By ERIKA KINETZ and SOLOMIIA HERA (Associated Press)
DOVHENKE, Ukraine (AP) — The odor in the car is strong and sweet, the overwhelming smell of bodies that have been left in mud and destruction for too long, the ones that were not eaten by dogs. Oleksii Yukov, a 38-year-old martial arts teacher who leads a group of volunteer body collectors in Ukraine, does not notice.
He is talking on the phone with one of the mothers. She heard that her son was injured in battle and left behind, but she is not sure where.
“He was abandoned to die and now they are telling me that ‘he died as a hero!?’” she says, struggling to speak between sobs.
“Don’t cry,” Yukov tells her. “Because if you get weak — no one will help him … Don’t cry in front of anyone! They are not worth it. Cry in front of the grave of your son only.”
“We will take everyone back,” he promised. “We just need some time.”
Yukov says the same thing to all the mothers. He tells them to talk about their deceased children, so they will be remembered. There is one person in particular whose story Yukov does not want forgotten: Oleksandr Romanovych Hrysiuk — Sasha, to his mother, Olha.
In a cryptic voice message last year, Yukov urged Olha to tell Sasha’s story. “Not everyone has such a story,” he told her.
But he left out the most important part: What it had cost him to bring Sasha home.
COUNTING BODIES
The real impact of the war in Ukraine — and the chances faced by each side — can be measured by the number of people who have died.
More than half a million people have been killed or seriously injured in two years of war in Ukraine, according to Western intelligence estimates — a human toll not seen in Europe since World War II. The question of who prevails is being increasingly shaped by which side can tolerate higher losses.
By that measure, Moscow has the upper hand.
Analysts say it will be difficult for Ukraine to outmatch Russian forces, which continue to grow despite hundreds of thousands of casualties, without significant resources from its international partners. But the U.S. Congress has not approved $60 billion in aid for Ukraine, even as soldiers at the front run low on ammunition.
“Putin is not running a democracy,” said Evelyn Farkas, a former senior Pentagon official for Russia and Ukraine who now heads the McCain Institute at Arizona State University. “Putin can afford to be more callous and disregard the body count.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on the other hand, is presiding over a more democratic system, “where the will of the people is actually the strongest component of their war machine.”
Russia had 3.7 times more men of fighting age than Ukraine in 2022, according to World Bank data. That means that though Russia has sustained nearly twice as many casualties as Ukraine, according to Western intelligence estimates, on a per capita basis Russia’s losses remain lower than Ukraine’s.
At current levels of recruitment, the Kremlin can sustain current attrition rates through 2025, according to an assessment by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a think tank in London. Meanwhile, Ukraine this week took the politically difficult step of lowering the military conscription age from 27 to 25 in an effort to replenish its ranks.
Nick Reynolds, a researcher at RUSI, stated that the Russians have a larger industrial base and more manpower, so they can use manpower and equipment at a lower cost.
Yukov knows that to distant observers, war is about geopolitics, death is just a statistic, and money is considered more important than human lives. However, he disagrees with this view.
He mentioned that war is characterized by death, irrationality, and horror.
GOD TAKES THE BEST AWAY
The last conversation Olha Hrysiuk had with her son occurred on May 15, 2022, where they discussed spring crops, the vegetable garden, horses, cows, and egg-laying chickens as if they had all the time in the world. The next day, Sasha disappeared.
The following day, Sasha went missing.
For three days, Olha accepted the silence, believing it was due to Sasha being on a mission. On the fourth day, she learned that Sasha was missing.
She contacted the head of her village, who then informed the nearest military office, and eventually, Sasha's military unit confirmed that he was missing.
Sasha, who was not originally a fighter and studied physiotherapy, was conscripted on April 3, 2022. Olha gave him a silver cross on a chain to wear into battle.
Olha wondered where her son, who was known for his sweet smile, protruding ears, love for running, and numerous friends, was. She also pondered the whereabouts of her son, who dreamed of building a home for a future family.
“In Ukraine, we have a saying that God takes the best away,” Olha said. “I think this is the case.”
After appealing for information on social media, Olha's daughter-in-law managed to speak directly with some soldiers from Sasha’s unit.
