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Even torrential rain couldn’t erase the smell of death in the pine forest of Izyum on Friday afternoon, as Ukrainian investigators made their way through a mass burial site found in the eastern Ukrainian city. recover from Russian forces.

Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said at least 440 graves had been found in the city in recent days. The country’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday that some of the bodies found at Izium showed “signs of torture,” and he blamed Russia for what he called “cruelty and terror.”

When CNN arrived at the mass burial site on Friday afternoon, officials were transporting body bags, including one that appeared to be carrying something very small, in a refrigerated truck.

Most of the graves at the burial site are single graves, with wooden crosses placed on top of the earthen mounds. Some of them have names and numbers written on them. One was rising to 398. The other was named after an 82-year-old man. An official at the site told CNN that investigations should determine when these people died.

In the woods is what appeared to be a former military post, with tank positions dug deep into the ground.

A policeman at the scene told CNN that the place was a mass grave where 17 bodies were found.

The Ukrainian Center for Strategic Communications said on Thursday that some of the graves discovered in Izyum were “fresh” and that the bodies buried there were “mostly civilians”.

An Izium resident who lives across the street from the mass burial site told CNN that the Russians first hit a nearby cemetery in the city with an airstrike and then moved in.

They brought their own machines. They dug some trenches for their cars. “We just heard how they destroyed the forest,” Nadezhda Kalinichenko told CNN.

She said she tried not to go out during the time the city was under Russian occupation because she was too scared.

Some basic information: Isium came under heavy Russian artillery attacks in April. The city, located near the border between the Kharkiv and Donetsk regions, became an important center of the invading army during the five months of occupation. Ukrainian forces retook control of the city on Saturday, dealing a strategic blow to Russia’s military offensive in the east.