The tortured Ukrainian veteran turning shrapnel into a war museum

Telegraph

a day ago

Instead of an entrance hall, 'Grandpa's' war museum makes use of the dusty, weed-strewn pavement by the side of the road.
A Russian tank, an armoured personnel carrier and a howitzer barrel are displayed to lure in visitors heading east from the Ukrainian city of Pavlohrad. On the floor lie a row of Kinzhal and Kalibr cruise missiles with their tips pointed out at the passing cars.
These are only a handful of the treasures collected by the museum's founder and proprietor, 67-year-old Anatoly 'Grandpa' Tokarev, a former reconnaissance commander in the Ukrainian army.
'That was the first Kalibr that hit Pavlohrad,' says Mr Tokarev, pointing at a flower pot shaped from the missile's base and painted with licks of fire. 'We went out and collected it as a souvenir.'
Formed on the site of a roadside cafe, 'Grandpa's' may lack the prestige of the Imperial War Museum, but it is shaped by the same desire to honour the memory of the dead and inform the next generation, as far as possible, of what they went through.
In Mr Tokarev, it has an overseer as resourceful and dedicated as any of the great collectors who set up the Natural History Museum, Ashmolean or Getty. In its way, his own body could be an exhibit: both his legs were broken, and one shot through, during a month-long stint being tortured by the FSB after he was captured in Russian-occupied Ukraine in 2014.
Before leading The Telegraph on an impromptu tour of the facility, he hands everyone a bottle of water and a cup of machine coffee. The day is hot, and a Ukrainian flag hangs limply on its pole. 'Have that first, then we'll talk,' he says.
When Mr Tokarev retired from the military in 2016, he set up a cafe here along with his wife, a sniper in the Ukrainian army. But over time, the business began to irk them. Customers would come in to chat and unwind, seemingly unbothered by the war that continued, with tit-for-tat exchanges of artillery fire, less than 100 miles away to the east.
'My wife saw people relaxing, drinking and everything else. She said: 'Enough'. And, in 2019, we decided to make the museum,' says Mr Tokarev.
Some of the first exhibits were items he had squirrelled away in service. But his deep connection with the Ukrainian military provided a small army of helpers, scouts and sources to broaden the collection.
Since the full-scale invasion in February 2022, the archive has mushroomed. Russia's war has left traces across the country, from Shahed drones to stingers, mortars to mines, howitzers to hand grenades.
It has also left a trail of death, which Mr Tokarev endeavours to chart in his own way. On the pavement outside the museum stands a cross fashioned from 350kg of shrapnel, bearing the dog tags of local Pavlohrad soldiers who died before 2019. A falling bombshell has been welded to the front.
Behind it, on the wall of the museum, are memorial plaques for around 400 more soldiers, many of whom Mr Tokarev knew personally. 'He was a martial arts expert,' he says, pointing to one young man's picture. 'He died when the Russians took Kherson,' he adds by another.
A large portion of the wall lies blank, waiting for the next death to be painstakingly confirmed. 'I hire people to make the plaques. It's a never-ending process, unfortunately,' he says.
Children's drawings have been stuck to one side of a corridor. Entrance to the museum is free, and several busloads of school pupils arrive per week. In the drawings, there are pillboxes, helicopters, machine guns and stickmen soldiers, all sketched with the diligent madness of the under-10s.
'Every morning I see soldiers outside school,' one boy has written, 'I pray you will be alive when the war ends.'
'The most important thing is that I teach the children never to forget these guys who died, and always to stand up for them,' says Mr Tokarev, whose gruff demeanour, bright-blue eyes and sometimes cryptic way of speaking make him almost like a character from a children's book himself.
To be sure, the curiosity of youth runs through his veins. 'War is always changing and always the same,' he says, showing off a rack of uniforms, including Nazi, Ukrainian and Russian, in one dingy corner of the museum. He is reluctant to move into the next room without ensuring his guests have appreciated an old Cossack sword, which he draws from its sheath to wield.
Then there is a pack of playing cards featuring the Russian elite, with Putin as the six of spades and General Sergei Shoigu as the ace of clubs. Would he like to kill them all? 'Well, they'll get themselves killed,' Mr Tokarev says. 'The thing is, if you kill them, nothing will change. 89 per cent of the population in Russia is completely brainwashed.'
To this day, Mr Tokarev keeps in touch with members of the Salty Hedgehogs, the reconnaissance group in which he served and whose logo his T-shirt bears. At one point, he brings up a desperate text message on his phone from a soldier facing encirclement.
'We helped get them out,' he says, not long after proffering a signed flag given to him as a gift by General Valeriy Zaluzhny, the former commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army.
Some things he refuses to divulge. Why is his left hand missing its fingertips? How did he get hold of a decoy Shahed? Or a British-made NLAW missile? 'I asked nicely,' is all he will say of how his collection came to include a border post from the invaded Russian region of Kursk.
On the way out, Mr Tokarev beckons to a small garden. Shrapnel has been turned into thin sculptures of flowers.
As the sun sets, he insists he has never paid for a single weapon on show, nor the fresh haul of wrecked metal that lies in an alleyway. But the collection as a whole is priceless. 'My museum,' he says, 'is worth more than my life.'