Satellite image provider Maxar Technologies has said the images show more than 200 mass graves in the Russian-occupied village of Manhush, about 20 km west of Mariupol, the rmf24.pl website reported.
According to the Mariupol City Council, the graves could contain up to 9,000 bodies of civilians killed by Russian forces.
Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko has called the discovery "the new Babi Yar," a reference to a series of World War II massacres in which more than 33,000 Ukrainian Jews were killed by the German Nazis in 1941.
He accused Russian forces of "hiding their military crimes" by taking the bodies of civilians from the city and burying them in Manhush.
The top war crimes prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, has said that Ukraine has become "a crime scene" amid Russia's brutal invasion of the country.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address last week that a group of forensic experts from the International Criminal Court, led by Khan, had visited sites including Bucha near Kyiv, where mass graves of murdered civilians were discovered in early April after the withdrawal of Russian troops from northern Ukraine.
The top war crimes prosecutor, Karim Khan (centre), inspects a mass grave site in the Ukrainian town of Bucha near the capital Kyiv on April 13, 2022, amid mounting reports of Russian war crimes. Photo: EPA/OLEG PETRASYUK
"Responsibility for the Russian military for war crimes is inevitable," Zelensky said in a message to the nation at the time.
He added, as quoted by the ukrinform.net website: "We will drag them all to the tribunal. And not only for what was done in Bucha."
Polish President Andrzej Duda said on a visit to Kyiv last week with his Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian counterparts that “those responsible for crimes against the Ukrainian people must be punished by international tribunals.”
He appealed for “sanctions that will exclude Russia” from the international community.
Poland’s upper-house Speaker, Tomasz Grodzki, said last Friday after returning from Kyiv that the Russian devastation of Ukraine and atrocities committed there were "much more terrible" than he and others could have imagined before visiting the war-torn country.
US President Joe Biden has described Russia's actions in Ukraine as amounting to genocide, news outlets have reported.
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Source: rmf24.pl