By ERIKA KINETZ and SOLOMIIA HERA (Associated Press)
DOVHENKE, Ukraine (AP) — The odor in the car is unpleasant and sugary, the strong smell of bodies that have been lying in mud and destruction for too long, the ones the dogs didn't consume. Oleksii Yukov, a 38-year-old martial arts teacher who leads a team of voluntary body collectors in Ukraine, doesn't notice.
He is talking on the phone with one of the mothers. She heard that her son was hurt in battle and left behind, but she's not sure where.
“He was left to die and now they are telling me that ‘he died as a hero!?’” she says, struggling to speak as she cries.
“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 dead 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 actual cost of the war in Ukraine — and the challenges faced by each side — can be estimated by the number of people who have died.
More than half a million individuals have been killed or seriously wounded in two years of war in Ukraine, according to Western intelligence estimates — a human cost not seen in Europe since World War II. The issue of who succeeds is increasingly influenced by which side can endure higher losses.
By that measure, Moscow has the advantage.
Analysts say it will be difficult for Ukraine to surpass Russian forces, which continue to increase despite hundreds of thousands of casualties, without significant support 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, said that manpower is like a valuable resource. He explained that the Russians have a larger workforce and industrial base, so they can use manpower and equipment with less cost.
Yukov knows that to people far away, war is about geopolitics, death can be measured in numbers, and money is more important than men. But he has a better understanding.
He stated that war is characterized by death, foolishness, and horror.
GOD TAKES THE BEST AWAY
The last time Olha Hrysiuk spoke with her son, Sasha asked about the spring crops, the vegetable garden, their horses and cows, were the chickens laying many eggs? The conversation went on, as if they had all the time in the world. It was May 15, 2022.
Sasha vanished the next day.
For three days, Olha knew only silence. She accepted it, because Sasha had told her he was going on a mission and might be out of touch.
On the fourth day, she called the head of her village, who called the nearest military office, who contacted his military unit, who said that Sasha was missing.
Sasha wasn’t a born fighter. An athlete, he studied physiotherapy before he was drafted and packed off on April 3, 2022. Olha gave him a silver cross on a chain to hang around his neck as he went into battle.
Where was her boy now, she wondered, the kid with the sweet smile and ears that stuck out, who loved to run and had so many friends she couldn’t keep count? Where was her son, who dreamed of building a home for the family he did not yet have?
“In Ukraine, we have a saying that God takes the best away,” Olha said. “I think this is the case.”
After pleading on social media for information, Olha’s daughter-in-law managed to speak directly with some soldiers from Sasha’s unit.
They said Sasha was dead. They were very sorry they couldn’t take his body with them, the shelling was too heavy, all they could do was hide him in a cellar in Dovhenke — a rural settlement in eastern Ukraine that fell to the Russians. They would write his name on the shells they fired because they loved him too. He was a hero, they said.
Sasha, 27 years old, had lasted exactly six weeks at war. It was time for him to come home. If Olha couldn’t have her son back, she’d take whatever pieces were left.
But how?
Olha started making calls, so many that she had to buy a notebook to keep track. She said she called 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, every hotline and volunteer group she could find. She emailed the Commissioner for Human Rights and wrote letters to the Ministry of Defense and even to President Zelenskyy himself.
She wrote down who answered, who didn’t, and, mostly, who told her to wait, wait, wait. For six months, Olha tried.
“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!”
In the end, people told her that if Black Tulip couldn’t bring Sasha home, no one could.
‘WE HAVE TO BE BURIED’
Black Tulip is the name of the network of volunteer body collectors Yukov worked with back in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and pushed into eastern Ukraine. Black Tulip has since disbanded but the name stuck. Yukov went on to found his own group, named Platsdarm, which can mean “bridgehead,” to continue the mission of Black Tulip.
Yukov’s task is to bring everyone back. He has gathered the pieces of a man scattered across the trees and restored them to the soldier’s mother. He has removed human remains from a burning helicopter. Once, a mother requested him to retrieve her son’s arm, which she had heard was left hanging in a specific tree, and he did. He has searched through feces to retrieve the finger bones and teeth of men whose bodies were eaten by pigs.
“Listen, if your child was killed, you would chew through this s— with your teeth to bury the body,” he said.
Yukov is racing against time, which consumes corpses, to bring all the souls home. However, there are too many. He cannot fit them all in his car, even if he ties 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 tale of the bloodlands of Ukraine, a landscape changed by years of conflict. He grew up cold and hungry in Sloviansk, in eastern Ukraine, one of five children. They survived one winter by scavenging for dried peas packed in his brother’s punching bag. He learned to share, down to his last piece of bread.
When Yukov was about six, a local cemetery was dug up to make way for a new children’s hospital. Bulldozers moved piles of clothes and bones; children played with skulls stuck on the end of sticks.
He was shocked and embarrassed as he stood before the unburied dead. “I looked at the bones and thought, “Crap … these are people!’” Yukov remembered. “What if my relatives are buried in this place?”
The forests of Yukov’s childhood were full of the bones of German and Soviet soldiers from World War II, some so densely scattered they looked like snow.
