Ukrainian police investigating 12,000 civilian deaths

National police in Ukraine are investigating more than 12,000 civilian deaths since the start of the Russian invasion in February.

“In Bucha, Irpen, Gostomel, Borodyanka there were a lot of killed people lying right on the streets — snipers shot them from tanks, from armored personnel carriers, despite the white armbands that the Russian military forced people to wear,” Igor Klimenko, chief of the National Police, told the Interfax-Ukraine news agency.

“This is a civilian population, people had nothing to do with the military or law enforcement agencies,” he added.

Klimenko said that nationwide some 1,200 civilian bodies have yet to be identified.

“This is a long process, quite laborious, because many bodies are in a state of decay,” he said.

On the outskirts of Kyiv, police have been continuing the grisly work of cataloging civilians killed in apparent Russian war crimes in the capitol’s suburbs.

“Shots to the knees tell us that people were tortured,” Andriy Nebytov, head of the Kyiv regional police, said Monday. “The hands tied behind the back with tape say that people had been held [hostage] for a long time and [enemy forces] tried to get any information from them.”

So far, the bodies of 1,316 people have been found in the region, but investigators dressed in white hazmat suits continued to work on exhuming mass graves on Monday in the forest outside the northern suburb of Bucha.

Seven additional bodies were exhumed Monday, two with bound hands and gunshot wounds to the knees and head, according to Nebytov.

The investigations, like the war, are ongoing. But Ukrainian prosecutors have already begun to bring war-crime cases against captured Russian troops.

Last month, a Ukrainian court sentenced 21-year-old Russian soldier Vadim Shishimarin to life in prison for the killing of an unarmed civilian in the opening days of the invasion.

Soon after, two more captured Russian soldiers were sentenced to 11 years in prison for allegedly shelling a Ukrainian town, though prosecutors said the bombardment resulted in no casualties.

With Post wires