Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, 2022, the war has claimed countless lives, many of them left behind in
forests and fields scarred by fighting. The grim task of recovering the fallen often falls to civilians like Oleksiy Yukov.
“In war, you see how little life can it’s worth,” he said.
Yukov founded the NGO Platsdarm (“Bridgehead”) over a decade ago to recover remains from World Wars I and II, challenging long-suppressed
Soviet narratives about Ukraine’s wartime losses. His journey into death began young—he found his first remains at eight and his second at
thirteen. Since then, he’s been searching for the dead for 26 years. The mission became urgent and ongoing in 2014 when Russia annexed
Crimea and war broke out in eastern Ukraine. Yukov helped launch Platsdarm, a volunteer initiative retrieving bodies from current battle zones
in the eastern Donetsk region.
Another unit - the military J-9 - named after the Geneva Conventions address the retrieval of casualties; are generally the first on the scene
for the Kharkiv region to collect the dead, however many dead are still left behind. The Ukrainian bodies are quickly returned to the grieving
families; instead, the Russian bodies, once retrieved, are handed over to Ukrainian authorities for exchanges. Every Russian body brings one
Ukrainian home.