More and more graves are being laid at the cemetery in the village of Manhush, which is around 20 kilometers west of the Ukrainian port of Mariupol.
Russian troops surrounded the southeastern port city weeks ago and also control Manhush and the surrounding area.
Satellite images from the American company Maxar, dated March 23, show how the village cemetery was initially expanded to include a few fresh graves.
Gerhard Gnauck
Political correspondent for Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania based in Warsaw.
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Frederick Smith
Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.
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A week later, a long line has been added, apparently in a field parallel to a road, in four segments Maxar says are each 85 meters long.
A mass grave, judges the company.
On a recording from the beginning of April, more graves have been added.
The city council of Mariupol accuses Russia of burying the corpses of civilians in Manhush: The mortal remains of 3,000 to 4,000 citizens of Mariupol could lie in the mass grave, they say.
The Russians used trucks to bring the dead.
"The biggest war crime of the 21st century was committed in Mariupol," said Mayor Vadym Boychenko on Thursday evening via the Telegram messenger service.
"This is the new Babyn Yar," Boychenko continued, referring to the 1941 German massacre in Kyiv, in which more than 33,000 people were murdered.
“At that time Hitler killed Jews, Roma and Slavs.
Now Putin is destroying Ukrainians.” Tens of thousands of civilians may have been killed in Mariupol.
Steelwork so far not taken
Mariupol is the largest of all Ukrainian cities captured or encircled by Russian troops since February;
And it is now largely destroyed.
Most of the once more than 400,000 inhabitants have fled.
According to Kiev data, "tens of thousands" of residents were deported to Russia.
Various Ukrainian authorities estimate that there are still 50,000 to 150,000 people in the city - the vast majority of them now under Russian control.
The attackers try to crush the remaining defenders of Mariupol.
But they have so far failed to take the Azovstal Steelworks, where the Ukrainians have entrenched themselves.
After the Russian Minister of Defense Sergei Schojgu reported the "liberation" Mariupols on Thursday Putin, the Ukrainian President Wolodymyr Selenskyj said, "That they have conquered the larger part of Mariupols, we all know." But there are still "some thousand" people on the big one Area of Azovstal, namely soldiers - among them, according to Zelenskyy, 400 wounded - and civilians who fled there.
Kyiv is in constant contact with the defenders and has offered the Russians an exchange of wounded.
Shojgu had promised Putin that the "work" in Mariupol could be completed in "three or four days".
Allegedly in order to protect his own soldiers, Putin then ordered the storming of Azovstal to be stopped and the area only besieged in such a way that "no flies" could get through.
"The Russians are afraid to storm the work," commented on the Kiev Minister for the occupied territories, Iryna Verechschuk, on Friday.
But the Russians would also not leave civilians out to "exert pressure on our military in this way".
She appealed to the world community to create an escape corridor from the steelworks.
Criticism also at Selenskyj
However, Selenskyj has to explain again and again why no advance is being made to the symbolic Mariupol in order to free the city.
The President repeatedly says that Ukraine "unfortunately does not receive as many weapons as it needs to end this war more quickly".
This applies "in particular" to the liberation of Mariupol from the Russian occupiers.
On Thursday, Zelenskyj was even clearer: "We can't do that." What remains is a political solution with international participation.
The expectations of Selenskyj are high.
Well-known journalist Yuriy Butuzov wrote on Friday that the government "cannot confine itself to appeals to the world's leaders.
That is the responsibility of the Commander-in-Chief.” However, Butusov also admitted that fighting when completely encircled is always very difficult.
A brigade of marine infantry is holed up in the steelworks, as well as a unit of the National Guard, which emerged from the nationalist Azov battalion;
this is an occasion for Russian propaganda to portray the defenders as "Nazis".
A representative of the unit who remained in Azovstal, Svyatoslav Palamar, told the BBC that the Russians used bunker-busting bombs, among other things, to attack the steelworks.
Civilians are trapped under the rubble of some buildings.
They reject Russian calls to surrender, knowing that all of Russia's "guarantees" are "worth nothing."
Message "to the German people"
The commander of the MarineFarterBrigade in Asowstal, Major Serhij Wolynskyj ("Wolyna"), demanded in an appeal "to the German people", the Federal President and the Federal Government, which he submitted the FAZ via a Messengerierung, Berlin may "as a guarantee for the safe Evacuation of the civilian population and the military from the besieged city occur.
You can save the lives of more than a hundred thousand civilians, several thousand relatives of the Ukrainian garrison and the world before evil, which can destroy the planet. "In Wolynskyjs text it continues:" Mariupol is still to be saved!
The world must finally say 'never again' and help us.” The people of the city were starving and “in the cellars lie my wounded soldiers with the pus from their wounds”.
Germany now have the chance