Kherson Evacuates Hospitals Amid Russian Bombardment: Live Updates

LVIVSKY OTRUBI, Ukraine — More that 15,000 people have gone missing since Russia invaded Ukraine, the International Committee for Missing Persons estimated on Friday. This is the story of two of them.

After Russian forces retreated from the southern port city of Kherson and its environs earlier this month, Serhiy Novosad, 26, returned to the small village of Lvivsky Otrubi where he had grown up, looking for his father and grandmother.

As the Russians’ fortunes sank in recent months, their occupation tactics had turned increasingly savage, and Mr. Novosad had begged his father and grandmother to leave and join him in Kyiv. But his father, also named Serhiy Novosad, would have none of it.

He was a farmer and had to tend to his field, he said. City life was not for him. The two men had been able to stay in touch up until the final days of the Russian occupation. But as the Russians pulled out of the village in early November, his father’s phone stopped working.

After being unable to reach him on Nov. 10, Mr. Novosad set out on the three-day journey from Kyiv to search for him and his grandmother.

When he got to his family home, he found Ukrainian soldiers living there. He asked them where his father was. They shrugged their shoulders, and pointed to what appeared to be a makeshift grave with a cross in front of the house directly across the street.

Reluctantly, he went to investigate.

The first thing he noticed were his father’s shoes sitting in a narrow trench dug into the front yard. But before he could look more closely, he had to wait for a demining team.

The Russians had used the family’s house as a base of sorts, and all around were discarded Russian uniforms and boots, dozens of empty ammunition crates, obscene graffiti scribbled on the walls, half-eaten hotdogs and tinned meat.

And the threat of mines.

The scale of the mining around Kherson is hard to comprehend, Rostyslav Smirnov, an adviser to the Ukrainian interior minister, said on Friday. While more than 5,000 mines have been disposed of, he said, they remain everywhere, including in children’s toys. “There was a mine between two soccer balls,” he said.

Once the sappers had removed the wooden cross to make sure it was not rigged, Ukrainian police officers this week started to clear dirt from the shallow grave.

Mr. Novosad recognized his father’s feet. He also spotted his grandmother’s cane visible through a thin layer of dirt. The bloodied, bruised and bullet-riddled bodies made it clear that Serhiy Novosad, 49, and his mother, Lyubov Novosad, 78, had met a violent end.

Andriy Kovalenko, a prosecutor in the Kherson regional prosecutor’s office, said their deaths would be added to the more than 6,000 criminal cases opened in and around Kherson city since the start of the war, based on testimony from people who had fled the area.

The Russian retreat from Kherson to the other side of the Dnipro River played out over weeks, during which time Russian soldiers had time to systematically loot the city and, according to Ukrainian officials, cover up evidence of war crimes.

Only now, with the Russians having withdrawn from the area, is it possible to independently investigate allegations of atrocities, including torture, kidnapping, murder and sexual violence.

But that work is complicated by the fact that Russian forces now across the river are stepping up their shelling of Kherson city and the surrounding towns and villages, promising more death and destruction in the coming weeks and months.