Along with the officers were four men in civilian clothes wearing gardening gloves – ordinary Ukrainians with no previous experience of this exterminating volunteer work collecting hundreds of corpses still being excavated in cities bordering the capital. It has been a month since the Ukrainian army ousted Russian forces from the Kiev region, but local police and volunteers are still finding new graves. More than 1,000 bodies were recovered there, according to Ukrainian prosecutors, who said many more people had been killed by bombs, making their remains difficult to find. Police in small towns and quiet villages have been immersed in investigating one of Europe’s biggest atrocities in recent times. In the midst of the unsearchable scale of this effort, officers are relying on ordinary Ukrainians to do the heavy lifting while taking deposits and documenting deaths. Volunteer bodyguards undertake to pick up rotten and often mutilated corpses from the graves, place them in bags, number them and then, at the end of each day, bring the total number of bodies collected to any morgue in the Kiev region. room. The work of the volunteers is sometimes witnessed by the family of the deceased, while the police record the process. Photo: Alessio Mamo / The Guardian “I did not know we would do this,” said Vasily Pasieka, a middle-aged driver for a construction company in the Chernivtsi region of western Ukraine, who drove the van carrying the bodies. “But someone has to do it for the relatives, for the police.” “I am just a driver. “I have been behind the wheel for 40 years,” Pasieka said. Their employer, Mekhtransbud, wanted to do something to help when they saw the news of the mass atrocities in the Kiev region. They called one of the makeshift humanitarian aid centers, which he said needed a van and manpower. Pasieka and his colleague Serhiy Roholsky volunteered to go to the area with one of the company’s trucks. The company, they said, paid for their stay in a hotel while they volunteered. “We get 8 to 11 corpses a day,” said Roholsky, who said he had only worked in the small town of Borodianka and surrounding villages since arriving two weeks ago. A Russian checkpoint was located near this forest where two bodies were buried. Photo: Alessio Mamo / The Guardian Roholsky had just taken two bodies from a dug grave in the forest and placed them on a path with the help of two other male volunteers in their twenties. “Every day is different, but we find all kinds – men, women, young people, the elderly, the middle-aged.” One of the two bodies was a retired man whose head had been cut off, whose whereabouts are still unknown. Both bodies were twisted and deformed. It looked like they had broken their limbs in many places. The son of the beheaded man, Serhiy Kubitsky, was there to watch the exhumation and give a statement to the police. He and his family had left the village for the safety of western Ukraine when the war broke out, but his father did not want to leave. “I did not believe it was him when I was told that,” Kubitsky said. He said his neighbors found his father’s body in the woods near the Russian checkpoint on March 17 and buried him on the spot. Neighbors returned to the grave yesterday to dig it under police surveillance. “Then they showed me his documents,” Kubitsky said. In the trunk of his car were the sticks used by his neighbors to bury the bodies. Subscribe to the First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am Every day, Pasieka and Roholsky go from their hotel to the humanitarian aid center where their company truck is refueled and then pick up two new volunteers to help them collect the bodies. Even in the daily hell of the project, the two worst cases in the relatively small area of Kiev where they volunteered, Roholsky said, were when a 15-year-old girl was exhumed from a mass grave near the city’s clinic. and when they dug up the body of an elderly man who had been doused in gasoline and set it on fire. The witness who told the story to Roholski was the elderly man’s wife, who said he had been tied up by Russian soldiers and forced to watch. After the two men in the forest, the next stop was the cemetery of a nearby village, where the group was going to dig up two buried corpses to record the cause of death. Volunteers were then sent to a cemetery to bury the bodies of two people killed in airstrikes. Photo: Alessio Mamo / The Guardian Stanislav Kozynchuk, deputy chief prosecutor of the Kyiv region, said the two people buried in the cemetery had been killed in airstrikes, which he had reason to believe may have used cluster bombs. Evidence gathered by the Guardian during visits to Bucha, Hostomel and Borodianka – and examined by independent weapons experts – showed that Russian troops had used cluster munitions, which are widely banned around the world, as well as extremely powerful unguided bombs. , which are not allowed for use in residential areas and are responsible for the destruction of many apartment buildings in the Kiev region. At the cemetery, one of the victims’ wives, Alla Kuzmenko, said her husband had come out to help neighbors after a bomb struck a house across the street. She started following him but turned around to put the dog in the house when a second bomb hit him and killed him. “My dog likes to run between people’s legs, I did not want to make a fuss,” said Kuzmenko. Authorities aim to find and document all the bodies buried without a full autopsy. Photo: Alessio Mamo / The Guardian Deputy Prosecutor Kozynchuk said all bodies not buried in accordance with the law had to be exhumed and examined until any cause of death had been determined by a medical examiner after an autopsy – only after that could such bodies be buried. “Because of the war, there was no way the autopsies could be done, the citizens just buried the body and later reported the location of the grave to the police. “It does not matter if the body was buried in a cemetery or somewhere in a field, if it was not documented it should be exhumed,” Kozynchuk said. “It is important that all bodies be exhumed and identified so that the families of the victims can be informed and the exact causes of death can be ascertained,” said Michel Bachelet, UNHCR. “All measures must be taken to preserve the evidence.”
