Mariupol, Ukraine, already has been under assault by Russian military forces for weeks.
A Fox News report described the city as partly occupied by Russians and in the bull’s-eye of “one of the most brutal Russia offensives in Ukraine.”
There are an estimated 160,000 people trapped there without access to power, heat, health care or water, and some 5,000 reportedly are dead.
But the death told could be in the tens of thousands, the report said.
But now city officials are charging that Russians have set up mobile crematoria to remove the evidence of their alleged war crimes.
On social media, the city council issued a statement that said, “The killers are covering their tracks.”
It continued, “Russia’s top leadership ordered the destruction of any evidence of crimes committed by its army in Mariupol.”
The alleged destruction of “evidence” follows widespread world condemnation of Russia’s mass killings of civilians in Bucha, which recently came to light, the report explained.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said it evacuated a few hundred people from Berdiansk, about 50 miles from Mariupol, but it remains unable to reach those in the larger city, the report said.
The city charged that Russians are preventing aid from reaching the city because of the number of dead remaining in the streets, and further the invading forces are removing potential witnesses by taking people to “filtration camps.”
That statement was affirmed by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who said she has seen “credible reports” of that activity.
“The world has not seen the scale of the tragedy in Mariupol since the existence of the Nazi concentration camps. Russia-occupation forces turned our entire city into a death camp,” said Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko in a statement on a Ukrainian news outlet. “This is the new Auschwitz and Majdanek.”
Fox News reported Thomas-Greenfield described how Russians were abducting Ukrainian civilians, taking their passports and interrogating them – before relocating them to Russia.
“The remarks from U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield came after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking remotely from Ukraine, addressed the U.N. Security Council. He called for Russian troops to be brought up on war crime charges for atrocities uncovered in Bucha and around Kyiv before a tribunal similar to the one set up at Nuremberg after World War II,” the report explained.
“We’ve all seen the gruesome photos, lifeless bodies lying in the streets, apparently summarily executed, their hands tied behind their backs,” explained Thomas-Greenfield.
“As we work to independently confirm the events depicted in these images, I would remind this council that based on the currently available information, the United States has assessed that members of Russia’s forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine,” the ambassador said.
She continued, according to the report, “I do not need to spell out what these so-called filtration camps are reminiscent of. It’s chilling, and we cannot look away,” she said, invoking Nazi-era concentration camps without identifying them by name.
“Every day we see more and more how little Russia respects human rights. And that is why I announced yesterday that the United States, in coordination with Ukraine and many other U.N. member states, will seek Russia’s suspension from the U.N. Human Rights Council.”
Zelenskyy previously has said hundreds were tortured and killed by Russians in Bucha, including civilians driven over in their cars by tanks, and women being raped and killed.
Reports also said Russian soldiers were rigging bodies of Ukrainian civilians they killed with explosives.
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