DONETSK OBLAST, Ukraine — Volunteers with a nongovernmental organization named Platzdarm have taken it upon themselves to carry out one of the grimmest chores of war: recover and help identify the remains of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers left to die on the contested battlefield.
Along the outskirts of a small, unremarkable village in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region on a recent Sunday, a van sporting the blue and yellow colors of the Ukrainian flag slowly made its way up a dirt road before halting atop a hill overlooking a small cemetery. On the truck’s flanks, an inscription in bold lettering betrayed the poignant nature of its load: “Gruz 200,” or “Cargo 200” — military code inherited from the Soviet era designating the transport of dead soldiers.
The carcass of a Ukrainian armored personnel carrier lay farther up the road, its body and windows riddled with bullet holes. Plumes of smoke rose over the horizon, a testament to the fierce fighting across the region.
At the top of the wind-swept hill, the vehicle’s occupants were greeted by a short, energetic man dressed in military fatigues. Despite his martial attire and commanding attitude, 37-year-old Alexey Yukov isn’t a soldier — though he has witnessed the realities of modern warfare up close.
A native of the nearby city of Slovyansk in the oblast of Donetsk, Mr. Yukov founded Platzdarm, whose members scour the battlefields of eastern Ukraine to recover and help identify the remains of soldiers.
Sporting a neatly trimmed beard and weighing his words carefully, Mr. Yukov said he had been searching for war victims for nearly a quarter century. As a teenager, he stumbled upon strange white spots in the lush forests surrounding Slovyansk. The spots marked the final resting places of an unknowable number of Soviet and German soldiers killed during the epic battles of World War II.
When a Russia-backed separatist war broke out in his native Donbas in 2014, Mr. Yukov and his organization set to work seeking fresh bodies instead of victims of a long-ago war.
Bodies and souls
When Russian tanks and armored vehicles rumbled across the Ukrainian border in February 2022, few expected that their country could long survive the onslaught. Yet more than two years in, the bloodied and battered country still stands.
With the clash settling over time into gruesome positional warfare — its trench-lined pockmarked battlefields in eastern and southern Ukraine eerily reminiscent of scenes from World War I — the bodies pile up. Platzdarm finds a constant demand for its grim yet necessary work.
“Let’s open it,” said Mr. Yukov, gesturing toward the refrigerated van his team uses to ferry bodies back from the battlefield.
As the doors opened, the gathered volunteers grimaced when hit with the faint smell of putrefaction. Mr. Yukov said all of the remains examined that day were retrieved near Klishchivka, a small village near the Donbas front lines where fierce fighting has raged since the fall of neighboring Bakhmut in May.
The surrounding area is still littered with the bodies of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers, but the constant shelling has impeded the work of the body collectors. Some have died while carrying out this work. In January 2023, Denys Sosnenko, 21, a former Ukrainian national kickboxing champion and a Platzdarm volunteer, was killed when his van drove over an anti-tank mine.
“We understand the risks that we are taking, and it is very dangerous at times, but it is a necessary work,” Mr. Yukov said. “We not only bring back the bodies but also the souls.”
One by one, the black body bags were taken out of the truck and carefully laid in rows on the grass. Putting on a pair of latex gloves, Mr. Yukov began the examination process.
A fellow volunteer, dressed all in black, jotted down every relevant detail on a clipboard while another recorded the proceedings with his phone.
Mr. Yukov methodically inspected the remains of each soldier, emptied their pockets, and gathered their personal belongings and documents before trying to rearrange the grotesque puzzle of these barely recognizable bodies. Every detail was duly noted, including the color of a shirt and the sizes and locations of the wounds.
Some corpses had rotten away almost entirely, and the volunteers’ best bet to identify them was to look for some kind of dental work.
On occasion, the search yielded identification papers and decaying traces of a lost life and a faded humanity: a burned copy of the Quran and a handful of rubles on one corpse and a rosary caked in mud on another. The volunteers cleaned the prayer beads with water before laying them beside the body.
From one of the best-preserved victims, Mr. Yukov retrieved a small notebook filled with children’s drawings. Seemingly lost in thought, he started quietly singing “Gruppa Krovi,” a song by Soviet rock band Kino, as he tore off a patch signaling the blood type of the deceased soldier.
“My blood type mark is on the sleeve, my service number marked on the sleeve,” the song lyrics say in one verse. “Wish me now some luck in the fight.”
Forensic skills
All of the information collected by the volunteers is passed to military officers, who inventory the bodies of Russian soldiers to be exchanged for Ukrainian bodies.
One of the last corpses to be examined that long day gave pause to the volunteers. The hands were bound by duct tape, and the uniform was unrecognizable. The team’s forensic skills came to the fore.
“He doesn’t have any documents on him, but the [camouflage] pattern that he’s wearing is unlike the ones usually sold in Russia,” Mr. Yukov said. “His boots are also Western-made, so I think he’s one of ours.”
The searchers speculate that the unidentifiable victim may have been an executed Ukrainian POW.
As the Platzdarm team sifted through the decomposing remains of yet another dozen fallen soldiers on Feb. 25, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy disclosed for the first time the losses sustained by Ukraine since the beginning of the invasion. “Thirty-one thousand Ukrainian soldiers have died in this war,” Mr. Zelenskyy revealed during one of his daily addresses to the nation. “Not 300,000 or 150,000 or whatever Putin and his lying circle are saying.”
Although Russian casualties are difficult to ascertain, a declassified U.S. intelligence report published in December assessed that the war had cost Russia 315,000 dead and wounded soldiers.
The Kremlin’s conscription of another 300,000 in September 2022 seemingly confirmed that the Russian armed forces had been hemorrhaging personnel since the invasion. Yet the demographic difference between the two countries means Russia can sustain much higher losses than its neighbor. “Each of these losses is a great loss for us,” Mr. Zelenskyy said.
Mr. Yukov echoed the sentiment as the day drew to a close. As the red-tinted sun slowly set over the rolling hills of Donbas, he made a personal appeal to Russians to stop the carnage.
“Mothers, how can you accept to trade your child, who you have reared, fed and watched grow, for a plastic bag and an iron medal?” he asked, removing his surgical gloves. “You have buried your youth and ours, and what did you get in return? Ruins and misery, and the destruction of the country you claim to want to reunite with.”
— Due to an editing error, the dateline for this story was incorrectly listed on the original piece.
• Guillaume Ptak can be reached at gptak@washingtontimes.com.
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