‘We are taking you home, buddy’: Ukraine recovers battlefield heroes
Ukrainian soldiers in the Cargo 200 team, the codename for the recovery of dead troops, are never careless with Russian bodies – they are essential to the exchange process.
A Ukrainian soldier stares out from the pictures on a Facebook post. In one, he is sitting with a baby dressed in pink on his lap. The man’s head is shaven at the sides and he has a traditional Cossack lock of hair remaining as a crest. In another shot, he wears an olive baseball cap emblazoned with a shark on the front.
Thirty-eight years old, the soldier was declared missing in action in April. His wife, not knowing his fate, posted the pictures on a page used by relatives of unaccounted-for Ukrainian fighters, searching for information that could confirm whether her husband was dead or alive.
This week, an officer called and her wait ended. Her husband was not a prisoner of war but lay dead in a foxhole on the forest floor outside Yampil, eastern Ukraine. His body was found on Saturday.
As heavy artillery crashed to the east of the battlefield, close enough that the ground trembled, a recovery team pulled the man’s corpse from the soil, speaking to their comrade so tenderly that, despite his skeletal form, it were as if he were merely wounded.
“Come on, buddy, we are taking you home,” murmured Leonid Bondar, who scooped the dead soldier from the ground. “Thanks for all you did here. But it’s time to go home. We’re carrying you back to your family.”
Bondar pulled the dead man’s baseball cap from the foxhole and patted it clean. In the dead soldier’s pockets he found a knife and a lighter. A crucifix hung from a cord around the man’s neck. Then, wrapped in a plastic folder, his identifying documents were found.
“So now we know you,” added Bondar, 46, flicking through the pages of the dead man’s passport before placing it on a white body bag by his chest.
Bondar and the four Ukrainian soldiers working alongside him are part of a Cargo 200 team, the codename given by both sides in the conflict for the recovery and transport of dead troops. No official toll for the thousands of personnel killed in action has been published by Russia or Ukraine, and estimates vary wildly.
In late May, long before the autumn escalation, President Volodymyr Zelensky said up to 100 Ukrainian soldiers a day were dying in the east of the country. In August, the Pentagon suggested 70,000 to 80,000 Russian personnel had been killed or wounded since February.
CIA director William Burns had previously estimated Russia’s death toll in Ukraine at around 15,000, with another 45,000 injured.
Thousands more are prisoners of war. Upwards of 2000 Ukrainian service personnel were captured in the battle at Mariupol alone. But as Russia has not given international organisations the access needed to identify, document and safeguard the rights of those captured on the battlefield, many are classed as missing in action months after their capture. That means relatives of soldiers who disappeared during combat are locked in a painful limbo, fearing the worst while hoping for the best. Recovering bodies from the battlefield is therefore a priority.
“Part of our job is to end the wait and uncertainty of our families of the missing, to find our dead, identify them, to finish their ‘missing in action’ status and get them back to their families,” said Colonel Oleg Neshchadym, 35, the commander of the Cargo 200 team working on the front outside Yampil.
Their task is far from easy. The battlefield was active and in flux, Ukrainian forces fighting to push the Russians further eastwards. Across a forest littered with the wreckage of armoured vehicles, shattered trench lines and the scattered bodies of soldiers from both sides, the sound of heavy artillery exchanges was ever present and at times close.
“We have to work quickly,” Neshchadym added, as a salvo of Grad rockets exploded in the middle distance. “We have a window of time to do this now. But you never know how quickly the front can change and you lose the chance to collect your dead.”
Two dead Ukrainian soldiers lay close to one another. The bodies of three Russians were sprawled near by. In places, the corpses of enemy combatants were close together, in easy hand-grenade range. They lived, fought and died on the same patch of forest floor among the bunkers and foxholes.
Further into the forest, the Cargo 200 team found another five dead Ukrainian soldiers, their flak jackets charred and helmets perforated.
