A cloud of thick smoke hangs over the occupied city of Kherson in Ukraine. Its very stench is evidence of Russian war crimes, on a scale almost too sickening to contemplate.

The smoke comes from mobile incinerators that are running night and day. Vladimir Putin’s paranoid soldiers are burning the corpses of Ukrainian citizens tortured and murdered on suspicion of helping the resistance.

And they are dispatching the bodies of their own comrades too — hundreds of them. The Russians are killed by the constant pounding of Ukrainian shells from artillery placements surrounding the city and by highly organised, secret units of freedom fighters.

They are even killed by gangs of youths armed with knives who set upon drunken Russians and stab them.

The incinerators fill Kherson with the reek of charred flesh. There is no mistaking the smell and it adds to the pervasive sense of horror in this Black Sea port. It is a living hell.