They informed her that Sasha was dead and expressed their regret for being unable to retrieve his body due to heavy shelling. They disclosed that they had hidden him in a cellar in Dovhenke, a rural settlement in eastern Ukraine under Russian control. They promised to write his name on the shells they fired as a tribute to him and referred to him as a hero.
At the age of 27, Sasha had endured six weeks of war. It was time for him to return home. If Olha couldn't have her son back, she was prepared to accept any remains.
But how?
Due to the lack of progress, Olha made numerous calls and even resorted to purchasing a notebook to keep track. She reached out to various organizations, including the Ukrainian Red Cross, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Ukraine’s National Information Bureau, the Ukrainian military, the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, and many other hotlines and volunteer groups. She also reached out via email to the Commissioner for Human Rights, and wrote letters to the Ministry of Defense and President Zelenskyy.
She meticulously documented the responses she received, including those who didn't respond and those who advised her to wait. For six months, Olha persistently sought assistance.
“I just could not live without trying,” she said. “How is it possible to not even see the bones of your child! I was even ready to go to Dovhenke myself!”
Ultimately, she was advised that if Black Tulip couldn't bring Sasha home, then no one could.
‘WE HAVE TO BE BURIED’
Black Tulip is the volunteer body collection network that Yukov collaborated with in 2014 during the Russian occupation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine. Despite the disbandment of Black Tulip, the name has endured. Yukov subsequently established his own organization. called Platsdarm, which means “bridgehead,” to continue the mission of Black Tulip.
Yukov’s task is to bring everyone back. He has gathered the fragments of a man scattered across the trees and restored them to the soldier’s mother. He has taken human remains from a smoldering helicopter. Once, a mother asked him to retrieve her son’s arm, which she’d heard was left dangling in a particular tree; he did. He has sifted through feces to recover the finger bones and teeth of men whose corpses were eaten by pigs.
“Listen, if your child was killed, you would gnaw through this mess with your teeth to bury the body,” he said.
Yukov is racing against time, which consumes corpses, to bring all the souls home. But there are too many. He can’t fit them all in his car, even if he straps them to the roof or carries them in his hands. They overwhelm him.
“Sometimes I just want to scream. To yell. Because you realize what madness and pain it is,” he said. “I understand that I do not have enough life to finish this work of searching for the dead.”
Yukov’s story is the story of the bloodlands of Ukraine, a landscape transformed by generations of conflict. He grew up cold and hungry in Sloviansk, in eastern Ukraine, one of five children. They survived one winter by foraging dried peas packed in his brother’s punching bag. He learned to share, down to his last piece of bread.
When Yukov was around six, a local cemetery got dug up to make way for a new children’s hospital. Bulldozers heaved piles of clothes and bones; children ran around playing with skulls stuck on the end of sticks.
He was shocked and ashamed as he stood before the unburied dead. “I looked at the bones and thought, “Crap …these are people!’” Yukov recalled. “What if my relatives are buried in this place?”
The forests of Yukov’s childhood were filled with the bones of German and Soviet soldiers from World War II, some so densely strewn they looked like snow.
He started searching for the dead when he was thirteen, but at first he made mistakes. The souls he offended — or failed to find — haunted him. He felt them poke his ribs as he slept and he woke up dizzy, his nose bleeding.
“Why do you keep coming?” he demanded of his phantoms. “What do you need?”
As a boy, he dreamt he was running in a forest, jumping over pits and trenches until he tumbled into a hole, falling deep into ruby-colored light. He smelled the bodies before he saw them, bones sliding beneath his feet as he sank.
“Someone grabs me by the scruff of the neck, whispering, ‘We have to be buried,’” he recalled.
He woke up wet with sweat. He knew what he had to do.
“Until they are buried according to their traditions and rituals, a soul will suffer. So it’s very important for me, even if it is an enemy, to return them home to be buried properly, for their souls to be calm,” Yukov said. “‘Collectors of souls’ is what the locals call us.”
A FATEFUL CLICK
In late summer 2022, Olha and her other son reached out to Yukov, seeking help. They sent along photos of Sasha and his tattoo, as well as satellite images of his approximate location.
