There are no mass graves in Mariupol, reported Canadian independent journalist Eva Bartlett in a column in RT posted on April 28. Bartlett has a well-established record of reporting on the ground from war zones, notably including from Aleppo in 2016, from where she demolished the pro-jihadi narratives of the Western news media at that time. In Mariupol, Bartlett visited the sites claimed to be the locations of mass graves in Western news media reports using satellite imagery but found no mass graves. (https://www.rt.com/russia/554617-mass-grave-mariupol-ukraine/)
“What I saw were new, orderly grave plots including some still empty ones—an extension of a cemetery that already exists at the spot,” Bartlett writes. “No mass pit. Many of the graves have placards with the names and dates of birth of the deceased when available, and the remaining plots were numbered according to burial.”
Apparently, Western media has been relying on a single source for its claims of mass graves. Vadym Boichenko, the former mayor of Mariupol “who seems to be far from the city now” has made all kinds of alarming claims, including calling the site that Bartlett visited “the new Babi Yar,” where 33,000 Jews had been killed by the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators during World War II. “In reality, the site has around 400 individual plots, including nearly 100 empty ones,” Bartlett writes. “The 9,000 bodies and ‘biggest war crime of the 21st century’ were unverified claims made by a mayor who fled his city, promoted by media which down the page admitted they could not independently verify the claims—but by then, the damage had been done.”
