In the middle of a forest at the outskirts of recently-liberated Izyum, by a cemetery, Ukraine's army is hard at work: a mass grave of Ukrainian soldiers was found after the departure of the Russians. Graves topped with white crosses and marked with numbers lie dotted between the trees outside the city in the eastern Donbas region, with one inscription reading: "Ukrainian army, 17 people. Izyum morgue." Oleg Kotenko, Ukraine's Commissioner for Missing People, surveys the scene as deminers probe for explosives and the forensic teams exhume and examine the lifeless bodies, occasionally asking for the progress the teams have made. Counting the number of dead is a "tricky business to figure out", but he believes he has a rough idea all the same: "If we count the crosses, there are around 440 crosses and if we find 17 bodies here, then there would be more than 450 in total." He adds that the Ukrainian forces found the graves thanks to an unverified video allegedly showing Russian soldiers moving bodies from the city's morgue to the mass grave. AFP has been unable to independently verify the video shown by Oleg Kotenko. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES ARRANGED IN SEQUENCES