MOSCOW: Ukrainian officials say about 3,000 to 9,000 civilians may have been killed and buried in a huge grave in the village of Manhash in Mariupol.
It is about 20 km from the port city of Mariupol. Russian troops have captured the remote village of Manhash, where it is concentrated.
The Mariupol City Council has published information about this on its social media page, exploring satellite photo galleries with the help of Maxer technology. In it, he said there may be a pit 20 times larger in the Manhash area than the largest pit set up in the Pucha area.
Throughout April in Mariupol, Russian forces reportedly dug huge trenches and filled the bodies of Ukrainian people with them.
According to satellite imagery, the bodies were buried in clusters, one on top of the other, and four such 85-meter-long pits were dug and covered.
In the city of Mariupol alone, about 22,000 locals may have been killed by Russian forces, according to local news reports.
Russia, which had previously occupied almost all of Mariupol, had planned to enter the Azovstal plant and arrest it if it did not surrender to Ukrainian troops by Wednesday’s deadline.
In this case, Putin had ordered the abandonment of the project and the siege of the steel plant.
In connection with the Ukraine war, Vladimir Putin met with the Minister of Defense Sokei Shaikh at the Adibah Palace in Moscow and gave a presentation.
At the time, Shaikh told Putin that the city of Mariupol in Ukraine had been “liberated” from government forces. However, thousands of Ukrainian soldiers refused to surrender, and Shaikh admitted that he was hiding in the city’s Azovstal iron plant. He said he planned to raid the plant and arrest the ambushing Ukrainian soldiers.
Following this, Vladimir Putin told Shayku:
It is impractical to enter the complex buildings of the huge Azovstas steel plant, crawl through the tunnels and capture Ukrainian soldiers. So, there is no need to carry out offensive action.
Instead, he ordered the siege of the iron plant to be tightened so that not even a fly could leave.
Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine on February 24 in protest of its accession to NATO.
The Russian military is conducting a major offensive to seize control of the Donbass and Luhansk regions of Donbass, which are currently under the control of pro – government forces in the east.
Russia is intensifying its efforts to annex the Donbass region and the Crimean peninsula, which they already occupied in the south in 2014.
Accordingly, the Russian army has been besieging and attacking the city of Mariupol in the area for several weeks. A large number of civilians were said to have been killed.
Russia, which has captured almost all territory in Mariupol, says more than a thousand Ukrainian soldiers have surrendered.
However, a limited number of Ukrainian soldiers and their affiliated Azov troops were killed within 10 km of Mariupol. He is lurking and fighting inside the sprawling Azovstel iron plant. They are said to have about 1,000 civilians with them. It is unknown at this time what he will do after leaving the post.