The Ukrainian government and military officials in the southern port city of Mariupol say Russian forces have brought in mobile crematoriums to erase evidence of war crimes that are “much, much worse” than the reported atrocities in the liberated northern areas near the capital of Kyiv.
A planned evacuation of foreign nationals from Mariupol negotiated by Turkish President Recep Erdogan with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and scheduled to begin this past Sunday was abruptly halted before it began and only hours after it was announced, Russian state channel RIA News announced.
The interruption came as “Bucha” – the Kyiv suburb – began trending on social media with images of slain civilians attributed to retreating Russian forces. The Mariupol City Council alleges that Russia is stalling time to dispose of the bodies before the Turkish mission can arrive in the city.
“Moreover,” the council said, “all of the potential witnesses of the atrocities are being identified through special filtration camps and ordered to be destroyed.”
The United States, as well as European Union countries, are planning to rapidly strengthen sanctions against Russia, a country nearing default on its debt obligations, because of recent evidence of mass civilian murders.
But unlike in the settlements near Kyiv, where the civilian death toll may be in the hundreds, modest estimates of the deaths in Mariupol total at least 5,000.
“If you consider the size of the city, catastrophic damaged, the length of the city’s blockade (more than a month), and the relentless resistance, there could be more than tens of thousands of dead civilians,” the city council wrote.
Previously, Mariupol officials reported on March 24 that the blockaded city had seen countless people die of starvation, with no place to bury them.
“More and more deaths from starvation,” they said. “More and more people left without any food supplies. Any attempt at getting humanitarian aid to the city’s civilians is disrupted by Russian troops.”
Since the March 24 report, residents have only seen a handful of humanitarian convoys reach the city, well short of the supplies necessary to feed the reported 130,000 survivors that remained. All buses that could get people out of the city were reportedly destroyed and only personal vehicles are occasionally allowed out.
“The scale of tragedy in Mariupol hasn’t been seen since the existence of concentration camps. The Russians have turned our city into a camp of death. This isn’t the new Chechnya or Aleppo. This is the new Auschwitz,” Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko said.
via newsmax
