By Hilary AnderssonBBC PanoramaMore that 1,500 graves have been found at a mass burial site close to Mariupol in southern Ukraine, according to an analysis by new satellite images. The site is near the Russian border and was a strategic target for the Russians. It was relentlessly pounded from the ground and in the air since the beginning of the war. It was pounded relentlessly from the air and the ground until May when it fell to Russia. The BBC Panorama programme’s Centre for Information Resilience examined the images of Staryi Krym and found that 1,500 graves had been added since the last time it looked at them in June. It now estimates that there are more than 4,600 graves at the site since the start of the war. However, it does not know how many bodies have been buried at the site. Her house was bombed by Russians and she was the only one to survive. Her husband and parents were killed and she, like many others who fled the city, doesn’t know where they are. The 48-year old accountant lived in a two-storey house with an enclosed garden in Mariupol. Her two adult children lived elsewhere. It was quiet in her neighborhood in March despite intense shelling in other parts. She and her husband slept in the cellar every night. Olga said, “I used to cry all of the time, my husband tried reassure me.” “He told me to not worry and that we would get through it. On the night of 10 March, the 15th anniversary of the Russian bombardment began, there was a knock on the door. Olga’s parents, in their 80s, stood there looking very shaken. Their house was on fire and had just been shelled. Olga invited them into her home and encouraged them to go down to her cellar.
They refused to go, so Olga gave them a bedroom in her main house. Valery went upstairs from her cellar at 22:30 because the shelling had stopped and he needed to rest. He reassured Olga and said he would return if something happened. The entire house fell on top of her. Learn moreThe Panorama special Mariupol – The People’s Story – will air on BBC One on Tuesday, 8 November at 21:00. A feature-length version of the story will be available on iPlayer starting at 0600 that day. “It all happened in a split-second. She said that everything was falling on her. “My legs were half-buried so I couldn’t even move. My hearing slowly returned and I could hear my husband’s voice: “Olga, help us, dig me out,” he said. “I’m right by the stairs,” he said. “Olga could only see Valery six feet away, but she couldn’t reach him. He was deeper than she could see. All she could do was keep talking to him. She said, “After a while I heard him wheezing.” “Then he stopped talking. “Alone in darkness, Olga tried screaming but no one heard her. She finally saw a torch moving towards the torch. Her neighbours tried to rescue her from the rubble. They were unable to free Olga from the rubble and Olga began to see her surroundings. She looked up to see a concrete slab, tilted and about to fall on her. “I knew that nothing was important anymore. She said she was dying. She said that she tried to end her own life at that point. Eventually, her neighbours returned with others and tried to rescue her.
They were able to free Olga’s left leg. They tried for six more hours to free her right leg but one of the concrete slabs kept pressing down on it. They finally decided to wrap a cable around Olga’s leg and pull it hard. After three attempts, Olga was finally freed. She was unable to walk for nearly five months because her legs were infected. She said that her right leg was broken in multiple places and she was unable to walk for almost five months. Three days earlier, her sister and brother-in law had also been killed in the same home. Olga stated that the bomb struck while they were drinking coffee in their garden. “I lost five of the closest people I knew in a matter of days. “When I met Olga she was safe in Huizen, near Amsterdam, with her two grown-up kids. After months of being in a wheelchair, she is now able to walk again. She is currently learning English and loves to go for walks and admire the gardens and flowers that remind her of her home. She is warm, soft-spoken, elegant, and has a friendly smile. Olga said that she is happy to be alive and believes that she was fated for life. I sent her a text to wish her a happy birthday. She replied, “No matter what, life continues and I have an understanding of the fact that I must live!” She was in tears for most of the day. Until mid-summer, she had relived the horrors of her past and had to stay awake until the wee hours of the morning to avoid them. She scrolls through photos of her past life and says that she is still trying to process what happened. She sees her husband in her two adult children. She misses Valery so much that it is hard to bear it. They used to swim together and have parties once a weeks. Now Olga lives in a small apartment in a foreign land. Olga has not been able to find any information about her family’s bodies, but she suspects that they are still under the rubble of her home. The Russians now control the city, but Olga was informed this summer that one body could still be found in the ruins her old home. The gravediggerOlga was one of many Mariupol residents who can’t find their relatives.
Others were buried in mass graves located in central Mariupol. These graves were dug by Ukrainians who braved shelling to recover corpses found in streets and homes. Vaagn Mnatsakanian was a local ecologist who was trying to find a spot to bury his father, who had been killed during the fighting. Vaagn was shocked to discover that all the mortuaries were full. He contacted the local authorities to inquire about other options. He then began to organize teams of locals to dig three mass graves in the centre city for the Ukrainian municipal authorities. He and his team collected bodies around Mariupol for five days in March, during intense shelling. The bodies were quickly slid into the trenches without bags, sometimes even without them. He said that he was told that there were often more than 100 bodies, sometimes 150, that required collecting that day on some horrible days. “There were so many bodies that we couldn’t collect them all. “One day, a shell flew toward me and I had no choice but to jump into the mass burial for cover. Vaagn said, “I found myself near the corpses but I was glad that I was alive.” Tatyana, who lost her son in fighting, had been searching for him since childhood. She visited Vynohradne, near Mariupol, this summer to search for him. She claims she has no idea what happened to Yaroslav, a 26-year-old who loved cars and dreamed about owning a business. But she says that she was told he was killed in sniper fire. She said, “If he’s not alive, we want him to be buried humanely.” Tatyana, who prefers to not use her surname, said that she had counted more than 800 new graves at Vynohradne. Many Russian-controlled residents are afraid of reprisals and won’t speak out about mass burials. She took a photo of Vynohradne. Placards with numbers and gender are placed on many graves at the site. However, they do not identify the bodies. “Most of these bodies are unidentified,” she stated. Tatyana said that “people should know the truth about such horrors” so it won’t happen again.