A distressing search for answers amid Izium's mass graves

The men digging in the dusty ground looked visibly sickened by the gruesome task they had been given. The rotted bodies were mangled and the smell poisoned the fresh forest air. One corpse had a rope around the neck.

- Isobel Koshiw and Lorenzo Tondo

Those on a break mostly stood with their spades and goggles, looking on at their colleagues from the state rescue services who were red in the face from the hard labour of tugging the bodies out of the graves and sweating in their blue plastic overalls.

In woods a few kilometres from the centre of Izium, the north-eastern Ukrainian town recaptured by Kyiv earlier this month, hundreds of police detectives, prosecutors, forensic doctors and journalists gathered at the site of burials revealed after the Russian retreat.

"We have found 445 graves here in this place alone," said Oleksandr Filchakov, the chief prosecutor for the Kharkiv region that includes Izium. "Then, a few metres away, we found a big grave containing 17 Ukrainian soldiers buried together. Most of the civilians were buried individually."

Locals say those being exhumed from the site were killed by Russian forces, who occupied the strategic city for six months, using it as a base for the assault on the eastern Donbas region.