According to Ukrainian police, 900 civilians were found dead in Kyiv

Russian forces retreating from the Kyiv region left behind the bodies of more than 900 slaughtered Ukrainian civilians, local authorities said on Friday.

The vast majority of victims around the capital were “simply executed,” police said. The grim body count continued to mount as bodies were uncovered under rubble and in mass graves.

Andriy Nebytov, the head of the capital’s regional police force, estimated that 95 percent of the bodies stranded in the region had been shot and that citizens who had expressed strong pro-Ukrainian views were being hunted down and murdered.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused occupying forces in the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions of doing the same.

“The occupiers believe that this will make it easier for them to control this area. But they are very wrong. You’re fooling yourself,” Zelensky said. “Russia’s problem is that it is not accepted by the entire Ukrainian people – and will never be accepted. Russia has lost Ukraine forever.”

News of the staggering death toll coincided with another somber revelation when Zelenskyy told CNN on Friday that between 2,500 and 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and around 10,000 injured in the invasion.

Officials provided a briefing on the atrocities as Russia’s Defense Ministry vowed to step up airstrikes on the capital in retaliation for the destruction of its lead warship, which was sunk by Ukrainian missiles on Thursday.

The loss of the 12,500-ton Black Sea flagship is the latest embarrassment to befall the supposed superpower’s forces during its unprovoked invasion. US intelligence officials doubted the ship had nuclear warheads on board at the time of its sinking, CNN reported.

Russia also accused Ukraine of killing seven people and damaging 100 residential buildings in attacks on the Bryansk region just across the country’s shared border as it prepared for renewed attacks on disputed areas to the east.

“The number and scale of rocket attacks on targets in Kyiv will increase in response to terrorist attacks or acts of sabotage by the nationalist Kiev regime on Russian territory,” Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov told the state news agency TASS.

Ukrainian defenders were unlikely to resist Russian advances on the besieged Donbass port of Mariupol, while shelling a neighborhood in Kharkiv killed seven people – including an infant – and wounded 34 others, local leaders said.

Bucha still appeared to have suffered the most atrocities, with 350 people found bound and shot.

US lawmakers toured the Bucha region this week and reported “indisputable evidence of Putin’s war crimes.”

With postal wires