Yukov arrived in Dovhenke in September, shortly after the departure of the Russians. More than 90 percent of the buildings there had been destroyed or damaged, and it was challenging to locate the cellar where Sasha’s unit had indicated they left him. In addition, there were mines.
They spent many days searching. On September 19, Yukov took a step and heard a clicking sound. The explosion knocked him to the ground.
“As I lay there, I felt like I had lost my legs,” Yukov said. “I thought, 'It's okay, I'll get a prosthesis.’ But then I saw holes and blood spraying from my legs. I thought, 'Okay, my legs are intact.’ But suddenly, I couldn't see with my eye. There was no eye.”
His team came running, screaming for him to stop and stand still. Yukov hollered back, concerned that they might also get blown up. He requested tourniquets and a stretcher.
They quickly drove him to the hospital in silence, the dog panting above the loud engine. Yukov was limp in the back seat, his legs secured with tourniquets. He delicately touched a bloodied white cloth to the place where his right eye used to be.
Two weeks later, with a patch over his eye and using crutches, Yukov led everyone back to Dovhenke, attempting to find Sasha. However, it was still too dangerous, and they had to wait a few more weeks for the mines to be cleared. By then, Yukov had a new glass eye, which looked incredibly real until he tapped it with his knuckles.
When they finally returned to Dovhenke to search for Sasha, a small grey kitten with an injured nose kept jumping on Yukov’s shoulder and nuzzling him. The cat circled a specific spot in the wreckage, prompting them to start digging there.
“Souls come over and wander next to us,” Yukov explained. “A sign came to show us where he was lying … He wants to be back home. Mother is waiting.”
Sasha was trapped beneath the collapsed building, with the area scorched and evidence of a massive blast, including fragments of 120mm mortars.
By the time they had removed the last layers of concrete, it was dark. Denys Sosnenko, a 21-year-old who Yukov used to coach in kickboxing, went down into the pit to search for bones with his fingers.
Yukov instructed Denys to attempt to keep the fragments of Sasha’s head intact in what remained of his helmet. He handed part of Sasha’s skull, wet and yellowed, to Yukov, who placed it carefully in a large white bag. It was difficult to keep track of all the pieces because it was pitch black and they were working by flashlight.
Denys found a silver, soil-covered cross and set it aside, along with a spoon and a watch.
Yukov proceeded to make a basic anatomical inventory of Sasha's remains. An arm. The backbone. Pelvis. Femur. Elbow.
“Wait,” Yukov said. “Where is the other arm and shoulder blade?”
It was November 25, 2022.
Two months later, Denys was killed when he drove over a landmine while searching for bodies.
11 RUSSIANS AND ONE LEG
As in most wars, both sides have downplayed or obscured their losses, and the true toll may not be known for years. However, from the sky, the countless dead have already started to change the landscape. The graves look the same on both sides of the front: fields, once empty, now covered with patches of new tombstones.
President Zelenskyy recently stated that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died in the war, which is less than half of what Western intelligence has estimated. It is believed that Russia’s losses are approximately double that of Ukraine’s.
The Associated Press used satellite images and site visits to show the rapid increase in soldiers' graves at a few key locations in Russia and Ukraine where the war dead have accumulated at a large scale.
By March, over 650 soldiers were buried in an area outside Lviv, in contrast to two years ago, and there were over 800 new soldiers’ graves in a Kyiv cemetery. Some 700 graves appeared in two sections for soldiers in a Kharkiv cemetery between Feb. 2022 through Sept. 2023, according to satellite images. The AP also counted at least 1,345 new soldiers' graves at a Dnipro cemetery in March, bordered by six orderly rows of empty pits in the earth waiting for more bodies.
Many more deceased individuals are scattered across both Ukraine and Russia, discreetly placed among civilian graves.
Mediazona, an independent Russian media outlet, has identified the locations of dozens of Russian cemeteries that have grown with war dead. Along with the BBC’s Russia service and a network of volunteers, they’ve verified the deaths of about 50,000 Russian soldiers killed since the full-scale invasion. They believe this number captures just over half of the true death toll. Their count does not include Russian fighters from occupied territories in Ukraine.
