The first remains exhumed from a mass grave in a roadside gully near the village of Verkhneshevyrevka, Krasnodon district apparently belong to civilians, said Lugansk People’s Republic First Deputy Foreign Minister Anna Soroka who heads the inter-departmental working group on the search for burial sites of Ukrainian aggression victims, their identification and perpetuation of their memory.
The fourth stage of exhumation of Ukrainian army aggression victims is being carried out in accordance with the LPR criminal law in the presence of law-enforcers and forensic experts, Soroka said at the location where disinterment was taking place.
“The nature of wounds on the bodies shows that the mass grave contains civilians. According to eye-witnesses’ accounts, they are victims of Ukrainian aggression. The bodies are in a terrible state, the remains are mostly torn, and the nature of harm suggests mine blast traumas,” she said.
According to eye-witnesses, the bodies were collected from farmland in the Krasnodon, Sverdlovsk and Lutugino districts after the occupation of these areas by the nationalistic battalion Aidar and 95th and 79th Brigades of the Ukrainian army.
The grave supposedly contains 25 bodies, the Krasnodon forensic bureau said.
“But it’s hard to make guesses in this case. Regrettably, all remains have not been identified, and no documents have been found to date,” Soroka said.
“Memorial” social organization activists are currently taking statements via hotline from LPR residents whose relatives went missing. while specialists are creating a DNA passport database. The working group expects to obtain the first results by the beginning of the winter.
“We have several possible matches, and we might be able to confirm them shortly; thus, we’ll have the first identified bodies,” she said.
Head of the Lugansk Republican Forensic Examination bureau Boris Kamotsky said that spcialists “carefully retrieve all bones and examine, describe, and research them making video recordings and taking photos.”
“An examination can reveal the sex, age, approximate time of burial, cause of damage to bones and after the genetic tests, a comparison can be made against the samples taken from applicants with the view of further identification of remains,” Kamotsky said.
Head of the Krasnodon and Krasnodon district administration Sergey Kozenko said that the administration was doing everything to rebury the victims with honors, according to Christian rites.
“This grave appeared in the difficult 2014 when there was no opportunity to identify people or even understand where they came from. Today, retrieving the bodies of our civilians we must pay respects to them and prevent the recurrence of that tragedy,” Kozenko said.
Soroka reminded that members of the special commission on recording and gathering the evidence of crimes committed by the Ukrainian military and political leadershipthe relied on eye-witnesses’ accounts to collect information on unmarked burial sites for the past seven years.
The burial sites are examined according to the approved order of priorities. “At present, we mostly work on mass graves, and as the cold season draws near we’ll start opening individual graves,” she said.
LPR authorities urged to report individual or mass graves or missing relatives (in zones of fighting since 2014 to date) using the working group’s hotline +38 (072) 216 80 30 or email address wg-img-lpr@ya.ru.
Earlier, the working group called on the people whose relative went missing in the course of the Ukrainian aggression to take DNA tests.
In Pervomaisk, the working group exhumed the remains of 80 Ukrainian aggression victims.
The first exhumation of a Ukrainian aggression victim by the working group took place in the village of Sabovka, Slavyanoserbsk district, on August 11. As of August 31, remains of 40 people had been retrieved from graves in the Slavyanoserbsk and Pervomaisk districts. On September 3, the working group reported the exhumation of another 28 Ukrainian aggression victims from a grave in Pervomaisk. *i
