A Ukrainian mayor has warned that his cemeteries can no longer handle the dead as the city is left “in complete carnage” from the Russian invasion.
Vladyslav Atroshenko, mayor of Chernihiv, said that the city’s cemeteries were overflowing with its dead in a new video.
In the video Atroshenko filmed he says that they have refrigerator trucks full of dead bodies and that they’ve been forced to dig up old cemeteries to bury the newly dead.
As he talks, he drives through the ruins of the northern Ukrainian city and he offers a horrifying insight into the reality of so many still stuck in Ukraine.
CNN verified the video which was originally posted on Telegram.
The mayor said: “The city cemetery cannot handle all the dead, so we are keeping people in morgues and refrigerators longer than normal.
“We are burying people in the old cemeteries that haven’t been used in a while.”
On top of that he shows the burning buildings and ruin and debris that was once his city.
He was driving on Shevchenka street, located in the east of the city, as he shows ruined billboards and homes with their roofs blown off or walls caved in.
He added: “There was a direct strike here. There is a tractor over there burning. We are located right now in the zone of combat.”
“Look at these neighbourhoods. They are completely destroyed. You can clearly see that complete carnage has been unleashed here.”
The continued bombings of Ukrainian cities is seen by many as a change in tactics after the invasion failed to take the country’s urban centres.
Instead of conquering them, Moscow seems intent some have argued on following a Grozny-style bombings that infamously levelled the Chenynan capital.
The Kremlin only turned to this after its failure to achieve a ‘lightning invasion’ where it reportedly sought to take Ukraine and Kyiv in a few days.
However, instead of deposing the government, Russia now finds itself negotiating with it.
On CNN the analyst said that Russia resorted to this “mediaeval siege method of just pounding towns” because after suffering such heavy losses its army is struggling to operate.
This came after NATO estimated as many as 15,000 Russian troops were already dead, but others have argued as many as 30-40,000 could be dead, injured, or missing in action.
That is a significant chunk of the estimated 150,000 Russian troops who were initially stationed on the border.
It is also more dead in one month than Russia suffered in over a decade of fighting in Afghanistan.
As Russia’s invasion stutters and struggles, one of its architects, Sergei Shoigu, has not been seen in public in nearly two weeks.
Sources close to him told investigative news outlet Agentstvo he was having “heart problems” previously.
But today the Kremlin said that the top Kremlin official and once close ally of Putin simply had ‘a lot on his plate’ and was too busy to do media.
In the first few weeks of the invasion, Shoigu did a number of media appearances, speaking frequently.