National Police Chief: 1,200 bodies of killed Ukrainians not yet identified

The Ukrainian police are investigating criminal proceedings on the facts of the death of more than 12,000 Ukrainians, 1,200 bodies, including those found in mass graves, have not yet been identified, Chief of the National Police of Ukraine Ihor Klymenko has said.

“In Ukraine, we received reports, opened the relevant criminal proceedings on the death of more than 12,000 people, found, in particular, in mass graves,” Klymenko said in an exclusive interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

He noted that more than 1,500 civilians were killed in Kyiv region alone. “In Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel, Borodianka, there were a lot of dead people lying right on the streets – snipers shot them from tanks, from armored personnel carriers, despite the white armbands that the Russian military forced people to wear,” the head of the National Police said.
Klymenko added that a large number of people were found dead in their homes and apartments: “And when our explosives experts, forensic investigators entered the apartments, they found these bodies. As a rule, these people died from mine-explosive injuries.”

As for the mass graves, as Klymenko stressed, it is still too early to talk about specific numbers, since law enforcement officers find several bodies every week.

“In Bucha, 116 people were buried in one such grave, there were smaller burials – five-seven people each. Residents collected the bodies of the dead and buried them in parks,” he added.

According to the head of the National Police, a total of approximately 75% of the dead are men, about 2% are children, and the rest are women. “This is a civilian population, people had nothing to do with military or law enforcement structures,” Klymenko noted.

Speaking about the exhumation procedure, the head of the National Police noted the duration and complexity of the process. “To date, about 1,200 bodies of the dead have not been identified. This is a long process, rather painstaking, because a lot of bodies are in a state of putrefactive decay. We select DNA from those relatives who contacted us via the hot line, and then we compare the profiles of these relatives with the profiles of the dead, buried, shot, who could not be identified. Relatives should be only close – mom-dad-native children. This is the only way we work,” Klymenko summed up.