Russian Federation (RF) forces in Mariupol are operating mobile crematoria to clear city streets of corpses and conceal evidence of atrocities, a Ukraine Army Chief of Staff (ACS) situation estimate said on Wednesday.
RF authorities are using thirteen truck-mounted crematoria within Mariupol, the statement said, citing national military intelligence as the source of the information.
RF officials are also burning Russian service personnel bodies, so there can be less funeral ceremonies in Russia, which might provoke public opposition to the Kremlin’s bloody invasion of Ukraine, the estimate said.
Aside from Mariupol, Ukraine Armed Forces (UAF) military intelligence has confirmed RF use of mobile crematoria in Ukraine’s Luhansk and Chernihiv regions, the statement said.
The ACS is the highest-level Ukrainian claim yet that RF officials operate mobile crematoria in the wake of their occupation of a region. The first social media allegations RF forces were burning bodies wholesale, rather than allowing survivors and relatives to take possession of remains, surfaced during the first week of the war.
Vadym Boichenko, mayor at large of the mostly RF-occupied city of Mariupol, last week said RF authorities were clearing city streets of bodies both military and civilian, and destroying the remains in truck-mounted crematoria.
Other Ukrainian officials have said intense fighting and inability to bury remains have made long-untouched corpses a health hazard in some districts. According to accounts from the besieged city Mariupol, some killed civilians have been left in the streets for weeks, because of continuous firing makes approaching their remains too dangerous.
Boichenko claimed without providing evidence that, aside from mobile crematoria, RF authorities in the Donetsk suburb Kharyzsk operate industrial-scale crematoria capable of destroying dozens of bodies in a day.
Ukrainian officials following in the wake of retreating RF units in the northern Kyiv and Chernihiv regions have discovered remains of between 700 and 1,000 civilians, so far, thought to have died at the hands of RF soldiers. Some seem likely to have been killed by accident in fighting, while others appear to have been executed.
The national government has vowed to prosecute all war crimes particularly murders of civilians- an almost impossible task if investigators lack a corpse from which to gain evidence.
