Agony as widow finds husband's makeshift grave after returning to Ukrainian city

Overcome by grief, Lyudmila Trekushenko breaks down at her husband’s makeshift grave, one of hundreds across the liberated Ukrainian city of Izyum.

The 52-year-old arrived on her bicycle at the spot outside town, clutching some red roses to place by the wooden cross where Yuri, a lawyer and businessman now lies. 

He was killed in the early days of the Russian invasion in an attack on the north-eastern city.

Like so many others, Lyudmila is only now able to go to his graveside because Moscow’s troops have been forced from the area by a Ukrainian counter-offensive.

Teams of investigators have spent days in the forests outside the city, where up to 450 graves have been found. Some of those exhumed have been found with their hands bound and ropes around their necks, indicating probable torture, say Ukrainian prosecutors. The bodies of two children were among the 146 taken out on Monday.

Exhausted war crimes investigators have taken to sleeping on the ground in the woodland between shifts. Izyum fell to Moscow’s forces in April. In the five months since, some 1,000 people, including Ukrainian soldiers, have perished, the authorities said, due to ‘shelling, hunger and lack of medicine’.

Kyiv’s defence ministry said: ‘It will take many long and exhausting hours for investigators to reveal the magnitude of the genocide perpetrated by Russian murderers.’

Officials fear the toll in Izyum will outstrip that of towns north of Kyiv that became synonymous with war crimes earlier in the war, such as Irpin and Bucha, where civilians’ bodies were left in the streets.