1,374 Civilians Died Violently During the Occupation of Kyiv Region

A year after Russian occupiers were expelled from the Kyiv region, three torture chambers and 15 mass graves of murdered locals have been discovered.

People mostly suffered violent deaths, Andriy Nebytov, the head of the Main Department of the National Police in Kyiv Region, said, speaking at the briefing on the outcomes of law enforcement’s investigation of crimes committed by the occupiers.

"We found 15 mass graves, in which bodies of from three people to 116, were temporarily buried in Bucha near the Church of St Andrew the First-Called," said Nebytov.

Police also discovered three locations used for torture, all in the Bucha district.

"People were tied up, strangled with car cables, beaten with truncheons, kept in pits, and then shot," said the regional police chief.

Torture sites were either at the Russian army headquarters, where the command was located, or at positions where heavy artillery was deployed.

According to Nebytov, a total of 1,374 bodies of Ukrainian civilians have been found so far. Of these, 717 people were deliberately killed by shooting from small arms.

According to the head of the Kyiv regional police, another 340 people died of mine-blast injuries, and the cause of death of 317 people has not yet been established. They could have died either by natural causes, during the occupation, or because of a lack of medical care.

38 children died and 43 others were injured, during the occupation of the Kyiv region. 195 bodies remain unidentified, and 279 people are missing.

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Nebytov said that 11,333 reorts of criminal acts had been registered in the Kyiv region. The SBU is investigating the majority of them for "violations of the laws and customs of war" – war crimes.

Since the de-occupation of the Kyiv region, police have conducted more than 200,000 inspections, collected testimonies from Ukrainian citizens, checked 171,000 vehicles and 750,000 private homes. Forty-one people have been charged with  34 cases already being heard in court.