Russian authorities have begun using mobile crematoriums in the besieged city of Mariupol in order to hide evidence of murdered civilians, the city’s mayor alleges.
In a lengthy post to Telegram on Wednesday, Vadym Boichenko said Russian military officials had reacted swiftly to “hide their tracks” after images of dead civilians littering the street in Bucha sparked international outrage over the weekend.
“After widespread international coverage of the genocide in Bucha, the top Russian leadership issued an order to destroy any evidence of the crimes of their army in Mariupol,” Boichenko said.
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“The Russians left all the dirty work for collaborators. Eyewitnesses report that the [Russians] recruited local and 'DNR' terrorists to special brigades to clean up. They are collecting and burning the bodies of the residents of Mariupol who were killed as a result of the Russian invasion,” he said.
“The world has not seen a tragedy on the scale of Mariupol since the Nazi concentration camps. The Rashists have turned our entire city into a death camp,” he said, using a derogatory term for “Russians” that is a play on “fascists.”
“This is no longer Chechnya or Aleppo. This is the new Auschwitz and Majdanek. The world should help punish Putin's bigots,” he wrote.
Just hours before his alarming announcement, two civilians were killed by Russian forces in Ukraine’s Donetsk region on Wednesday as they were collecting humanitarian aid, according to local authorities.
“The place of distribution of humanitarian aid was shot up by Russian fascists with rocket artillery in Vuhledar,” Pavel Kirilenko, the head of the regional military administration, announced on Telegram.
Photos from the scene showed medics tending to several wounded people who lay on the ground amid the wreckage. At least two people were killed, and another five wounded, Kirilenko said.
The attack came as Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, in comments to Russian media, insisted with a straight face that Russian troops are not targeting civilians, despite growing evidence to the contrary.
His comments came after Ukraine’s Security Service released audio of what it said was an intercepted call between a Russian soldier and his commander. In the recording, the commander can be heard angrily ordering the soldier to shoot “everyone,” regardless of whether they are civilians or not.
“Yes, cut them all fucking down!” he said.
In the recently liberated town of Hostomel, in the Kyiv region, authorities said hundreds of civilians are still missing and feared dead after Russian forces decimated the area while they had control for 35 days.
Taras Dumenko, the head of the local administration, told Hromadske Radio on Wednesday that “more than 400 civilians have disappeared without a trace.”
“In Hostomel, there were not so many bodies found, further out in the villages of our community there were bodies found of those executed, and residents who were killed,” he said.
He went on to say authorities were informed of several killings of civilians, incidents that were confirmed with photo or video evidence, but that their bodies had yet to be found.
“But one must understand that the invaders also covered up the traces of their crimes,” he said.
Russian troops appeared to be more brazen in the town of Bucha, outside of Kyiv, where scenes of streets literally littered with slain civilians shocked the world this week. Bucha Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk detailed the horrors that unfolded there in comments to BBC on Wednesday, saying he had personally witnessed several killings.
“Three civilian vehicles were trying to evacuate towards Kyiv and were brutally fired upon. There was a pregnant woman whose husband screamed and begged [for them] not to shoot her, but she was just brutally shot,” Fedoruk said.
About 320 residents in total were killed, he said.
The harrowing new details come shortly after a Russian missile strike at a pediatric hospital in the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, with chilling images showing children’s toys near the scene of the attack.
In the parking lot, CCTV footage caught the moment the Russian missile struck an ambulance donated by the U.K. to the facility. Witness accounts by those who were there say at least one child and one man died and at least 60 others were injured. International condemnation—by now a daily chorus—has done little to deter the carnage.
Doctors Without Borders staff, who were there helping administer medical aid at the compound, which also includes a cancer center, say the windows of their vehicles were blown out in the bombings. “Several explosions took place in close proximity to our staff over the course of about 10 minutes,” Doctors Without Borders Ukraine chief Michel-Olivier Lacharité told Reuters. “As they were leaving the area, the MSF team saw injured people and at least one dead body.”
Ukrainian officials say at least 167 children have been killed since Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion on Feb. 24. A further 279 have been gravely wounded, and thousands more undoubtedly traumatized for life by what they have seen. At least 927 schools and other educational facilities have been damaged in the war so far, according to the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office.
Near the capital of Kyiv, another suburb has been abandoned by Russian troops and another trail of suspected war crimes lies in their wake. Like the scenes in Bucha that horrified an already shocked world earlier in the week, images out of Borodianka revealed another nightmare.
A woman interviewed by CNN showed a corpse in her garden. The dead man’s pants were pulled down; he had a bag over his head and his hands were tied behind his back. “He was executed, gunshot to the head,” a Ukrainian police officer told CNN. Buildings in the shelled city have almost all been defaced with the letter V or Z, symbols of Putin’s “special military operation,” or codeword for war.
European leaders will meet on Wednesday to decide on new sanctions against Russia, which now look to be gradual rather than immediate as Europe’s dependency on Russian gas becomes increasingly clear with energy bill increases expected to top 400 percent in the coming months.
In the U.S., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley warned of a geopolitical disaster in the making. “The Russian invasion of Ukraine is threatening to undermine not only European peace and stability but global peace and stability that my parents and a generation of Americans fought so hard to defend,” he said. “We are entering a world that is becoming more unstable and the potential for significant international conflict is increasing, not decreasing.”