The deceased cannot be concealed from space. Satellite images show over 750 graves at the Wagner cemetery in Bakinskaya, a town near the Black Sea, up from around 170 in Jan. 2023. About 15 kilometers (9 miles) away, an estimated 2,646 compartments for cremated remains have been built into new rows of dark grey walls at the Wagner Chapel, though it wasn’t possible to say how many were filled. The number of war dead buried at the Federal Military Memorial Cemetery north of Moscow has tripled in the last year, reaching an estimated 846 graves.
These are the fortunate individuals who made it home.
Yukov says he’s retrieved over 1,000 bodies since the full-scale invasion began two years ago, with more than half of them being Russians.
“We are not fighting the dead,” he said. “I don’t separate the bodies of Russian soldiers and Ukrainian soldiers. They are all souls for me.”
One night in October, Yukov returned from a mission near Sloviansk with black body bags strapped to the roof of his car. They bounced perilously over potholes, as he sped to deliver the cargo to a morgue.
The count that day was 11 Russians and one leg, which was probably Ukrainian, judging by its boot. Their wounds would be documented. The things they carried — amulets that hadn’t worked, kids’ drawings, family photos, letters of love and despair — would be collected and cataloged. Their DNA would be tested, if necessary, and their identities logged in government databases.
Yukov hoped that the Ukrainians would find their way home, while the Russians would become bargaining chips to exchange for Ukrainian bodies in periodic exchanges of war dead.
“When someone says, “I am tired of war,” yes, we are all tired,” Yukov said. “But we just need you to understand: Help us. Don’t stand aside. Because war has no borders. War will cross your doorstep too.”
He looked inside a bag holding dead bodies. The corpses had been exposed to the sun and their faces were somewhat mummified. Yukov estimated they had been dead for about three months.
Suddenly upset, Yukov started speaking in a stressed manner in Russian.
“You carried this child in your womb,” he said, “Now your Russian boys are lying here, in Ukrainian soil. Why did you let them come here? You knew what this was all about, that they were going to kill and be killed.”
Yukov gazed down at the bodies placed on the night grass. “This is where it all ends,” he said.
He turned away and let out a small laugh, then fell silent and shook his head.
“So, I don’t know … It’s stupidity.”
HOLDING THE SKY TOGETHER
Olha hoped for a long time that missing meant alive. But when Yukov sent a photograph of the necklace they’d found in the cellar in Dovhenke, Olha recognized it instantly. It was the same silver Jesus she’d given Sasha when he left for war, only now it was an exhibit, number 3118, mud-flecked evidence of the dead.
Olha never got to see her son’s face again. By the time she got the body back, Sasha had no face anymore. This was hard for her because it allowed her to nurture a tiny, painful hope that there had been some mistake.
Yukov is a destroyer of hope for mothers. But they thank him anyway.
“I am glad we managed to do it,” Yukov messaged Olha, after he found Sasha. “We hug you and hope that we can meet you to get to know more about him. We are holding the sky together with you.”
“Your work is priceless,” she replied.
Olha buried what was left of Sasha on March 16, 2023 in her village cemetery, beneath a cross bandaged with flowers and ribbons.
“It’s very important for me to know his body is next to me,” Olha said. “We are all waiting for victory. For me, it’s the most important thing. If we do not win, what did my son die for — and so many other sons?”
Yukov never told Olha he’d lost an eye trying to find her son.
When she heard what had happened, she nodded faintly, her frown deepening to an expression of infinite sadness.
“I cannot express with words how grateful I am,” she said. She opened her hands and looked up, searching for sounds that could convey the enormity of loss. “I’m so shocked … As long as I live, I will remember the sacrifice he made for me and my family.”
Olha visits Sasha’s grave every day, to sit with him, talk with him and pray that he — and perhaps she herself — finds peace.
“Whatever people say, I know Sasha wanted to come home,” Olha said. “Sometimes I watch TV, the internet, TikTok, whatever, and I think: That’s it, we lost. I feel like giving up … But when I watch videos of Oleksii (Yukov), I want to keep helping. If there are people like Oleksii, nothing is lost yet in Ukraine.”
