Mick Hartley

The BBC reports:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has issued decrees bestowing the status "City of Military Glory" on two Russian-occupied Ukrainian cities – Melitopol and Mariupol.

It is a status similar to the Soviet-era "Hero City", which honoured certain cities' roles in the USSR's fight against Nazi Germany in World War Two. The status gave them certain privileges under communism, such as consumer goods in short supply elsewhere.

Putin's decrees say the new status honours "the courage, steadfastness and mass heroism displayed by the defenders of the cities in the fight for the freedom and independence of the fatherland".

In the light of the extraordinarily powerful Panorama documentary Mariupol: The People's Story, shown last week, this is obscene. A city where civilians were bombed relentlessly for weeks, with tens of thousands slaughtered….the man at the Mariupol theatre who wrote "children" in huge Russian letters outside after it became a refuge, in the belief that the Russians wouldn't bomb it. Ha. He couldn't get out of his mind the image of the young girl's body the next morning, half buried in rubble.

And this:

More than 1,500 new graves have been dug at a mass burial site near the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, according to an analysis of new satellite images carried out for the BBC.

The site north-west of the city consists of a large field of graves that Ukrainian officials and witnesses say contains thousands of bodies.

Mariupol, a port city close to the border with Russia, was a major strategic target for the Russians. From the start of the war it was pounded relentlessly from the air and from the ground. By the time it fell to the Russians in May, thousands of civilians had died and much of the city had been destroyed.

Recent satellite images from Maxar show that three mass burial sites near Mariupol located at Staryi Krym, Manhush and Vynohradne, have been steadily growing since the Spring.

The Centre for Information Resilience analysed the images of Staryi Krym for the BBC's Panorama programme and concluded that 1,500 new graves had been dug there since it last analysed images at the site in June. It now estimates that more than 4,600 graves have been dug there since the beginning of the war, although it says it cannot know how many bodies are buried at the site.

Ukrainian officials now believe that at least 25,000 people were killed in the fighting in Mariupol, and that 5,000-7,000 of them died under the rubble after their homes were bombed. Mariupol had a pre-war population of nearly 500,000.

Witnesses in Mariupol have told the BBC that they have seen the Russian authorities removing bodies from the rubble of destroyed buildings in the city over recent months and taking them away for burial.

Military Glory indeed.