The DNA detectives taking on the grim reality of Ukraine’s war

For the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine their most challenging time came with having to identify the 173 people who lost their lives in the 2009 Black Saturday fires.

It was a scientific miracle that the team of pathologists was able to identify every victim, allowing the victims’ families to hold funerals and say goodbye. A temporary mortuary was set up in the Southbank carpark as staff worked ridiculous hours to complete their mission.

Now imagine every day was Black Saturday – that the bodies kept coming – not for days but for years, some in such bad shape that they could never be identified. And there was no end in sight.

Then imagine that some relatives, who are so angry at the seeming lack of progress, would break into the forensic complex and bash staff who were trying to scientifically find the answers they desperately needed.

Or try to continue to live and work in a building where the front has been sheered off from repeated drone attacks.

This is the world of Ukrainian pathologists, doctors Vitalii Povstianyi and Vitalii Levchenko, who have spent a week at VIFM and the Australian Federal Police Canberra lab to exchange information.

Since the conflict with Russia began in 2014, Povstianyi, the acting head of Ukraine’s Bureau of Forensic Medical Examination, has turned the system from a cluttered, bureaucratic and antiquated system, controlled locally and often blighted with corruption, into one that can remain functional in the face of overwhelming numbers.

Ukraine’s Main Bureau of Forensic Medical Examination staff: Dr Vitalii Levchenko (left), head of forensic criminology division, and Dr Vitalii Povstianyi (right), acting bureau head, pictured with Professor Soren Blau from the International Commission on Missing Persons.Credit: Peter Bury

VIFM pathologists are acknowledged as world-class and are routinely called in to work in war zones and disaster sites where there are mass casualties.

One is just back from Gaza where he reports there are still 10,000 victims buried under rubble who may never be identified.

In most of these sites, the pathologists arrive after the carnage and try to build some order from the chaos, but in Ukraine there is no end in sight.

Povstianyi says that since the Russian invasion in 2022, they have had to make a new set of rules.

“What works in peacetime doesn’t work in wartime,” he says. They no longer perform autopsies – finding the identity of the victim is more important than the intricate details of how they died.

Before the war he was an expert at looking at microscopic changes in the Achilles tendon to establish the time of death. Now there is no time for such academic research.

At VIFM there are specialists in anthropology, archaeology, radiology, odontology. In Ukraine, the pathologists do the lot.

As in all wars, both sides use figures as propaganda, but what is known is that about 60,000 Ukrainians are registered as missing, which includes an estimated 35,000 military.

In December, President Volodymyr Zelensky said 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since the invasion.

Levchenko says the way to stay mentally resilient is in one way not to think too deeply and accept that the seemingly unsustainable workload is the new normal. In short, they keep going because they have to.

The new normal includes refrigerated trains to move bodies, storage areas dotted around the country to house unidentified war casualties, renting space from hospitals and a Herculean effort to return victims to their families. They are increasing their ability to identify through dental examination and have opened DNA hubs around the war-ravaged country.

Some of the experts and trainees fled at the beginning of the war. Regular blackouts, chaotic traffic and rocket attacks are also part of the new normal. Remains in numbered bags are waiting for identification.

Emergency workers remove rubble and look for survivors at the site of Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv, Ukraine, in July last year.Credit: AP

In December alone, Levchenko says the service conducted 30,000 forensic examinations. That figure includes multiple tests on different body parts.

He says they work to a code. Everyone has the right to a dignified life. Everyone has the right to a dignified death. The war will not end until its last soldier is buried. Our task is to ensure that this soldier is buried as a hero under his own name.

It would be normal and entirely understandable if under wartime conditions the Ukrainian pathologists gave up, allowing thousands of unidentified bodies to be interred in unknown soldier graves, but they continue to search for one scientific clue that can result in a match.

Every day, they manage to identify 30 victims through DNA, fingerprints and body marks.

He says in two cases they dipped bodies into a bath of a special solution that restored unique tattoos. In other cases they have used the same method to restore fingerprints.

Civilian casualties are easier, he says as they are found close to home and can usually be identified by relatives.

