Collecting the dead 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 ruined village of Klishchiivka outside Bakhmut, where Ukrainian and Russian forces have fought seesaw battles for well over a year, he collected 300 bodies. They were almost all Russian, he said, left behind in a maelstrom of violence where the struggle to stay alive often outweighs concern for the dead.

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 death than he would care to remember.

But as Russia presses a slowmoving offensive at great human cost, Yusov says the toll is still shocking. He said he had recovered bodies stacked four or five deep in trenches.

Sometimes Russian soldiers take the bodies, lay them in large pits and “wrap them up because you can’t breathe around them,” he said, alluding to the stench. “They don’t know what to do with them.”

The willingness of the Russian military to sacrifice thousands of soldiers in a blunt-force effort to gain territory has been a defining feature of the past year of the war — exhibited 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 death, The New York Times traveled with Yukov’s team of body collectors, interviewed Ukrainian soldiers about living amid death and embedded with military drone units that allowed an unedited view of some of the deadliest killing grounds.

The best time to collect the bodies is in bad weather, with fog and rain, Yukov said, because Russian drones don’t fly in it.

Many Ukrainian soldiers also have died in the bloody battles that play out every day, but Yukov said most of the bodies he collects are Russians left behind.

“We deal with the realities of war, not a war on paper,” he said. “I’m saying specifically what I see: for every five or six bodies of Ukrainian soldiers, we find almost 80 Russian bodies.”

Russia’s ministry of defense did not respond to a request for comment.

With U.S. military support halted and Ukrainian forces running low on ammunition, there are more Ukrainian soldiers dying under relentless assaults by a better-equipped army with more men. “For the past two to three months, we have been noticing serious changes,” he said, alluding to Ukraine’s growing casualty toll.

After Yukov collects the bodies, he brings them to the local morgue if they are civilians. If they are soldiers of either army, he turns them over to the Ukrainian military.

The remains of the Russians can be exchanged for the remains of Ukrainian soldiers who have been killed.

There are no reliably precise estimates on how many Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have died over the past two years. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy 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 in action. His figures cannot be verified.

Zelenskyy’s accounting of Ukrainian casualties differs sharply from estimates by U.S. officials, who, this past summer said that close to 70,000 Ukrainians had been killed and 100,000 to 120,000 wounded.

In Russia, following a Soviet-era playbook that has been well-documented, 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 have put the toll of dead and wounded for Russia at 300,000 to 350,000, with most estimating that more than 100,000 have been killed.

With the ranks of the Russian military having been bolstered by conscripts from poor villages, ethnic minorities forced into service and convicts released from prison in exchange for fighting in Ukraine, the Kremlin has so far managed to keep the cost of its war from touching the most privileged parts of its society.

“I think people understand, but are afraid of the truth,” Yukov said of the Russian public. “It’s easier for them to believe in propaganda,” he said. “But what we see are huge losses on the Russian side, catastrophically huge.”

With tens of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers killed over the past two years, the toll can feel overwhelming and abstract.

But for the soldiers on the front, death is a part of daily life.

Junior Sgt. Pavlo Zinenko, 36, was servicing fiber-optic cables when the Russians invaded. He raced to join the 128th Territorial Defense Brigade after seeing the atrocities Russian forces committed in Bucha.

“I was ready to give my life to ensure that no more civilians on our side would die,” he said. “But over time, when you see so many deaths, especially when your close friends die before your eyes, it really breaks a person.”

When he comes across dead Russian soldiers, he said, he has “no feelings, no emotions.”

“The only thought that crosses my mind is that if they’re dead, it means they won’t be able to kill anyone else here,” he said.

Yukov has collected the dead from the battlefields of the Donbas for over a decade, working both sides of the front line until the full-scale invasion in 2022 made it impossible to go to the Russian side.

As a civilian, he does not need to adhere to military restrictions regarding discussing Ukrainian casualties.

His dedication to his mission — regardless of what uniform the dead wore in life — has earned him the broad respect and trust of the Ukrainian military. His work is financed by private donations.

Yukov, who lost an eye after a mine exploded during a mission last year, said he often is asked why he risks his life to recover bodies.

“It’s important for me to bring them all home because we are humans, and we must remember to remain human,” he said.