Russia has widened its strikes on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure in the past week following setbacks on the battlefield and is likely to expand its target range further, Britain said on Sunday.

Ukrainians who returned to the northeastern area retaken in Kyiv’s lightning advance earlier this month were searching for their dead while Russian artillery and air strikes kept pounding targets across Ukraine’s east.

Five civilians were killed in Russian attacks in the eastern Donetsk region over the past day and in Nikopol, further west, several dozen residential buildings, gas pipelines and power lines were hit, regional governors said on Sunday.

Britain’s defence ministry said Russian strikes at civilian infrastructure, including a power grid and a dam, had intensified over the past seven days.

“As it faces setbacks on the front lines, Russia has likely extended the locations it is prepared to strike in an attempt to directly undermine the morale of the Ukrainian people and government,” it said in a intelligence update.

On Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address that authorities had found a mass grave containing the bodies of 17 soldiers in Izium, some of which he said bore signs of torture.

Residents of Izium have been searching for dead relatives at a forest grave site where emergency workers began exhuming bodies last week. The causes of death for those at the gravesite have not yet been established, although residents say some died in an air strike.

Ukrainian officials said last week they had found 440 bodies in the woodlands near Izium. They said most of the dead were civilians and the causes of death had not been established.

Making his way between graves and trees at the forest site where exhumations were underway, Volodymyr Kolesnyk was trying to match numbers written on wooden crosses with names on a neatly handwritten list to locate relatives who he said died in an air strike in the early days of war. Kolesnyk said he got the list from a local funeral company that dug the graves.

“They buried the bodies in bags, without coffins, without anything. I was not allowed here at first. They (Russians) said it was mined and asked to wait,” he told Reuters on Saturday.

Izium’s mayor said on Sunday that work at the site would continue for another two weeks.

“The exhumation is underway, the graves are being dug up and all the remains are being transported to Kharkiv,” Valery Marchenko told state television.

165 ships

A total of 165 ships with 3.7 million tonnes of agricultural products on board have left Ukraine under a deal brokered by the United Nations and Turkey to unblock Ukrainian sea ports, the Ukrainian infrastructure ministry said on Sunday.

The ministry said 10 ships with 169,300 tonnes of agricultural products are due to leave Ukrainian Black Sea ports on Sunday.

Ukraine’s grain exports slumped after Russia invaded the country on February 24 and blockaded its Black Sea ports, driving up global food prices and prompting fears of shortages in Africa and the Middle East.

Contract soldiers

The Russian army, seeking contract soldiers for what it calls the “special military operation” in Ukraine, is using mobile recruiting trucks to attract volunteers, offering nearly $3,000 a month as an incentive.

A special unit stationed one such truck in a central park in the southern Russian city of Rostov on Saturday and removed the sides to reveal a mobile office.

Soldiers in camouflage and black masks showed their guns to interested passers-by and handed out colour brochures titled “Military service on a contract — the choice of a real man.”