Usually, the graphic details of death on a battlefront are diluted, but this is happening in the middle of Europe and much has been posted online, much to the distress of family members who no longer know whether their sons, daughters, mothers or fathers are alive.

Even in the heat of war there can be rules, and the Russians have repatriated bodies back to Ukraine, but sometimes it is unimaginable work.

Ukraine and Russia regularly exchange hundreds of the bodies of those killed in the war.

Levchenko says his team received about 60 plastic garbage bags with 500 body parts. They were able to identify 65 war dead.

Trips to Australia for the Ukrainian experts are about more than just exchanging forensic ideas, it is about showing that Western democracies are still supporting the battling nation three years into the war.

Such assurances may well now be worthless.

With the two warring sides having fought their way to a near standstill, the Ukrainian medics, military and citizen population are faced with a greater uncertainty with US President Donald Trump making a series of inflammatory statements.

In a morale-sapping moment, the United States opposed a United Nations resolution condemning Russia for instigating the war.

Having attacked President Zelensky and praised President Vladimir Putin, he initially suggested (then retracted) the bizarre notion that Ukraine started the war. He wanted peace talks to begin without Ukraine having a seat at the table, apparently thinks Europe doesn’t deserve a voice and wants a large slice of the beleaguered country’s mineral resources in what history may see as The Great Betrayal.

VIFM has already been used as an independent authority in Ukraine over possible war crimes.

Professors Stephen Cordner and David Ransom reviewed images and videos of victims from the Ukrainian town of Bucha, taken after Russian troops had withdrawn.

Russia claims the images are doctored and called on the UN Security Council to take action against “Ukraine radicals”, suggesting the bodies were actors and the scenes were set up to manipulate world opinion.

The VIFM experts said some of the victims still had their hands tied behind their backs and their T-shirts pulled up, consistent with them being used to cover their faces.

Russia is so sensitive about its world reputation over Ukraine, I was put on Putin’s banned list after reporting the VIFM findings.

The International Commission on Missing Persons is working with the Ukraine authorities to try to identify the 60,000 missing.

It reports the discovery of mass graves. “In addition to military personnel reported missing in action, and civilian victims of deportation, summary execution, incommunicado detention, and abduction, children have been subjected to unlawful adoption, as well as family separation in the midst of mass displacement.

“Missing and disappeared persons from the ongoing war and related circumstances include both Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians.”

Dr Soren Blau, a long-term VIFM senior forensic anthropologist, is now the head of Anthropology and Archaeology at the commission and spends months at a time in Ukraine.

She is no stranger to mass tragedies having worked in Congo, Timor and Uzbekistan, often working in single graves with up to eight bodies, as well as on Black Saturday.

She has also investigated many long-term missing cases in Victoria working with cold case detectives.

In 2007 police launched Operation Belier, a taskforce to check every unidentified body against missing persons cases back to 1960. It involved reviewing 80,000 police and court records.

In three years, police cross-checked 179 unidentified cases with 600 missing persons files. It resulted in solving around 30 cases using DNA, dental records and circumstantial evidence.

Her most famous case was identifying the remains of bushranger Ned Kelly, buried in the Melbourne Gaol in 1880 and moved to Pentridge Prison in 1929.

“We assist countries in identifying missing persons,” she says. “We have an office in Kyiv. The Ukraine service is excellent, but the caseload is overwhelming. What they are doing in an active conflict is amazing. We are there to assist where we can.”

American and Ukrainian flags placed in honour of fallen servicemen in a memorial in central square in Kyiv, Ukraine, last November. Credit: AP

DNA testing can be an area of frustration. Family members may have moved overseas or be trapped in occupied lands making it near impossible to get samples.

This is where the missing persons commission outreach program plays a role. “Since the beginning of the conflict we have seen many flee Ukraine. We have a data co-ordination team that has travelled to Poland, France, Switzerland and Germany to collect family samples for DNA matches,” Blau says.

She says in some cases beyond the capacity of Ukraine technology, a sample is sent to the commission’s state-of-the-art lab in The Hague. In the lab they have been able to identify victims from dental fragments using equipment not available in war-torn Kyiv.

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