Working for Cimic, a Kyiv-based body that helps co-ordinate civil and military affairs and is responsible for repatriating dead Ukrainian and Russian soldiers, Neshchadym estimates he has personally supervised the collection of more than 800 fighters’ bodies in 100-plus retrieval missions from battlefields across the country.
His five-man team is one of several working in Ukraine. From time to time he finds the bodies of foreign volunteer fighters – and he recalls repatriating a British fighter killed near Lysychansk, as well as an Argentinian and a Spaniard.
“Some of my work is simply to find the dead and pick them up from the battlefield, then take them back to a morgue,” he said. “At other times, I am directly involved taking the bodies of our fallen soldiers back to their families. That part is the hardest,” he added, looking suddenly exhausted.
“It is then that we see a family receive back a husband, a son, a father. It is acutely emotional. For that reason, I try not to think too much about the details of individual bodies as I find them. It would drive me crazy if I did.”
Most of the 10 troops – seven Ukrainian, three Russian – collected from the battlefield on Saturday, along with partial remains of an unidentified 11th, carried a religious symbol with them: a cross, a saint, a set of wooden icons. Some had dogtags and ID papers. Three had mobile phones, which will be checked later as part of the identification process.
Once the bodies are delivered to a morgue, Russian Sim cards are sent on to the state security service, the SBU, for analysis. The personal effects of the Ukrainian dead are returned to their families. Those with rifles have the weapon’s serial number recorded to match with issue records from their brigade armoury. DNA testing will be done for those who remain unidentified. Neshchadym began calling Ukrainian brigades involved in the fighting even as he examined the dead.
“Hey, send me the list of your missing,” he said on his mobile phone as he examined the passport of a dead soldier. “I think we’ve got one of your lads here.”
Other details given up by the dead soldiers spoke of how they spent their final moments. As they pulled the bodies of the first two dead Ukrainian soldiers from foxholes, the colonel suggested the state of decomposition meant they were killed when Russians overran the area in the spring.
The Russian dead, bloated and crawling with maggots, were killed just a fortnight ago, as Ukrainian units fought their way back across the area. All appeared to have been killed by shellfire. Some were shattered, others bore only small evidence of shrapnel penetrations.
“This guy took a full shell blast in his back,” observed Bondar, as he examined the first dead Ukrainian in his foxhole. “There was no chance that he could have survived.”
The team soon found another Ukrainian who had pulled his legs tight up against his torso. Death was not instant. “Probably a stomach wound,” noted Neshchadym. “In pain, he would have pulled his legs up like this and turned his face to the ground.”
One of the dead Russians – known as “Orcs” in Ukrainian battlefield slang, after JRR Tolkien’s monsters – had an eye infection. His medication was in his pocket, along with a bottle of aftershave, a wad of roubles and his cigarettes.
Another Russian had most likely been wounded and was being carried from the position by a comrade when he died. He had a shrapnel wound to his chest and his flak jacket had been removed and placed beside his body, as if he were being treated.
As they worked, the Cimic team’s banter alternated between familiarity and dark humour.
“Oh look, so much money in your pockets, red-top,” one of the team said to a huge, dead red-haired Russian. “I’ll let you keep it, so you have something to spend on your journey home!”
“This guy has too many maggots even for an all-day fishing trip,” a soldier observed as he rolled another Russian into a body bag.
Yet they were never careless in their collection of the Russian dead, knowing the repatriation of Russian bodies is an essential part of the exchange process, whereby Ukraine receives back the bodies of its soldiers from Russian-held territory.
“We don’t like the Russians, we don’t like Putin,” said Bondar as he worked among the clutch of five dead Ukrainians. “But the more professional we are in collecting their dead, in a way that allows them to be most easily identified, the more likely we are to get our own dead back from the Russians in a similar way. There is just no other way to facilitate the exchange. Russian or Ukrainian, we put everything we find into a body bag, right down to the last fingernail.”
Yet that respect has its limits and death is not necessarily the great equaliser. As the bodies were loaded into a Cargo 200 van, they were done so in defined order: Russian dead at the bottom of the pile, Ukrainians on top.
The Times
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