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Investigators searching through what appears to be one of the largest mass burial sites discovered in Ukraine have found evidence of atrocities, including torture, on land recently recaptured from Russia, Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy said Friday.

In a video he apparently rushed out to underscore the gravity of the discoveries just hours after exhumations began, Zelenskyy said hundreds of civilian adults and children, as well as soldiers, had been found “tortured, shot, killed by shelling” near Izium’s Pishchanske cemetery. He cited evidence of atrocities, such as a body with a rope around its neck and broken arms.

In the video, Zelenskyy said more than 400 graves have been found at the site but that the number of victims isn’t yet known. Zelenskyy, who visited the Izium area on Wednesday, said the discoveries showed again the need for world leaders to declare Russia a state sponsor of terrorism.

At a press briefing on Friday, John Kirby, the National Security Council coordinator for Strategic Communications at the White House, decried Russia’s actions in Izium as “horrifying” and repugnant,” adding that it is “in keeping with the kind of depravity and the brutality with which Russian forces have been prosecuting this war against Ukraine and Ukrainian people.” 

But he said the United States would likely not heed Zelenskyy’s request that world leaders recognize Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism, saying the Biden administration believes there are “better alternatives to holding Russia accountable and to increase the costs and consequences on their behavior in Ukraine.” 

“The state sponsor of terrorism designation could actually make it harder for humanitarian aid to get into Ukraine,” Kirby explained. “It could put in jeopardy the food security, the grain deal that is in place […] and we believe that it could limit Mr. Zelenskyy’s flexibility at the negotiating table if and when it gets to that point.” 

It was a similar position to the one stated by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre last Tuesday, who told reporters such a designation would “undercut our unprecedented multilateral condition that has been so effective at holding Putin accountable.”

Currently, there are only four countries who have been given the state sponsor of terror designation by the U.S. government: Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Syria.

Countries designated as such are subject to a number of limitations, which include “restrictions on U.S. foreign assistance; a ban on defense exports and sales; certain controls over exports of dual use items; and miscellaneous financial and other restrictions,” per the Department of State. 

The decision not to designate Russia comes despite a continuous push both from Zelenskyy and bipartisan lawmakers in the United States for the government to do so. 

But the United States is prepared to “continue to actively support efforts to document war crimes and atrocities that Russian forces committed in Ukraine and to assist national and international efforts to identify and hold Russia accountable,” Kirby told reporters on Friday.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia would press on with the war despite the success of the recent Ukrainian counteroffensive.

Speaking to reporters Friday after attending a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, Putin said the “liberation” of the entire territory of Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland of Donbas remains Russia’s main goal.

He added that “we aren’t in a rush” to achieve the stated goals, noting that Russia has only engaged volunteer soldiers in the operation.

Digging in the rain, workers hauled body after body out of the sandy soil in a pine forest near Izium. Protected by full body suits and rubber gloves, they gently felt through the decomposing remains of the victims’ clothing, seemingly looking for things that might identify them.

Ukrainian forces gained access to the site after recapturing the northeastern city and much of the wider Kharkiv region in a counteroffensive that suddenly shifted the momentum in the nearly seven-month war. Ukrainian officials also found evidence of torture elsewhere in the region. The U.N. human rights office said it would investigate.

Associated Press journalists who visited the Izium site saw graves amid the pine trees, marked with simple wooden crosses. Most were numbered into the 400s.

The majority of the people buried were believed to be civilians, but a marker on one mass grave said it contained the bodies of 17 Ukrainian soldiers.

Elsewhere in Ukraine, the war continued to claim lives and wreak destruction.

— Ukraine’s presidential office said Russian shelling killed five civilians and wounded 18 others in a 24-hour span. Missile strikes were also reported, with Zelenskyy’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih among the targets for a third consecutive day Friday. Air raid sirens also howled in the capital, Kyiv.

— More killings targeting pro-Russian separatist officials were reported in areas under their control. Separatist authorities said a blast killed the prosecutor-general of the self-proclaimed republic in the Luhansk region. Moscow-backed authorities said two Russian-installed officials were also killed in Berdyansk, a city in the Zaporizhzhia region occupied earlier in the war. And local authorities reported at least one person killed and 10 wounded in a Ukrainian missile strike on an administrative building in Russian-occupied Kherson.

— To bolster the Ukrainian offensive, the Biden administration announced another $600 million package of military aid.

Izium resident Sergei Gorodko said that among the hundreds buried in individual graves were dozens of adults and children killed in a Russian airstrike on an apartment building.

He said he pulled some of them out of the rubble “with my own hands.”

Before exhumation, investigators with metal detectors scanned the site for any hidden explosives. Soldiers strung red and white plastic tape between the trees to mark off parts of the site. A few graves had wreaths of flowers hanging from the crosses, and some bore people’s names.

Izium was a key supply hub for Russian forces until they withdrew in recent days. Izium city councilor Maksym Strelnikov told reporters that hundreds of people had died during the fighting and after Russia seized the town in March. Many couldn’t get a proper burial, he said.

His claims could not be immediately verified, but similar scenes have played out in other cities captured by Russian forces, including Mariupol.

Strelnikov said an untold number of people also died from lack of proper health care since the “medical infrastructure of the city was destroyed.” Most of the city’s pre-war population of 47,000 fled to Ukrainian-held territories. Strelnikov said 10,000 residents remain in the ruined city — bracing for more hardship with winter coming and most infrastructure destroyed.

Ukraine’s national police chief, Ihor Klymenko, said “torture chambers” have also been found in the Kharkiv region’s recaptured towns and villages. The claim could not be independently verified.

Seven Sri Lankan students who fell into Russian hands in Kupiansk, also in the Kharkiv region, have also said that they were held and mistreated, he said.

“They are scared, they were abused,” he said. They include “a woman who can barely speak” and two with torn toe nails.

Ukrainian Deputy Interior Minister Yevhen Enin said bodies exhumed in the region also showed “traces of a violent death, but also of torture — cut off ears, etc. This is just the beginning.”

“All these traces of war crimes are now carefully documented by us. And we know from the experience of Bucha that the worst crimes can only be exposed over time,” Enin said in an interview with Ukraine’s Radio NV.