Mass Graves & Mass Horror in Izium
Last week I visited Izium in eastern Ukraine. A small city in the Kharkiv Oblast, Izium had a pre-war population of around 45,000 people. It has been an area that has seen sporadic, but intense, fighting since 2014. The 35-mile highway connecting Izium to Slovyansk was often referred to as the “highway of death” during the summer of 2014 when Russian forces first invaded the Donbas. Following Russia’s second invasion last year, Izium once again found itself at the center of fighting as an important transportation link that could connect Russian forces in the Donbas to the wider Kharkiv region. From March 3 until April 1, 2022, the battle for Izium raged. Russian forces ultimately successfully captured the city and occupied it until September 10, 2022. Driving to Izium from Kharkiv, destroyed tanks and houses litter the road.
After Ukrainian forces recaptured the city, they discovered the reality of what had transpired during those five months of Russian occupation. Roughly 10,000 people remained in the town, around ⅕ of the pre-war population. Local authorities estimate around 1,000 civilians were killed in the course of the fighting and during the occupation. More than 80% of the city’s infrastructure was destroyed, including multi-story apartment buildings, state and municipal institutions, healthcare facilities, and the centralized heating system relied on by residents in the winter.
Mass graves were found with the bodies of at least 440 people. The overwhelming majority of the deceased were civilians. Most showed signs of a violent death while a number were believed to have died due to a lack of access to medical attention. Authorities said 30 bodies showed signs of torture. Others were found to have died from summary execution, hands bound behind their back, ropes around their neck, and broken limbs.
Driving through Izium on our way east from Kharkiv, we went to see the mass graves for ourselves. My partner for this road trip was an American trauma-medic volunteering with the Ukrainian army. I’ll refer to him by his alias, Doc. Ukrainians are big on aliases, he told me, almost as big as they are on swapping army patches.
We found the general area using the satellite images that had been released following the graves’ discovery, using the graveyard in a national forest as a landmark.
It turned out we had started way far west of the graves’ location and ended up walking through the forest looking for indications of the sites for about half an hour. Along the way, we came upon dozens of large pits. Some were shallow but extremely wide, large enough to fit a tank with some spare room. Some of the holes were roughly six-feet deep and wide. Others were oddly shaped, some extra long but barely 3 feet deep. We went back and forth discussing whether or not these holes were what we thought they were. Maybe they were dug as part of the work of loggers who had clearly been operating here? Perhaps the long shallow ones were tank or military vehicle parking spots? A place where they were parked inside the forest before, during, or after the battle for Izium. Many had fresh tread tracks so it seemed a plausible explanation. But they were truly in the middle of a fairly dense forest so, strategically, at the same time that hunch didn’t really make sense at all.
We were looking for any rationalization to explain the purpose of the holes beyond the one we most suspected: that all of these holes were potential mass grave sites. We figured they also could have been dug by excavators looking for further graves after the original tranche was found. As we walked we looked for the simple wooden crosses we had seen dotting the graves in the images shared by the Ukrainians who discovered them. I moved slowly through the trees, walking carefully up to each large hole to see what lay inside, my breath catching each time before the final step that would allow me to see inside. Each and every one was empty, a flat pit of silty sand.
I photographed and filmed many of the holes along the way before finally catching sight of what I thought was what we were looking for. The unmissable remains of a small skeleton: spine intact, flesh rotting. Before getting closer I turned to look at Doc, silently signaling a potential discovery. He immediately read the expression on my face and came over. As he got closer, my brain finally processed what I was seeing and we both felt a brief moment of relief. It wasn’t the skeleton of a small child as we both had immediately thought. It was, however, the remains of a dog. He had been there for some time, but not that much; trace fur still clung to the rotting flesh on his tail.
“Maybe he fell in and couldn’t get back up?” He offered optimistically. “Maybe he was old and climbed in there to die?”
I kept quiet, not mentioning how many images of executed, tortured, or mutilated dogs I had seen coming out of this war during a year of covering it from abroad.
The two of us were both huge dog lovers. Having met just a week prior, it was something we had quickly bonded over and had spent a large percentage of our long road trip east discussing our own dogs back home and trying to entice strays to play with us. So while we were relieved to not have found the exposed skeleton of a child lying in the middle of a pit in a forest just outside of town, the sight was still jarring and the momentary relief turned back to dread as we appeared to be getting closer.
We continued walking through the forest, large holes continuously scattered on either side of us. We approached an area and a set of holes that he explained were actually probably used by the military, pointing out reinforced steps and crude wooden handholds which would have been used to quickly climb out of a trench. By then we had looped back towards the graveyard we had driven past, our original marker to find the sites. Approaching the graveyard from out of the forest, not by the road, we began to see larger and larger pits. Finally, we spotted the red hazard tape and simple wooden crosses which we had been looking for. The first makeshift memorial we found on the edge of the site was actually two tributes to dogs. Their framed pictures lay nestled along a tree beside wreaths of flowers. Just behind them lay rows and rows and rows of shallow graves, each marked with a simple wooden cross bearing a number written in black marker. The numbers reached all the way up past 400. The holes were all empty. Some had identifying details, some had flowers. A few had opened and empty wooden caskets.
After the Russian forces withdrew, the operator of the local morgue in Izium told Ukrainian investigators that the occupying forces had only allowed her to mark some of the graves with numbers, no names or other identifying details. She, however, kept her own private record in a notebook connecting the numbered graves to the names of the occupants. Thanks to her work, the majority of the deceased were able to be identified and reburied in the graveyard in a proper tribute.
