violent death, claims Kyiv

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has blamed Russia and drew a comparison of the new mass graves found in Izium to what was discovered in Bucha.

Zelensky: After Bucha, new mass graves found in Ukraine's recaptured Izium

Even after 200 days into the war, there seems no end in sight to Russia's so-called special military operation in Ukraine. Ukrainian President Zelensky says Ukrainians were buried at various sites in the newly reclaimed Northeast.

Ukrainian President Zelensky cries foul as mass graves are uncovered at Izium

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has stated that a mass grave was recently found in Izium, Kharkiv. The Chief of Police from Kharkiv has said that the mass grave had 440 bodies. "The necessary legal proceeding have already started. There should be more clear and verified information by tomorrow," stated President Zelensky.

Mass grave with over 400 bodies found in Ukraine's Izium

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited a newly captured city in the northeast province of Kharkiv. He also traveled to the recently recaptured city of Izium to attend a flag-raising ceremony.

Ukrainian President Zelensky visits Kharkiv amidst stunning counter-offensive

Moscow has abandoned one of its main bastions in Northeastern Ukraine after the Ukrainian forces made rapid advances. Russia's defense ministry said on Saturday that it was pulling troops out of its main stronghold in Northeastern Ukraine.

Ukraine: Rapid advance of Ukrainian forces take Russia by surprise, draws back from Izium

izium

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