• Ukrainian forces have discovered hundreds of unmarked graves near the city of Izyum, just days after it was retaken from Russia.
• It is unclear what happened to the victims, but Ukrainian officials believe more than 400 bodies are buried at the site.
• The UN hopes to send a monitoring team to the city to look into possible war crimes.

Hundreds of graves have been discovered outside Izyum, in the Kharkiv region, according to Kyiv, just days after it was retaken from Russia’s military. The majority of the numbered wooden crosses were discovered in a forest outside the city by advancing Ukrainian forces.

It was unclear what happened to the victims as they began exhuming some of the graves on Friday. However, some officials believe that at least a few victims died as a result of shelling and a lack of access to healthcare.

According to Ukraine’s national police service, the majority of the bodies were civilians, and authorities believe more than 400 bodies are buried at the site. The UN hopes to send a monitoring team to the city to look into possible war crimes.

The discovery highlighted the mounting human toll in Russia’s nearly seven-month invasion of Ukraine.

But the war isn’t going as Russia planned, with Kyiv claiming to have retaken 8,000 square kilometres (3,100 square miles) of territory in the country’s east and south.

Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers are thought to have died, and several Russian politicians have dared to call for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s resignation this month.

With the death toll rising, Russia appears to be relying more on mercenaries and Chechen forces to reclaim territory from Ukraine, or at the very least to keep what they have conquered.

A video of a Russian mercenary boss allegedly recruiting prisoners to join his controversial Wagner Group has surfaced. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the group’s leader, told them that “the war is brutal and looks nothing like the war in Chechnya.”

He also stated that those who do not want to send convicts to fight should instead send their children. In the leaked video, he told inmates that if they served six months with his group, they would be released. He did, however, admit that he could not guarantee that everyone “would return alive.”

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