The hundreds of graves had been cut into the sandy soil of a pine forest, isolated and unexamined for months. A chilly wind blew through the tree branches. Police officers spoke in hushed tones. And newly dug up bodies lay all about on the forest floor.

Ukrainian investigators on Friday began exhuming hundreds of bodies found after Russian forces fled the city of Izium in disarray last weekend. It was the first step in what officials said would be a painstaking process of figuring out how people had died during a three-week siege of their city and the six months of Russian occupation that followed.

The site consisted of around 445 individual graves and one mass grave where soldiers appeared to have been buried. Some had died when a Russian airstrike levelled an apartment building in March, residents said. “Here are my neighbours and friends,” said Serhiy Shtanko, 33. Among the bodies already exhumed were a family — a mother, father, daughter and two grandparents — killed in Russian bombardments in the spring, Ukrainian officials said.

Others had died more recently and bore signs of strangulation, said Serhiy Bolvinov, the lead investigator for the Kharkiv regional police force. It was unclear how or when the soldiers died, but Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian parliament’s commissioner for human rights, said they had been “heaped into a bunch and buried”.

Russian forces took control of Izium in late March, turning it into a military stronghold and staging ground for its assault on eastern Ukraine. They fled as Ukrainian forces routed the Russians across the northeast and reclaimed thousands of square miles of terrain. Officials invited journalists to witness the exhumation process on Friday.

(New York Times News Service)