Returning Ukraine's dead

Business Insider

6 days ago

In the back room of a morgue on the outskirts of Kyiv, the stench of rotten flesh hangs heavy in the air, its source a large white bag lying on a metal table. The mortician opens it, and inside is a smaller black bag containing a pair of mud-covered military boots, a mummified body, and a skull. This is all that is left of a Ukrainian soldier returned from captivity in Russia. Now begins the grueling work of finding out who he was.
Since Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine began three and a half years ago, at least 60,000 Ukrainian soldiers and civilians have been reported missing. Soldiers often vanish after coming face-to-face with Russians in combat. Some are taken alive as prisoners of war; others who die on the battlefield are captured as collateral for future body repatriation exchanges between Kyiv and Moscow — a corpse for a corpse. For the missing's wives, parents, siblings, and children back home, there is most often no way of knowing where they are, what condition they are being kept in, and whether they are alive.
At the center of the search for missing soldiers are some 1,300 investigators within the war crimes unit of Ukraine's National Police. Each investigator, some in their early 20s and fresh out of the police academy, manages hundreds of cases at a time, working early mornings, late nights, and weekends to locate, return, and identify the missing. They interview witnesses, scour social media and cellphone records, collect DNA samples, and coordinate with the Ukrainian government. Perhaps more than anything, they serve as a crucial lifeline to the families living through a nauseating uncertainty that can extend for months or even years. This summer, the National Police gave Business Insider exclusive access to interview and witness the investigators at work at three locations in the Kyiv region — the first time a publication has been allowed to report on their work in detail. (This story contains graphic descriptions and photos.)
At the Brovary police station east of Kyiv, Maksym Kot's phone rings, one of 50 calls he will get throughout the day, the majority from the families of some of the 400 missing soldier cases he is working on. Baby-faced and soft-spoken, Kot is 23 and graduated from Ukraine's police academy two years ago. He is the sole investigator of soldier disappearances in Brovary, a city of more than 100,000.
As we sit in his small, cluttered office, Kot explains how each case begins: A family member files a missing persons report with the police, which includes the name and circumstances of a soldier's disappearance, if there are any known witnesses, or any suspected perpetrators — in this case, Russian service members. Then Kot starts calling the vanished's fellow soldiers, other relatives, and friends into the station for questioning.
Soldiers serving alongside the missing service member provide a timeline leading up to their last known moments. They can tell Kot where a troop was fighting, what their last orders were, and the exact last location of the missing soldier.
The families, whom Kot refers to as "the victims," share intimate details of the missing soldiers' lives. They provide pictures and descriptions of the soldiers' faces, tattoos, birth marks, and other identifying features, the last text messages soldiers wrote to them, and DNA samples — to test for matches with bodies returned from Russia in prisoner exchanges.
When Kot talks to the families, they often "can't stop crying, and it's hard to engage them in conversation," he says. "I always tell them that hope dies last." The emotional toll they face is deep and excruciating. Russian soldiers have also been known to torture Ukrainian POWs, starving them, and at times sexually assaulting them. (The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has gathered claims from Russian prisoners of war of being tortured, severely beaten, and subjected to sexual violence.) Mental images of what could be happening to their loved ones in captivity often sends family members into hysterics.
At Kot's office, a 21-year-old woman named Nadiia arrives for a scheduled visit. Her father, Pavlo, 46, went missing off the front lines in the eastern Bakhmut region on October 1, 2022. She has come to provide her first DNA sample; an uncle had previously provided one. (The families who work with Kot whom I spoke with asked that their last name be withheld for security reasons; if their soldier is alive and in captivity, they fear speaking out could worsen the soldier's treatment.)
"The last time I spoke to him was during the day," Nadiia tells me of her father. "He didn't say anything special, he just said he would call me again in the evening, but he never did." One week later, her family received a call from a military office informing them that Pavlo had gone missing. Several weeks after that, a soldier serving alongside Pavlo told his brother that their unit had been sent to positions in two groups of four — one group returned and the other did not. Nearly three years later, his case remains open, and his whereabouts and whether he's alive remain unknown.
