The mayor of the besieged port city of Mariupol said Russian troops have buried as many as 9,000 civilians killed in the conflict in a nearby mass grave in order to cover up “military crimes.”

“The greatest war crime of the 21st century has been committed in Mariupol. This is the new Babi Yar,” Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko said, referring to the site of multiple Nazi massacres in which nearly 34,000 Ukrainian Jews were killed in 1941.

Boychenko and the city council in Mariupol accused Russians of burying civilians killed in Manhush, about 12 miles west of Mariupol, in large trenches they had dug. He said “the bodies started disappearing from the streets of the city,” charging that the Russians were “hiding the trace of their crimes and using the mass grave as one of the instruments for that.”

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