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Harrowing piece I read a couple of nights ago about what's happening in Ukraine, and specifically about a city of a half million people in southern Ukraine 75 miles east of Odessa called Kherson.
The article, Inside the City of the Damned: What's Going On in Putin Occupied Kherson Has Been Hidden From the World begins:
"A cloud of thick smoke hangs over the occupied city of Kherson in Ukraine. Its very stench is evidence of Russian war crimes, on a scale almost too sickening to contemplate.
The smoke comes from mobile incinerators that are running night and day. Vladimir Putin's paranoid soldiers are burning the corpses of Ukrainian citizens tortured and murdered on suspicion of helping the resistance."
And from later in the piece:
Even working 24-hours-a-day, the incinerators might not be able to dispose of all the dead. When the Russians retreated from the town of Bucha in April, a mass grave of hundreds of bodies was discovered. Many of the dead had their hands bound behind their backs, and scores had been tortured.
Not all the victims of civilian slaughter were buried. Troops left hundreds more strewn in the streets. Photographs of the carnage provoked a worldwide outcry. But even those hideous scenes could not compare with the aftermath of the destruction of Mariupol in March. Satellite photographs showed trenches that could conceal an estimated 9,000 bodies. Witnesses said the dead were buried in layers, across an area the size of three football pitches.
When Kherson is finally liberated, who knows what fresh horrors we will uncover.
However the Russians try to disguise it, this is mass murder of civilians on a scale not seen in Europe since World War II.