After a few minutes, a forensic specialist walked into Kot's room with a large black suitcase containing personal protective equipment and a buccal swab kit to take a DNA sample from inside Nadiia's cheek. While the swab takes a few seconds, it can take months to a year to create a DNA profile. Nadiia tells me she is hopeful that her sample will not match with the remains of any of the soldiers recently returned from captivity to Kyiv — which would mean her father could still be alive.
After Nadiia leaves, Kot reaches over to the left side of his desk and grabs a large stack of paper held together by a binder clip — this is the paperwork of a single case.
Once he collects witness statements and DNA samples, Kot goes through various bureaucratic channels of Ukraine's government to receive permission to create the official case of a missing soldier. With that, he can gain access to cellphone records — which can show who the soldier last spoke with and where — as well as letters from the military confirming the soldier is missing.
The International Committee of the Red Cross is another resource investigators rely on. As a neutral body, the ICRC has designated teams in both Moscow and Kyiv that maintain lists of current POWs from both sides of the war. "There are delays. It's not a perfect system. But by and large, this system functions," says Pat Griffiths, a spokesperson for the ICRC Ukraine. It can be months before a POW is entered into the system, and if they have not been accounted for after a prolonged period, the likelihood that the person has been killed increases significantly, Griffiths says. As of June, the ICRC has received requests to account for 134,000 missing people from both Russia and Ukraine since the start of the war. Of those, 14,200 have been told the fate of their loved ones.
Families come to Kot regularly with any fragments of information from their own research. He trawls Telegram and other Russian social media and messaging channels for information about a soldier's whereabouts. In one instance, he found video and photos of one of the missing soldiers who was in Russian captivity. "I quickly informed his mother about this. She was very happy," Kot recalls.
Beyond collecting evidence, all Kot can do as the investigator is wait and comfort the families through their maddening purgatory.
"I never show them that I have reached a dead end," says Kot. "I have not shown and will not show weakness." When he started his job, Kot took every new case "to heart," he says — each family's anguish tormented him. After thousands of meetings with missing soldiers' wives, siblings, parents, and children, he's managed to "stay psychologically resilient," he says, though he still feels each case deeply.
One case that Kot worked on was a 38-year-old soldier named Oleksandr, who went missing from the eastern Pokrovsk region, one of the war's hotspots, on November 22, 2024. Eleven days before his disappearance, Oleksandr married his wife, Nataliia, 37. A few hours into my visit to Kot's office, Nataliia arrives to meet with him.
"No one knew I was getting married because I wasn't sure if his brigade would allow him to attend the ceremony," she tells me with a smile. "After we got married, my mother asked me, 'Why him?' I said, 'Because he can listen to me and understand me." She talks about the hobbies she took on to pass the time: web design, adopting a poodle, learning Turkish for no particular reason. She is 99 percent certain her "soulmate" is alive, she says with conviction.
Nataliia has come to show a Facebook post about some soldiers who went missing with her husband and recently returned from captivity — could Kot locate and interview them? Kot nods as he types notes into Oleksandr's case file on his desktop computer.
Eight days after my visit, Nataliia sends me a text message. She had just heard from Ukraine's Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which interviews POWs upon their return, that two witnesses saw Oleksandr die. She did not specify whether it was on the battlefield or in captivity. "It feels like I'm falling into an abyss," she says on the phone. Months of certainty that her husband was alive were stripped away in a moment.
Kot says that he and other investigators are identifying witnesses and will conduct interviews to confirm that Oleksandr is dead. After that comes the interminable process of returning and identifying his body.
Since 2022, Ukraine has secured the release of 5,700 prisoners of war and civilians from Russia. The Ukrainian police believe there are many thousands more still in Russian captivity, as well as tens of thousands of bodies of Ukrainian soldiers. Most of them have been killed on the front lines; at least 206 have died in captivity, according to the Ukrainian government. Ukraine receives the bodies of around 100 deceased soldiers every two to six weeks, investigators told BI. They are unloaded from vans by Russian government workers in an undisclosed location and collected by their Ukrainian counterparts, who in turn return the bodies of Russian soldiers.
