The dreadful human toll of the brutal war in Ukraine is laid bare in heartbreaking photos of a woman identifying her husband who had been buried in a shallow grave.
The sad pictures show the woman – who has not been named – collapsing under the weight of her grief next to her husband, who has been laid out on a tarp in front of the grave. He is wearing a striped orange sweatshirt and blue jeans.
The awful scene played out in the town of Andriivka, near Kyiv, reports the New York Post.
It is one of many places in the region where suspected war crimes have been carried out by Russia following its invasion nearly 50 days ago.
It’s believed that Vladimir Putin's forces committed widespread atrocities on civilians before the invaders were humiliatingly driven out of the area by staunch Ukrainian resistance.
Over the weekend, Ukrainian prosecutor Iryna Venediktova said that more than 1,200 bodies had been found in the Kyiv region alone, and the authorities had identified 500 Russian war criminals, including top military officials.
Meanwhile, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he fears there are tens of thousands of people who have been killed in the besieged city of Mariupol.
In the tragic pictures from Andriivka, the devastated woman is helped to her feet by a policeman and another man after she collapses in grief.
According to the Post, residents said Russian forces arrived in the early days of the invasion and confiscated everyone’s phones.
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Although some local people were detained and then released, others simply disappeared.
Some others just hunkered down in their basements, praying that they'd escape the carnage going on all around them.
Valentyna Klymenko, 64, said she, her husband and two neighbours hid from the Russians underground, sleeping on sacks of potatoes.
“First we were scared, now we are hysterical. We didn’t cry at first. Now we are crying,” she said.
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