Special laboratories provided to Kyiv by Western partners travel around the country and process evidence in real time. Thanks to military assistance, DNA identification will take just over an hour.
Ukraine became a pioneer in military science with the help of mobile DNA laboratories. The new development reduces the time of identification of the dead. Thanks to her, this procedure will take a little more than an hour. This was reported on March 1 by The Independent.
Mobile DNA labs provided to Ukraine by Western partners, including France and the Howard J. Buffett Foundation in the United States, travel around the country in police vans. This allows the expert team to process evidence in real time.
New technologies significantly speed up the process of identifying thousands of dead and collecting evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
“Before, due to the huge number of deaths, there was a huge queue for DNA analysis in the laboratories that we had in western Ukraine,” explained Sergey Bolinev, chief investigator in Kharkiv in the northeastern region of the country.
Last year, law enforcement officers received more than 400 bodies in a mass grave in the city of Izyum, Kharkiv region. According to experts, it could take years to identify such a number of bodies. Thanks to modern laboratories, the situation has changed.
“I estimate that it would take up to five years to obtain and analyze DNA from these bodies using our previous system. You had to tell relatives: “You are in line, and someday we will get your DNA matches.” Now we can establish coincidence in a few hours,” said Sergey Bolinev.
In an interview with The Independent, Ukraine’s chief war crimes prosecutor, Yuriy Belousov, said that up to 100,000 Ukrainian civilians could be killed following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This figure is more than ten times higher than the official figures released by the United Nations, which admits that it has a shockingly low estimate.
He added that Ukrainians still have more than 3,300 bodies that have not yet been identified as they find it difficult to keep up with the numbers, especially after the discovery of numerous mass graves in recently liberated areas.
Ukraine has returned 54 bodies of soldiers who died after the shelling of a colony in Yelenovka in the temporarily occupied Donetsk region, the Ministry for the Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories has reported. There is a DNA examination and identification of the dead.
In Borodyanka in the Kyiv region, the bodies of three more local residents who died during the occupation of the Russian Federation were found. This was announced by the head of the police of the Kyiv region Andrey Nebitov on March 2.
