Russia using mobile crematoriums to cover war crimes, claims Mariupol mayor

“Russian mobile crematoria have started operating in ­Mariupol,” he said.

“The world has not seen the scale of the tragedy in Mariupol since the Nazi concentration camps. The racists turned our whole city into a death camp.”

It came as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Russia’s slaying of hundreds of civilians in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv under Russian occupation for a month, “doesn’t look far short of genocide to me”.

Many of the victims had been shot in the head and dumped in mass graves.

There have been widespread reports of summary executions, gang rapes, and looting from other liberated towns across Ukraine.

But Mr Boychenko has warned that the Bucha atrocities were just the “tip of the iceberg”. “Russia’s top leadership has ordered the destruction of any evidence of crimes committed by its army in Mariupol,” Mr Boychenko said.

“The Russians left all the dirty work to collaborators. They collect and burn the bodies of Mariupol residents murdered and killed as a result of the Russian invasion. In addition, all potential witnesses to the occupiers’ atrocities are being identified through filtration camps and destroyed.”

He estimated that of the more than 5,000 civilians killed during weeks of Russian bombardment and street fighting, 210 were children. He said Russian forces bombed hospitals, including one where 50 people burned to death.

He added that said the southern city, which is on the Sea of Azov, was no longer like “Chechnya or Aleppo” but instead the “new Auschwitz and Majdanek” in remarks made on the council’s Telegram channel.

Auschwitz and Majdanek were two Nazi death camps operating in occupied Poland during World War II. The Russian military has previously bombed Aleppo and Chechnya to total destruction. Mr Boychenko said the Russians had appointed a “mayor-­collaborator” in his place, his long-term political rival Kostiantyn Ivashchenko.

“Eventually he managed to become the director of the Mariupol crematorium,” he wrote bitterly.

Mariupol has been the focus of Russia’s most sustained bombardment since the war started on February 24.

Mr Boychenko said 90pc of the city had been destroyed and there were thousands of civilians still trapped in the besieged city’s cellars, living without food, medical supplies or drinking water. Russia needs Mariupol to control the highway between Russia and Crimea, and it has devoted immense firepower to capturing it.

Surrounded Ukrainian forces were continuing to fight in some parts of the city yesterday. Mariupol has already been the site of some of the most notorious Russian crimes of the war, including the March 9 airstrike on a maternity hospital and the destruction of a theatre sheltering hundreds of civilians a week later.

The Kremlin has claimed evidence of war crimes committed by its forces has been faked. Instead, it has framed its invasion as a mission to rescue Ukrainians from Nazis.

Earlier this week, the leader of the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ was filmed handing out medals to his soldiers fighting in Mariupol.

One of the commanders wore a Nazi death skull and white supremacist Norse knot on the sleeve of his combat jacket.

Instead of images of murdered civilians and burnt-out apartment blocks being broadcast on Russian state TV viewers are shown their kindly soldiers handing out aid ­parcels to desperate people.

The aid parcels are labelled with a ‘Z’, the insignia of the main Russian battle group that has become a rallying point for supporters of the war.

In other developments, Russia completed the pullout of all of its estimated 24,000 or more troops from the Kyiv and Chernihiv areas in the north, sending them into Belarus or Russia to resupply and reorganise, according to a US defence official.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that Moscow was now marshalling reinforcements and trying to push deeper into the country’s east, where the Kremlin has said its goal is to “liberate” the Donbas, Ukraine’s mostly Russian-speaking industrial heartland.

“The fate of our land and of our people is being decided. We know what we are fighting for. And we will do everything to win,” Mr Zelensky said, six weeks into the war.

Ukrainian authorities urged people living in the Donbas to evacuate now, ahead of an impending Russian offensive.

“Later, people will come under fire,” the deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk said, “and we won’t be able to do anything to help them.”

Another military source said it would take Russia’s battle- damaged forces as much as a month to regroup for a major push on eastern Ukraine.

In the north, Ukrainian authorities said the bodies of at least 410 civilians have been found in towns around Kyiv, victims of what Mr Zelensky has portrayed as a Russian campaign of murder, rape, ­dismemberment and torture.

At a cemetery in the town of Bucha, workers began to load more than 60 bodies apparently collected over the past few days into a grocery shipping truck for transport to a facility for further investigation.

The Kremlin has insisted its troops have committed no war crimes, charging that the images out of Bucha were staged by the Ukrainians.

Thwarted in their efforts to swiftly take the capital, increasing numbers of Putin’s troops, along with mercenaries, have been reported moving into the Donbas.

At least five people were killed by Russian shelling yesterday in the Donbas’ Donetsk region, according to governor Pavlo Kyrylenko, who urged civilians to leave for safer areas.

In the Luhansk region of the Donbas, Russian bombardment set fire to at least 10 multi- storey buildings and a mall in the town of Sievierodonetsk, the regional governor reported.

Russian forces also attacked a fuel depot and a factory in the Dnipropetrovsk region, just west of the Donbas, authorities said.

Ukrainian forces have been fighting Russia-backed separatists in the Donbas since 2014. Ahead of its February 24 invasion, Moscow recognised the Luhansk and Donetsk regions as independent states.