Volunteers Find and Bury Ukraine Civilians Murdered By Russian Troops

With most military age Ukrainian men serving in the armed forces, civilians are volunteering to find, help identify and give decent burial to the thousands feared murdered by Russian troops in the Kyiv area and elsewhere. JL 

Isobel Toshiw and Lorenzo Tondo report in The Guardian:

Ordinary Ukrainians with no previous experience of this gut-wrenching work have become volunteers collecting the hundreds of bodies still being dug up in towns bordering the capital. The police forces of small towns and quiet villages have been plunged into investigating one of the largest atrocities in Europe in recent times. Amid the unfathomable scale of this endeavour, officers are relying on ordinary Ukrainians to do the heavy lifting while they take statements and document the deaths.

In the woods on a roadside near Borodianka, 40 miles from Kyiv, police were overseeing the exhumation of two men who were executed and buried next to what locals say was a Russian military checkpoint.

Alongside the officers were four men in civilian clothing wearing gardening gloves – ordinary Ukrainians with no previous experience of this gut-wrenching work who have become volunteers collecting the hundreds of bodies still being dug up in towns bordering the capital.

It has been a month since the Ukrainian army pushed Russian forces out of Kyiv region, yet local police and volunteers are still finding new graves. More than 1,000 bodies have been recovered there according to Ukrainian prosecutors, who said many more people were killed by bombs, making their remains hard to find.

The police forces of small towns and quiet villages have been plunged into investigating one of the largest atrocities in Europe in recent times. Amid the unfathomable scale of this endeavour, officers are relying on ordinary Ukrainians to do the heavy lifting while they take statements and document the deaths.

The volunteer body collectors are tasked with picking up rotting and often mutilated bodies from the graves, putting them in body bags, numbering them and then, at the end of each day, driving the total number of bodies collected to whichever morgue in Kyiv region has room.

The volunteers’ work is sometimes witnessed by the deceased’s family, while police document the process. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

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“I didn’t know this is what we’d be doing,” said Vasily Pasieka, a middle-aged driver for a construction company in Chernivtsi region, western Ukraine, who was driving the van which carries the bodies. “But someone has to do it for the relatives, for the police.”

“I am a simple driver. I’ve been behind the wheel for 40 years,” said Pasieka.

Their employer, Mekhtransbud, wanted to do something to help when they saw the news about the mass atrocities in Kyiv region. They called one of the improvised humanitarian aid centres, who said they needed a van and manpower.

Pasieka and his colleague Serhiy Roholsky volunteered to go to the region with one of the company’s vans. The company, they said, was paying for their stay at a hotel while they volunteered.

“We pick up between 8 to 11 bodies a day,” said Roholsky, who said they had only been working in the small town of Borodianka and its surrounding villages since they arrived two weeks ago.

A Russian checkpoint was located near this woodland where two bodies were buried. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

Roholsky had just picked up two bodies from a dug-up grave in the woods and placed them on a path with the help of two other male volunteers in their early twenties. “Every day it’s different but we find all sorts – men, women, young, old, middle-aged.”

 

One of the two bodies was a pension-aged man whose head had been severed, the whereabouts of which is still unknown. Both corpses were twisted and mangled. It looked as though their limbs had been broken in several places.

The son of the man whose head had been severed, Serhiy Kubitsky, was there to witness the exhumation and give a statement to the police. He and his family had left the village for the safety of western Ukraine when the war started, but his father had not wanted to leave.

“I didn’t believe it was him when they told me,” said Kubitsky. He said that his neighbours found his father’s body in the woods near the Russian checkpoint on 17 March and buried him on the spot. The neighbours then returned to the grave yesterday to dig it up under police supervision.

“Then they showed me his documents,” said Kubitsky. In the trunk of his car were the spades used by his neighbours to exhume the bodies.