Maxar Technologies released new satellite images Friday that appear to show more mass graves near the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which remains under siege.
The images reveal a second cemetery that has been expanded over the past month and several long trenches that are or likely will become grave sites. Each trench measures 131 feet long.
According to Maxar, the cemetery is near Vynohradne, Ukraine, which is about 7½ miles east of Mariupol.
The initial expansion of the trenches occurred between March 22 and 29, around the same time new graves were first being established near the Manhush cemetery on the northwest outskirts of Mariupol.
On Thursday, Maxar released five photographs dated between March 19 and April 3 that show large pits progressively dug along the lower side of a road in Manhush, which is more than 10 miles outside of Mariupol.
''The occupying forces have dug ... a number of mass graves,'' Petro Andrushenko, spokesman for Mayor Vadym Boychenko, said on his Telegram account. ''Each grave measures 100 feet wide and 100 feet long. Russians are using trucks to deliver the bodies. Then, they simply dump them, a couple at a time.''
''It's getting warmer now,'' Andrushenko wrote. ''You understand what happens to corpses when it's warm. They must've begun dropping them off at the end of March. I can't even imagine how many bodies. Must be thousands. At least we know where some of our citizens are buried.''
According to the most modest reports, there are more than 5,000 dead civilians in Mariupol.
Axios reports that U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said Friday that the U.N. is seeing growing evidence of war crimes in Ukraine as it catalogs a ''horror story'' of violations committed against civilians.
''We know the actual numbers are going to be much higher as the horrors inflicted in areas of intense fighting, such as Mariupol, come to light,'' Bachelet said.
On his Telegram account, Boychenko called it ''the new Babi Yar'' — a reference to a site near Kyiv where the Germans massacred more than 33,000 people during World War II.
''The worst crime of the 21st century in Mariupol. This is the new Babi Yar,'' he wrote. ''Then, Hitler killed Jews, Romas, Slavs. Now, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is murdering Ukrainians. He already killed tens of thousands of civilians in Mariupol. We need a powerful response from the civilised world to do anything possible to stop this genocide.''
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