Digging up old graves to make room for recently fallen soldiers
For nearly 15 months, the bodies of fallen soldiers have steadily filled a military cemetery on a hill in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Now the old, unmarked graves of the dead in previous wars are being dug up to make way for the seemingly endless stream of dead since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
On Monday afternoon, half a dozen gravediggers took a break in the shadows, waiting for the last coffin to be buried at Lychakiv Cemetery. As they smoked cigarettes and shielded themselves from the sun, they lamented the devastation Russia had wrought. And they said they were bracing for more deaths as fighting intensified during Ukraine’s counter-offensive.
Fierce fighting is taking place on the front lines in the east and south of the country, with Ukraine reporting Monday that it had recaptured eight settlements during two weeks of “offensive action”. Hanna Malyar, Deputy Secretary of Defense, wrote on the Telegram messaging app that Ukrainian units had advanced about 7 miles and recaptured an area of about 44 square miles to the south. Among the recaptured settlements, she said, was the village of Piatykhatky, which Russian reports over the weekend confirmed.
While the recapture of Piatykhatky, in the Zaporizhzhia region, is evidence that Ukrainian forces continue to advance, it is not a significant military breakthrough. Like the other villages that have been recaptured, this one is small – Piatykhatky translates to “five houses” – and claims to have come at the cost of Ukrainian lives and sophisticated Western equipment.
“The situation in the east is now difficult,” Ms Malyar wrote. “The enemy has gathered its forces and is conducting an active offensive in the direction of Lyman and Kupyan, trying to take the initiative away from us.” But she added: “Our troops act courageously against the superiority of the enemy in troops and resources and do not allow the enemy to advance.”
A British Defense Intelligence report on Sunday said both armies were suffering significant casualties of the current fighting, and military experts have said months of artillery duels and trench warfare are likely ahead.
Like the Ukrainians, the Russians have been secretive about the toll of the war. The Kremlin has not updated its official tally since September, when Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu said nearly 6,000 Russians had been killed. Experts considered that number to be low at the time.
Leaked Pentagon documents published in April estimated Ukraine had suffered 124,500 to 131,000 casualties, with up to 17,500 killed in action, while the Russians had suffered 189,500 to 223,000 casualties, including up to 43,000 killed in action.
A team of often anonymous researchers inside and outside Russia, led by news organization Mediazona and Russia’s BBC News service, has compiled an independent census of confirmed deaths that is updated every two weeks. Last week, the to count surpassed 25,000 casualties, also considered an undercount. The team uses open source materials such as obituaries in local newspapers and cemetery visits for its census. Since the effort began last year, multiple regions in Russia have banned obituaries to camouflage the number.
The magnitude of the losses is being felt in communities such as the one in Lviv, evident in the growing number of military graves in large and small cemeteries across the country.
On Monday, two men who died hundreds of miles apart were buried next to each other. Bohdan Didukh, 34, was killed last week by a mine in the Zaporizhzhia region of southern Ukraine, where the first stages of Ukraine’s counter-offensive began. Three days later, Oleh Didukh, 52, died of a heart attack while serving in an air defense unit in the west of the country.
The men, who shared a surname but never knew each other in life, were united in death. They were honored side by side at a joint funeral in Lviv. Their families were overcome with grief as gravediggers shoveled dirt onto their coffins.
Incense hung in the air at the funeral service at a Greek Catholic church in the center of Lviv. The priest said he assumed the two were father and son because of their names and ages. Their families were joined by their pain, he said.
After the church ceremony, the coffins were loaded into vans and driven to the main square, where a single trumpeter played. The procession then proceeded to the cemetery.
Residents stopped along the route to pay their respects. A young girl stood beside her father, a small brown shopping bag in her hand, staring straight ahead as the coffins passed by. Some bystanders fell to their knees.
At the cemetery, Olena Didukh, the wife of Bohdan Didukh, fainted, overwhelmed by grief and the midday sun. Her sister stopped her and put her arm around her back. A stone’s throw away, Oleh Didukh’s family laid yellow and blue flowers, the colors of the Ukrainian flag, on his grave.
Funerals for fallen soldiers have taken on a grim routine in Lviv. Since last year, soldiers killed in battle have been buried in seemingly countless funerals, such as the one in Lviv, in every corner of the country.
And it is not uncommon for several military funerals to be held in Lviv at the same time. One of the harsh realities of the Russian war is that even in a city far from active fighting, soldiers killed on the front lines are returned to their hometowns, sometimes in groups, and buried at the same time. It is considered an efficient way if the dead keep coming.
Along this hill on a clear afternoon, mourners tend to the graves of relatives buried here for weeks, months or more than a year.
Mariia Kovalska’s son, Ivan, was murdered nine months ago in Kramatorsk, in the eastern Donetsk region. He was 30 years old and his round face and blue eyes resembled his mother’s, she explained proudly.
“What’s It All For?” she asked, the pain clear in her voice. “The best of the best died. He graduated from college. He graduated cum laude. Why did he die?”
Kateryna Havrylenko, 50, who works for the city that maintains the graves, loaded soil onto a wheelbarrow. There are funerals here almost every day, she said.
“With the counter-offensive, many young men and women will be killed,” she said. “Words cannot express how difficult it is. Very, very difficult. Even if they are strangers, they are someone’s children, just like I have a child.”
At the beginning of the Russian war, there was a small group of freshly dug graves on a hill in part of the cemetery. Now nearly 500 soldiers are buried here in plots that fill half the hill, she said, with more to come.
In the upper part of the cemetery, city officials have begun excavating the unmarked graves of soldiers buried as far back as World War I. .
“It’s so hard to imagine – there were so few of them last summer,” said Ms. Havrylenko. “And now there are so many.” She added with a distant look, “How many will there be until the war is over?”
Reporting contributed by Neil MacFarquhar from stockholm, Cassandra Vinograd And Matthew Mpoke Bigg from London and Daria Mitiuk from Lviv, Ukraine.