What the discovery at Izium revealed on 16 September 2022
A look back at a day when news of a mass grave in a recaptured city sat alongside continuing strikes on both sides of the border.
What did Ukraine and its partners have to absorb on 16 September 2022? The day brought the aftermath of a grim discovery in Izium, the recently recaptured city, where Ukrainian police had said on 15 September that a mass grave holding more than 440 bodies had been found.
The graves were located in woods near the city after Ukrainian forces retook it. As the background to these events makes clear, the bodies were of people killed by Russian forces. The Ukrainian government later came to believe that over 1,000 civilian residents died during the battle for Izium and the subsequent Russian occupation.
The violence continued elsewhere. On 16 September 2022, Vyacheslav Gladkov, governor of Belgorod Oblast, reported that Ukrainian shelling of Valuyki had killed one civilian and injured two others.
Two days earlier, on 14 September, Russian forces had launched eight cruise missiles at the dam of the Karachunivske reservoir. The strike caused extensive flooding in Kryvyi Rih and raised the water level of the Inhulets River by 2.5 metres.
Taken together, the reports from those days show a war in which recaptured territory, civilian infrastructure and border areas all remained exposed.
