Ukrainian authorities continued to gather the dead after the apparent slaughter of civilians in Kyiv’s northern suburbs Wednesday, piling up bodies for identification and clearing unexploded artillery left in the wake of Russia’s occupation.
Investigators have collected bodies — many with close-range gunshot wounds or severe burns, several with their hands still bound — throughout Bucha, where the dead have been found in mass graves and strewn across the city streets.
Photos from Bucha on Wednesday showed dozens of body bags in a local cemetery, as police began to identify the dead before sending them on to area morgues.
Dead civilians, clad in jeans and winter coats, wearing sneakers, could be seen through the open zippers of a handful of body bags as police went about their work.
Over 60 bodies have been collected in Bucha over the past day.
Authorities in Makariv, 40 miles to the west, said they’d found 20 bodies in and around the town.
Rescue workers in Borodyanka, where Ukrainian citizens reportedly held off a Russian advance last month, said they were looking for bodies in the rubble of destroyed apartment buildings.
In light of the gruesome trail left behind by retreating Russian troops in the north, Ukrainian officials urged civilians to evacuate from the east, where Kremlin forces are expected to advance.
Officials in Sloviansk, a city in the Donetsk oblast to the east, said Wednesday that local bank branches were shutting down, as were postal and pension operations.
Authorities in the eastern Luhansk oblast also urged civilians to evacuate westward, as Russian shelling struck high-rise buildings in the city of Severodonetsk.
With Post wires