In June, Ukraine received a sudden influx of 6,057 bodies (while Russia received 78, according to Kremlin aide Vladimir Medinsky) as part of a round of failed ceasefire talks between Kyiv and Moscow in Istanbul. The mass of corpses strained an already delicate system, with hundreds of bodies being brought to morgues throughout the country simultaneously. "As the nature of this conflict changed and rapidly escalated, suddenly you're dealing with a lot more human remains. The forensic infrastructure here risks being overwhelmed," says Griffiths. More than 90 percent of bodies return unlabeled and unidentified, and connecting each to a missing persons report is a lengthy, painstaking endeavor.
On June 26, I visit a morgue on the edge of Kyiv that just received the bodies of 50 servicemen, and meet with Victoriia Konopatska, a 24-year-old senior police investigator. Where Kot focuses primarily on locating missing soldiers who are thought to be alive, Konopatska focuses on identifying the dead upon their return. When the full-scale war began in February 2022, she was in her final year at Ukraine's police academy. She had four months of training left when, in March, she and her classmates graduated early to join the police force.
The smell of decaying corpses in the morgue seeps into the skin, makes your eyes water, and lingers long after you leave the building. Konopatska has been exposed to this smell nearly every day on the job for three and a half years, and has not grown used to it.
In the front room of the morgue, three dead civilians who just died at a local hospital — an elderly man and woman, and a man in his 40s — lie on separate tables. The mortician, a middle-aged woman, carefully dresses them in their funeral clothes: the men in black suits, the woman in a deep blue dress and a headscarf that the mortician delicately wraps around her head and tied just below her chin.
The bodies of the civilians were intact and their eyes and mouths peacefully closed — a stark contrast from the room Konopatska leads me to a few steps away. She is wearing a large white PPE suit, a blue hair net, and a face mask. Underneath all of the dressing, her eyebrows are perfectly shaped, her long lashes painted with mascara, and she has a fresh French manicure. As she stands holding an iPad, Simon Nikolaichuk, a forensic scientist, and his assistant assess the body of an unidentified soldier lying on the metal table. Though the soldier was dressed in the military uniform he had been killed in, the body was partly skeletal and mummified. It has "significant putrefactive changes and is generally reduced to bones and grease," Konopatska says flatly. Identifying it will be challenging.
As Nikolaichuk conducts the autopsy over the next hour, characteristics of the soldier begin to emerge. A rosary is pulled from his jacket, followed by a destroyed cellphone charger, and a pair of reading glasses, which suggests he may have been older. (The average Ukrainian soldier fighting today is 40.) These mementos will be given to the family of the soldier if he is identified and they are notified.
Konopatska types on her iPad each assessment called out to her. "Head injury. Gunshot wound to the head. Damage to the skull bones," says Nikolaichuk. "Broken shoulder blade. Fracture of the right and left shoulder blades. Fracture of the upper third of both humerus bones." He examines the soldier's scalp. "There are remnants of hair up to 0.7 inches long."
Konopatska estimates that she has assessed well over a thousand bodies throughout the war, both civilian and military. She spends the majority of her workdays collecting DNA samples from the bodies of the soldiers returned to Kyiv, up to five per day. "We finish working with some bodies, and others are immediately brought in," she says.
Their assessment of the soldier's body complete, Nikolaichuk and his assistant return the remains to a white bag and carry it to a nearby cargo-sized refrigerator that is filled with dozens of other bodies stacked neatly on shelves. Nikolaichuk walks back to the morgue and quickly looks through the corpses in the three other bags — one dead a few months and partially intact, the man's white beard flowing from his chin; one putrefied; and the other torn to shreds, the skull split in two, likely from an explosion.
Bones and mummified corpses are all that remain of 80 percent of the soldiers' bodies that Russia returns to Ukraine, according to Ihor Kalantai, head of the police unit investigating war crimes. Some return decapitated, have their hands tied, or have stab wounds — all "signs of extrajudicial executions," says Kalantai. Undetonated explosive devices have been found tucked inside the clothes of bodies of Ukrainian soldiers, Kalantai says. A de-miner is now present during every repatriation. Some soldiers, Kalantai says, return as nothing more than a leg, arm, or a mere finger.
