“This is nothing new for the Russian army,” a US congressman told ABC News.
Apr 7, 2022 at 9:02 p.m
• 8 minutes reading time
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterEmail this article
In one of the chilling allegations to emerge from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian officials have accused the Kremlin of using “mobile crematoria” to cremate dead civilians to cover up alleged war crimes in the hard-hit city of Mariupol .
Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko filed charges this week, saying he heard eyewitness accounts of Russian soldiers driving through Mariupol with crematoria on trucks collecting bodies of civilians while simultaneously preventing the International Committee of the Red Cross from carrying out the to enter the city with humanitarian aid.
“The world has not seen the scale of the tragedy in Mariupol since the existence of the Nazi concentration camps,” Boychenko said on Tuesday. “The Russians turned our entire city into an extermination camp. Unfortunately, the chilling analogy is finding more and more confirmation.”
A local resident walks with a suitcase past destroyed apartment buildings in the besieged southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine, March 30, 2022 amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In a statement published on its Facebook account, the Mariupol City Council said: “Witnesses have seen evidence that Russia operates mobile crematoria in Mariupol, burning the bodies of dead civilians and covering up evidence of war crimes.”
The statement added, “Therefore, Russia is in no hurry” to let the ICRC and other human rights groups into Mariupol to rescue civilians still trapped there.
Boychenko and the city council said the portable human ovens appeared in Mariupol after reports surfaced of alleged atrocities by Russian troops in Bucha, a suburb of the capital Kyiv. Ukrainian officials reported that at least 410 civilians were killed in Bucha, including many who were found with their hands tied behind their backs and shot in the head.
Boychenko said his once-thriving port city of 400,000 was completely decimated by bombing and estimated about 5,000 people were killed there.
US defense officials told ABC News they have not confirmed claims that Russia is using mobile crematoria to hide evidence of war crimes.
Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Massachusetts, told ABC News Thursday that he was not surprised by the reports.
Moulton, a former Marine and member of the House Armed Services Committee, said that during a fact-finding mission to Ukraine in 2015 that he led with other members of the House of Representatives, he was informed by “credible sources” that the Russian army was mobile Crematoria deployed its own soldiers in Russian-occupied Crimea in Ukraine. He said the sources told him Russia was using the devices to cover up the number of its soldiers killed in Crimea.
A man holds a cat as evacuees wait before boarding a bus to leave Mariupol, Ukraine, April 5, 2022.
“We heard this from a variety of sources over there, enough that I was confident in the accuracy of the information,” Moulton said. “None of that has changed. It absolutely was then, and now, unsurprisingly, I’m hearing reports it’s happening again.”
Moulton said he had no reason to dismiss reports from Ukrainian officials that Russia was using the incinerators to hide new war crimes.
“The bottom line is that this is nothing new for the Russian army and Vladimir Putin,” Moulton said.
This satellite image shows damage at an International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warehouse in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 28, 2022.
In an interview with Turkish media this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed that Russian soldiers were “cleaning up” before allowing aid workers into heavily bombed Mariupol.
Pressure from the international community to bring forward war crimes allegations against Putin and other Russian officials has increased. The International Criminal Court in The Hague has opened an investigation into atrocities allegedly committed by Russian forces against Ukrainian civilians since the February 24 invasion.
A report published by Amnesty International on Thursday claims Russian forces have committed numerous war crimes across Ukraine. The organization said its crisis response investigators interviewed more than 20 people from villages and towns near Kyiv, and many said they witnessed civilian executions.
The United Nations General Assembly on Thursday voted to pass a resolution to bar Russia from the UN Human Rights Council in response to the alleged killings of civilians by Russian forces in Ukraine.
“I’m not sure who needs more evidence that Russia is committing war crimes,” Moulton told ABC News. “They’re trying to cover their tracks.”
Russia has denied committing atrocities and attacking civilians.