Ukrainian Mayor And Family Found Dead After Being Kidnapped By Russian Forces, Officials Say

The Mayor of a Ukrainian village has been found dead alongside her husband and adult son, whose bodies were found in a shallow grave, according to Ukrainian officials.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk confirmed the death of the Mayor of the Village of Motyzhyn, Olga Sukhenko who was 'unfortunately killed in captivity by the Russians'.

"This is a war crime," Vereshchuk added.

"The guilty will inevitably be punished in accordance with international humanitarian law." 

Eleven mayors and community heads are in Russian captivity across Ukraine, including leaders from Kyiv, Kherson, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv and Donetsk regions, Vereshchuk says.

Vereshchuk went on to say: "We are informing about them and about other captive civilians to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United Nations and other international organisations.

"We demand everyone on whom it depends to do everything possible to make sure our civilians, our mayors, our clergymen, journalists activist are released."

Distressing images have been shared online which reportedly show the bodies of the Sukhenko family.

Anton Herashchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian interior ministry, says that troops 'tortured and murdered the whole family of the village head'.

He added: "The occupiers suspected they were collaborating with our military, giving us locations of where to target our artillery. 

"These scum tortured, slaughtered and killed the whole family."

It's being said that at least 410 civilians have been removed from Kyiv-area towns in what President Volodymyr Zelenskyy refers to as a 'genocide'. 

Zelenskyy toured the area on Monday, 4 April, saying that 'dead people have been found in barrels, basements, strangled, tortured'.

“What you see around, what they did to this modern town, is a characteristic of the Russian military, who treated people worse than animals. These are war crimes, and this will be recognized by the world as genocide,” Zelenskyy said, as per Ukrainian outlet UNIAN.

“It’s very difficult to conduct negotiations when you see what they did here,” Zelenskyy said, adding that Russia’s leadership 'needs to think faster if it has what to think with'.

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