Ukrainian soldiers uncovered a torture chamber after they liberated Mykolaiv and Kherson from Russian troops on Friday.
It is the latest evidence to suggest Putin’s thugs are responsible for war crimes during Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
A makeshift Russian prison used to torture and interrogate Ukrainian dissidents was filmed on fire in Kherson last night after the area was liberated by President Zelensky’s troops.
Investigators also uncovered three skeletons with fractured skulls in a cellar in the town of Berislav, Kherson.
Ukraine’s office for the Prosecutor General said the bodies were of three civilians who were living in the Kherson region and died during the Russian occupation.
Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba warned that while many were celebrating as Putin’s forces were beaten back from the region, the war was not over and Ukrainian troops would likely uncover more horrors.
He said: ‘We are winning battles on the ground, but the war continues.
‘Every time we liberate a piece of our territory from Russian army we find torture rooms and mass graves with civilians tortured and murdered by Russian army.’
He added: ‘It’s not easy to speak with people like this. But I said that every war ends with diplomacy and Russia has to approach talks in good faith.’
Basements where Russian soldiers lived at a former position in the village of Blahodatne showed how Putin’s army had ditched their kit and even equipment as they fled the region.
Blahodatne was retaken by the Ukrainian Armed Forces a day ago, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine in the Kherson region.
The National Police chief of Ukraine, Ihor Klymenko, said Saturday on Facebook that about 200 officers were at work in the city, setting up checkpoints and documenting evidence of possible war crimes.
Police teams also were working to identify and neutralize unexploded ordnance and one sapper was wounded Saturday while demining an administrative building, Klymenko said.
Roman Holovnya, an adviser to Kherson’s mayor said humanitarian aid and supplies had begun to arrive from the neighboring Mykolaiv region.
He described the situation in Kherson as ‘a humanitarian catastrophe.’
He said the remaining residents lacked water, medicine and food and key basics like bread went unbaked because a lack of electricity.
‘The occupiers and collaborators did everything possible so that those people who remained in the city suffered as much as possible over those days, weeks, months of waiting’ for Ukraine’s forces to arrive, Holovnya said. ‘Water supplies are practically nonexistent.’
Investigations by the US this week showed Russia’s war in Ukraine may already have killed or wounded tens of thousands of civilians and hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
Satellite images of Mariupol, which is in the Donetsk region of Ukraine in the east of the country, showed a larger number of additional graves have been added to the city’s cemetery between March 24 and October 14.
Mariupol City Council said there is now a 21st mass grave in the city’s cemetery as they released footage of the area.
The City Council said: ‘The Mariupol Cemetery is getting bigger and bigger.
‘Even a new sector of mass graves has already appeared — number 21.
‘Russian invaders brought death and destruction to our city.
‘Mariupol residents still bury their relatives and thousands still do not know where their relatives and friends are buried.
‘Others are missing. This is our common pain.’
A team from the UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine has already investigated alleged war crimes in Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Sumy, finding evidence of sexual abuse, executions, bombing of civilian areas and torture.
Children as young as four have been raped and tortured by Putin’s thugs in Ukraine, the UN experts claimed.
They cited testimonies by former detainees of beatings, electric shocks and forced nudity in Russian detention facilities.
An unspecified number of Russian soldiers were found to have committed crimes of sexual or gender-based violence – with victims ranging in age from four to 82 years old, Erik Mose, the commission’s chairman, told the Human Rights Council.
He said the team was ‘struck by the large number of executions in the areas that we visited’, and the frequent ‘visible signs of executions on bodies, such as hands tied behind backs, gunshot wounds to the head, and slit throats’.
He said: ‘Based on the evidence gathered by the commission, it has concluded that war crimes have been committed in Ukraine.’
In September Ukrainian officials said 436 bodies were exhumed from a mass burial site in Izium, 30 of them with visible signs of torture.
The governor of the Kharkiv region, Oleh Synyehubov, and the region’s police chief, Volodymyr Tymoshko, said three more grave sites have been located in areas retaken by Ukrainian forces in a counteroffensive this month
During their 10-day June trip to Ukraine, the UN team visited Bucha, a city outside Kyiv where Ukrainian authorities found mass graves and bodies strewn in the streets after Russian forces pulled out in late March.
The findings echo reports of the destruction, death and despair in Ukraine since tyrant Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian invasion on February 24.
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The UN has confirmed that children as young as four have been raped and tortured by Zelensky’s thugs in Ukraine.