Collecting the dead Russia left behind
Oleksii Yukov spends many of his nights dodging drones, navigating minefields and hoping not to be targeted by Russian artillery as he races to collect the remains of fallen soldiers from the battlefield.
In just three shattered tree lines around the devastated village of Klishchiivka outside Bakhmut, where Ukrainian and Russian forces have engaged in see-saw battles for more than a year, he collected 300 bodies. Almost all of them were Russians, he said, left behind in a maelstrom of violence where the struggle to stay alive often outweighs concern for the dead.
Mr. Yusov has been collecting bodies from the bloody fields and battered villages of eastern Ukraine for a decade. He is now the head of a group of civilian volunteers called Platsdarm, and has witnessed more deaths than he would like to remember.
But as Russia continues a slow offensive with major human consequences, Yusov says the toll is still shocking.
He said he found bodies stacked four or five deep in trenches. Men who died wearing summer uniforms are buried beneath men in winter clothing.
Sometimes Russian soldiers take the bodies, put them in large pits and “wrap them up because you can’t breathe around them,” he said, referring to the stench. “They don’t know what to do with it.”
The Russian army’s willingness to sacrifice thousands of soldiers in a blunt attempt to seize territory has been a defining feature of the war’s final year – reflected in the steep losses that marked the capture of two Ukrainian cities: Bakhmut last May And Avdiivka in February.
To get a sense of the scale of the death, The New York Times traveled with Mr. Yukov’s team of body collectors, interviewed Ukrainian soldiers about life in the midst of death and embedded with military drone units that carried out a unedited footage of some of the deadliest massacres. grounds.
The best time to retrieve the bodies is in bad weather, with fog and rain, Mr. Yukov said, because Russian drones do not fly into them. He likes to get close to where he needs to be at night, but the final move must be timed very carefully. It is often canceled.
Seen from drones over battlefields in eastern Ukraine, Russian soldiers can be seen frozen at the moment of their death, motionless on frost-covered, cratered fields. They are scattered on top of destroyed armored vehicles or next to destroyed tanks.
Many Ukrainian soldiers have also died in the bloody battles that take place every day, but Mr Yukov said most of the bodies he collects are Russians left behind.
“We are dealing with the reality of war, not war on paper,” he said. “I say specifically what I see: for every five or six bodies of Ukrainian soldiers, we find almost 80 Russian bodies.”
The Russian Defense Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
With U.S. military support cut off and Ukrainian forces running low on ammunition, more Ukrainian soldiers are dying under brutal attacks from a better-equipped, more-strong army.
“Over the past two to three months we have noticed serious changes,” he said, referring to the growing number of victims in Ukraine.
Finding the dead is not always possible because fighting takes place along the front, sometimes for weeks or months. But repeated visits to areas near the most violent hotspots – along with the testimonies of Ukrainian soldiers, medics and volunteers tending to the dead, the accounts of Russian military bloggers and visual images released by soldiers on both sides – provide a searing window . what death looks like on the battlefield.
After Mr. Yukov collects the bodies, he takes them, if they are civilians, to the local morgue. If they are soldiers from either army, he hands them over to the Ukrainian army, with whom he works closely.
The Russians’ remains could be exchanged for the remains of fallen Ukrainian soldiers – one of the rare issues on which the warring armies still cooperate.
There are no reliably accurate estimates of the number of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers killed in the past two years. President Volodymyr Zelensky said last month that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion.
He also claimed that Russia had suffered 500,000 casualties, including 180,000 troops killed. His figures cannot be independently verified.
Mr Zelensky’s accounting of the Ukrainian victims differs sharply from that of the Ukrainian victims estimates from US officialswhich last summer said nearly 70,000 Ukrainians had been killed and 100,000 to 120,000 injured.
In Russia, according to a well-documented Soviet-era playbook, the staggering amount of losses has been carefully hidden from public view by an authoritarian government that controls major media outlets.
Estimates from various Western intelligence agencies put the number of dead and wounded for Russia at somewhere between 300,000 and 350,000, with most estimates of well over 100,000 dead.
As the ranks of the Russian army have been strengthened by conscripts from poor villages, ethnic minorities have been forced to enlist and convicts released from prison in exchange for fights in Ukraine, the Kremlin has so far managed to prevent the costs of its war from hitting the most privileged parts of society.
“I think people understand, but are afraid of the truth,” Mr. Yukov said of the Russian public. “It is easier for them to believe in propaganda,” he said. “But what we see are enormous losses on the Russian side, catastrophically large.”
With tens of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers killed in the past two years, the toll can feel overwhelming and abstract. But for the soldiers at the front, death is part of everyday life.
Ukrainian soldiers sometimes struggle to put into words what it is like to kill wave after wave of attackers, only to see more come after them.
Junior Sergeant Pavlo Zinenko, 36, was maintaining fiber optic cables when the Russians invaded. He rushed to join the 128th Territorial Defense Brigade after seeing the atrocities Russian troops committed in Bucha.
“I was willing to give my life to ensure that no more civilians would die on our side,” he said. “But over time, when you see so much death, especially when your close friends die in front of your eyes, it really breaks a person.”
“Death is not frightening,” he said. “It’s just sickening.”
When he encounters dead Russian soldiers, he said, he has “no feelings, no emotions.”
“The only thought that comes to mind is that if they’re dead, that means they can’t kill anyone else here,” he said. “Death is generally not a pleasant phenomenon, and when you are surrounded by it, the impact is even greater.”
Vitalii Sholudko, a 20-year-old machine gunner with the 128th, said he didn’t think about death until a Russian missile crashed into a building near his home in Dnipro two years ago.
“I saw my mother crying, and my sister,” he said. “What can a child do? There was nothing I could do but take up arms and defend my family.”
Now he has slept in trenches full of dead Russian soldiers, he said.
“We slept, ate and kept watch next to the bodies,” he said. The battle was too fierce to worry about moving it.
“There was no time to think, and you couldn’t afford to think about someone dying or feeling sorry for them,” he said. “It’s you or them.”
Mr Yukov has been collecting the dead from the Donbas battlefields for more than a decade, working on both sides of the front line until the full-scale invasion in 2022 made it impossible to get to the Russian side. As a civilian, he does not have to adhere to military restrictions on discussing Ukrainian victims.
His dedication to his mission – regardless of what uniform the dead wore during their lives – has earned him the widespread respect and trust of the Ukrainian military. His work is funded by private donations.
Mr. Yukov, who lost an eye last year after a mine exploded during a mission, said he is often asked why he risks his life to recover bodies.
“It is important for me to take them all home because we are human, and we must remember to remain human,” he said.
Knowing that his work provides grieving families with a small measure of comfort and some closure helps him sleep at night. But something deeper drives him.
“When we talk about humanity and human rights,” he said, “we must remember that even the dead have rights.”
Liubov Sholudko contributed reporting from eastern Ukraine. Natalia Novosolova And Anastasia Kuznietsova reporting contributed.