Residents described the heartache of not knowing where their family members are buried.
Olga Sagirova with her mother and sister, whose bodies - like thousands in Mariupol - are unaccounted forMore than 1,500 new graves have been dug at a mass burial site near the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, according to an analysis of new satellite images carried out for the BBC.
The Centre for Information Resilience analysed the images of Staryi Krym for the BBC's Panorama programme and concluded that 1,500 new graves had been dug there since it last analysed images at the site in June. It now estimates that more than 4,600 graves have been dug there since the beginning of the war, although it says it cannot know how many bodies are buried at the site.
It had been fairly quiet in her area in early March, despite the intense shelling in other parts of the city. Nonetheless, each night she and her husband would sleep in the cellar. "I used to cry all the time, my husband tried to reassure me," said Olga. "He said I shouldn't worry, that we'd get through this."
Olga could see Valery only six feet away but she could not reach him. He was buried more deeply than her. "I knew that nothing mattered any more. I was dying," she says. At that point, she says, she tried to take her own life. When I met Olga, she was living in Huizen near Amsterdam, safe with her two grown-up children. She can now walk again, after months of needing to use a wheelchair.
In her two adult children she sees her husband. She misses Valery so deeply that she can hardly bear it. They used to swim together, have parties once a week, and now Olga lives in a small flat in a foreign country. In early March, Vaagn Mnatsakanian, a local ecologist, had been trying to find a place to bury his father who had been killed in the fighting. Vaagn found to his disgust that the mortuaries were full.
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