Other bodies have been dissected and have pieces of medical waste sewn into them. Bodies have also returned with missing organs. Last spring, when the body of Victoria Roshchyna, a prominent Ukrainian journalist who died in Russian custody at age 27, was returned to Ukraine, her eyes, brain, and parts of her windpipe were reportedly missing.
" It's hard to single out which bodies are difficult to look at," says Konopatska, "because every body is difficult to look at because you understand that someone was waiting for this person at home."
There is a common folklore belief in Ukraine that when a loved one dies, they will visit the dreams of their family members to say goodbye. When families have lost all contact with their relatives on the battlefield, many hold onto that legend, believing that if they have not dreamed of their son, their husband, or their father, then he must still be alive somewhere.
Once Konopatska has taken the DNA samples of the bodies, she brings them to Olha Sydorenko, 33, an investigator at the station's Department of Particularly Serious Crimes. She sends the samples to forensic scientists to create a DNA profile and begins the process of matching the remains to possible relatives.
When there is a match, Sydorenko is tasked with informing families. She has had this conversation with more than 2,000 families. It always begins with a phone call where she introduces herself and asks them to come to her office in Kyiv to discuss their case, a courtesy to deliver life-altering news in-person. Often, though, they're already expecting the worst, and she breaks the news on the call.
"No one wants to believe that their loved one has died," Sydorenko says in her office. Some families require many repeated explanations to fully comprehend that their son or husband has returned home in a body bag. Then she details the condition the body has returned in, so the family can decide whether to view the bodies and begin to make funeral arrangements. Many often choose cremation.
One of Sydorenko's first and most haunting cases, she tells me, was of Vladyslav Lytvynenko, a 27-year-old who went missing on April 7, 2022. Vira Lytvynenko, Vladyslav's mother, received a call from the patronage service of the 12th Special Forces Brigade of the National Guard — a unit known in Ukraine as Azov — informing her that he was killed fighting in Mariupol.
"I felt hysterical, like any mother would," Vira tells me. "We had been waiting for a message from him while he was already gone," she says as her voice breaks. She was then told that the fighting in Mariupol — the site of the heaviest shelling in the war's early months — was too fierce to collect the dead. Azov was forced to surrender in Mariupol to encircling Russian soldiers in May 2022, and more than 2,500 soldiers of the brigade were believed to have been taken as prisoners of war. Russian forces also took the bodies of hundreds of soldiers, including Vladyslav.
Sydorenko first connected with Lytvynenko that summer, and they worked together for months to find a way to bring her son's body home. For hours at a time, the pair looked through the National Police's online catalogs of corpses, which are filled with pictures of remains in morgues throughout Ukraine. Lytvyenko and her husband provided two rounds of DNA samples and pictures of their son's tattoos, one of which is a Viking warrior standing tall in front of skyscrapers, an orange sunset visible in the distance. In mid-October 2022, Sydorenko called Lytvynenko to inform her that they'd found a match: Vladyslav's body was at a morgue in Kyiv.
It was a cold spring when Valdyslav died, Lytvynenko says, and she hoped Russian soldiers would "at least return his body in a proper condition so that I could see him one last time." But the decaying body that Russia had returned bore no resemblance to her son, Sydorenko told her. "Nothing was sacred to them," she says of Russian soldiers who kept Valdyslav's body for months. Lytvynenko chose not to see his remains, in part because Sydorenko advised her against it, and in part because she did not believe her son would want her to see him as the "pieces of rotten flesh" he returned as.
"It's horrible to see any animal or person dead," she says. "And if you see it and they tell you it's your son, I guess humanity hasn't come up with a word to describe that feeling yet."
Anna Conkling is a journalist currently based in Kyiv. Her writing has been featured in Rolling Stone, Elle, The Daily Beast, and elsewhere.