He began searching for the dead when he was thirteen, but initially 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 Russians departed. Over 90 percent of the buildings there were destroyed or damaged, and it was difficult to locate the cellar where Sasha’s unit had left him. Additionally, there were mines.
They spent several days searching. On Sept. 19, Yukov took a step and heard a clicking sound. The force of the explosion knocked him to the ground.
“As I lay there, I felt like I had lost my legs,” Yukov recounted. “I thought, ‘It’s okay, I’ll get a prosthesis.’ … But then I noticed holes and blood spraying from my legs. I thought, ‘Okay, my legs are still there.’ Then suddenly, I couldn’t see with my eye. My eye was gone.”
His team came running for him, yelling. “STOP! DON’T RUN, STAND STILL!” Yukov shouted back, concerned that they might also get injured. “Bring tourniquets and a stretcher!”
They quickly transported him to the hospital in silence, their dog panting above the high-pitched sound of the straining engine. Yukov was limp in the backseat, with tourniquets tightly bound around his legs. He carefully touched a bloodied white cloth to the place where his right eye used to be.
Two weeks later, Yukov led everyone back to Dovhenke, his eye covered with a patch, and struggled around on crutches 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 on 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, nuzzling him. The cat circled a particular spot in the wreckage, and they began 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 rubble of a collapsed building. The area was scorched, with fragments of 120mm mortars and signs of a massive explosion.
By the time they had cleared through the last layers of concrete, it was dark. Denys Sosnenko, a 21-year-old who Yukov had previously coached in kickboxing, descended into the pit to sift through the dirt with his fingers, searching for bones.
Yukov instructed Denys to try and keep the fragments of Sasha’s head together in what remained of his helmet. He handed a part of Sasha’s skull, wet and yellowed, to Yukov, who carefully placed it in a large white bag. It was difficult to keep track of all the pieces in the pitch-black darkness as they worked by flashlight.
Denys uncovered a silver, soil-covered cross and set it aside, along with a spoon and a watch.
Yukov continued, making a rough physical inventory of what was left of Sasha. An arm. The backbone. Pelvis. Femur. Elbow.
“Wait,” Yukov said. “Where is the other arm and shoulder blade?”
It was Nov. 25, 2022.
Two months later, Denys drove over a landmine while searching for bodies and died.
11 RUSSIANS AND ONE LEG
Like in most wars, both sides have minimized or obscured their losses, and the true toll may not be known for years. However, the numerous dead are already altering the landscape from above. The graves appear similar on both sides of the front: fields that were once empty are now covered with patterns 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. Russia’s losses are believed to be about twice as many as Ukraine’s.
Using satellite images and on-site visits, The Associated Press recorded the rapid increase of soldiers’ graves at a few important locations in Russia and Ukraine where the war dead have accumulated on a large scale.
By March, over 650 soldiers were buried in an area outside Lviv that was open land two years ago, and there were over 800 new soldiers’ graves in a Kyiv cemetery. Around 700 graves appeared in two sections for soldiers in a Kharkiv cemetery between Feb. 2022 and Sept. 2023, according to satellite images. In March, the AP also counted at least 1,345 new soldiers’ graves at a Dnipro cemetery, bordered by six tidy rows of empty pits in the ground waiting for more bodies.
Many more deceased individuals are spread out across both Ukraine and Russia, discreetly placed among civilian graves.
Mediazona, an independent Russian media outlet, has identified the locations of several Russian cemeteries that have increased in size due to war casualties. Along with the BBC’s Russia service and a group of volunteers, they have confirmed the deaths of around 50,000 Russian soldiers since the full-scale invasion, a number they believe likely represents just over half of the true death count. Their tally does not include Russian fighters from occupied territories in Ukraine.
The deceased cannot be hidden from space. Satellite images reveal over 750 graves at the Wagner cemetery in Bakinskaya, a town near the Black Sea, up from around 170 in Jan. 2023. Approximately 15 kilometers (9 miles) away, an estimated 2,646 compartments for cremated remains have been constructed in new rows of dark grey walls at the Wagner Chapel, though it wasn’t possible to determine 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 ones, the ones who made it home.
Yukov says he’s collected 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 to 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 precariously over potholes, as he hurried to deliver the cargo to a morgue.
The count that day was 11 Russians and one leg, which was likely Ukrainian based on its boot. Their injuries would be documented. The items they carried — ineffective amulets, children’s drawings, family photos, love letters, and letters of despair — would be gathered and logged. Their DNA would be tested if necessary, and their identities would be recorded in government databases.
Yukov hoped that the Ukrainians would find their way home. 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 bodies had been exposed to the sun and their faces were somewhat dried out. Yukov estimated they had been dead for about three months.
Yukov suddenly became angry and started speaking in agitated Russian.
“You carried this child in your stomach,” 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 at the bodies laid out on the grass at night. “This is where it all ends,” he said.
He turned away, chuckled briefly, 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 destroys 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 learn more about him. We are holding the sky together with you.”
“Your work is invaluable,” she replied.
Olha buried what was left of Sasha on March 16, 2023 in her village cemetery, beneath a cross adorned 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 informed Olha that 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.”
