Ukraine’s latest suspected mass grave site is in a shell-damaged and abandoned industrial chicken farm on a hilltop littered with battle debris near the Russian border.

It’s not known how many bodies lie there — troops and officials put it somewhere between 90 and 100 without saying how they know — but evidence of the recent violence lies in rubble everywhere.

Fragments of the turret of a destroyed tank were thrown into the air and smashed through the shrapnel-ripped roof of a hangar-like shed, shattering empty poultry cages underneath.

A cold wind blows through the dust of splintered cement bricks, and the handful of Ukrainian guards occasionally wince when one of their own tanks throws a grenade at Russia.

Demining teams have not yet arrived at the site outside of Kozacha Lopan, about two kilometers from the border, and the potential mass grave has yet to be disturbed.

“I was told by the soldiers who came to our village that they saw a burial site of soldiers, but they didn’t give the number,” said Lyudmyla Vakulenko, head of the Kozacha Lopan local administration.

“They said a specialized unit would take care of it,” she added.

Forensic teams are expected later this week once the area is deemed safe for work. On Monday, soldiers moved cautiously, avoiding unfortified areas and looking out for mines and unexploded shells.

But reports of the possible mass burial will confirm the worst fears of Ukrainians who are still shocked by the discovery of a makeshift forest cemetery further south in retaken Izyum.

There, Ukrainian investigative teams found what they said were 447 bodies buried during the Russian occupation of the area: 425 civilians, including five children, and 22 Ukrainian soldiers.

Kharkiv regional governor Oleg Synegubov said most of Izyum’s bodies showed signs of violent death and that 30 of the victims appeared to have been tortured beforehand.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told CBS News on Sunday that Ukraine had found “two more mass graves, big graves with hundreds of people,” but it was not clear if he was referring to Kozacha Lopan.

Whose bodies are lying in the chicken plant is not yet known. Soldiers guarding the complex told AFP they expected to find the bodies of Russian and Ukrainian troops, as well as local civilians.

But Vakulenko says the officer who told her about the find said the military thinks it’s a grave for soldiers, and she got another clue as to the soldiers’ possible identities.

On April 22, she says, a Ukrainian force from the 72nd Mechanized Brigade counterattacked Russian troops dug in near the chicken factory, but was repulsed with heavy casualties.

The area was finally liberated by Ukrainian forces this month, and Vakulenko, who heads the civilian administration in the border area north of the city of Kharkiv, received a call over the weekend.

“Yes, there was a call to the community hotline from a woman named Olena. I don’t know if she’s a relative or a friend, just ‘Olena,'” Vakulenko told AFP.

“She left her phone number and said that some of her relatives or friends were killed on April 22 near the village of Kozacha Lopan.

“She asked, ‘Can I get official information?’ And we said, ‘Until now, no. Until the exhumation is done. Until this unit does its job and tells us what happened’.”

Whoever is buried under the chicken plant, it seems clear who was there when the burials took place. The hangars and outbuildings are full of signs of the Russian occupation.

Deep trenches were dug under the floors of some of the sheds, each as large as the tank that would have stood beneath the ceiling of the cavernous, metal-roofed poultry houses.

A Russian tank crewman’s leather helmet hung from a fence post and a Russian military jacket lay in the mud.

Ukrainian forces said the unit stationed there was recruited from Abkhazia, a breakaway region of Georgia under Russian occupation.

A bunker was dug under the concrete floor of the farm’s mechanical workshop, and the former residents built a makeshift gymnasium with a concrete dumbbell and a punching bag made of car tires.

A shell hole pierced a corner of the roof and let a ray of sunshine into the darkness.