Dicing With Death To Recover Ukraine Dead

Dolina, Ukraine, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 19th Jan, 2023 ) :Behind the front line in Ukraine's Donetsk region, danger lurks in rubble of retaken territory, where volunteers tread carefully to collect the abandoned dead.

Outside a gutted home on a now lifeless street in Dolina, in an area that saw heavy fighting before Russian forces withdrew last summer, Oleksiy Yukov instructs volunteers with his Platsdarm non-profit on how they will check for explosives.

They are there to collect the body of a Russian soldier, discovered in a basement by former residents picking their way through the rooms of their shattered home, now exposed to the elements.

But the volunteers have to be wary of mines, unexploded ordnance and booby traps.

"We look under our feet for any suspicious items, and we raise a hand if we see one," Yukov told the four men standing stony-faced in front of the ruined home, where the churned earth held fragments of rocket propelled grenades, camouflage cloth and a kitchen sieve.

- 'Click' and he lost an eye - De-miners had swept the house and surroundings, but there was still a risk there were explosives under the body.

Before removing it, one man lowered himself gingerly through the basement hatch and attached straps to the decomposed remains, estimated by Yukov to have been there since the summer.

The whole team then picked their way outside through the precarious piles of broken bricks, splintered spikes of wood and twisted nails.

"One, two, three, go!" Yukov shouted, with the men pulling hard in unison on the straps across the jagged glass remains of a window pane.

"Stop!" Yukov shouted, and they crouched near the wall, waiting to see if an explosive crack would break the silence.

It's a moment of tension Yukov knows too well. In September, while attempting to recover a Ukrainian service member's body, he heard the telltale click of a mine.

He threw himself to the side, but the explosion took out his right eye and sprayed 18 pieces of shrapnel into his leg.

He shouted to his team to steer clear in case there were more traps.

Yet just three weeks later Yukov was out with his teams again, leaning on a crutch to support his broken leg, which also suffered nerve damage.

"I returned as soon as possible to search for bodies because there is no time to waste -- animals and nature are destroying them and if we don't hurry, we won't manage to bring all of our soldiers home." To this day, he always goes first. "Until I pass everything and make sure it's safe, no one goes," said Yukov, who before the 2014 conflict spent years recovering the remains of combatants killed during the two world wars.

- 'We treat all the same' - On Wednesday, once Yukov was sure of the team's safety, they manoeuvred the body out of the basement into the overgrown yard.

He sifted through the remains, peeling muddied cloth from bone searching for something to identify the man, be it ID or a personal item -- a cross, a ring, a watch -- while carefully documenting everything.

"We treat all the dead the same," said Yukov, who comes from nearby Slovyansk, but Russian remains were "crucial" because they could be exchanged for those of a Ukrainian.

It's important to find documents, said 26-year-old volunteer Artur Simeyko, so as to quicken a possible exchange. "This motivates us," he said.

After zipping up the white body bag around the remains, Simeyko scrawled 298 across the middle -- the number of Russian bodies the group has recovered since the end of April.

Since winter set in, they have taken extra precautions such as forgoing sweeping open areas for bodies because the ground is too hard for some mine detection methods they use, but have not significantly slowed their efforts.

After loading the Russian's remains into a truck, they set off to recover another body. But hazards had also been reported -- several grenades and a Soviet-designed anti-personnel mine.

For Artur's brother, 21-year-old Andrii Simeyko, each mission is a source of pride no matter the dangers.

"You don't need to fear the bodies. They're already dead, they won't do you any harm."