They lie in white and black bags at 20 degrees below zero Celsius, but the stench is still overpowering. Filled with the bodies of 62 Russian soldiers, the bags are stacked in a refrigerated train car in a secret location on the outskirts of Ukraine’s second-largest city.
A spry elderly train worker spun open the vaultlike door to reveal the bloodied bags as the scent hung in the damp air.
“We are collecting these bodies for sanitary reasons because dogs have been eating them and we will eventually return them to their loved ones,” said a Ukrainian soldier identified as Summer.
Summer said that many of the bodies had been lying in the open for a month or longer before his unit found them. His two-man team works to identify the soldiers by their faces, tattoos and belongings.
They also take a DNA swab from each corpse to determine whether any is a potential war-crimes suspect.
Summer’s colleague, who refused to use even his first initial because of the sensitivity of the topic, said they were the only two men in their unit tasked to find and preserve the bodies of the enemy.
He said that identifications were possible about 50% of the time, while in other cases, the corpses were too deteriorated. Most of the bodies had been found in villages around Kharkiv. “This is the best work in the world,” he said of the grim satisfaction to be found in collecting the corpses of the invaders.
Recently, the Ukrainian army successfully counterattacked Russian forces, pushing them farther from Kharkiv and giving the city a sense of calm.
When the Russians retreated, they left some of their fallen soldiers behind. When Kharkiv inhabitants began returning tentatively to villages that had been in the line of fire and some found the bodies of the fallen soldiers in their homes or stumbled across them elsewhere. The train attendant sleeps in the wagon next to the refrigerated car, keeping guard over the corpses.
Colleagues have taken on similar duties in other cities, among them Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro, where other refrigerated wagons hold hundreds of bodies. Ukrainian authorities have complained that the Kremlin has been reluctant to engage on the subject of repatriating its dead.
Ukraine says 30,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since the invasion began on Feb. 24; those numbers are impossible to independently verify, and Russia rarely gives casualty tolls.
Last week, a British intelligence assessment put the estimated Russian losses at half that number.
Thousands more Russians are missing or are being held by the Ukrainians, Western intelligence agencies estimate. Russia has not released casualty figures since late March when it said 1,351 soldiers had died and 3,825 had been wounded. Estimates based on publicly available evidence suggest that over 400 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded in one incident alone this month in northeastern Ukraine.
For the first time since Russia invaded Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin visited a military hospital in Moscow last week to visit wounded soldiers. Donning a white lab coat, he called everyone serving in Ukraine “heroes”. Putin also announced further compensation increases for people serving there, a sign he may be trying to
tamp down bubbling public discontent over casualties. Russia also abolished upper age limits for signing a military service contract.
Ukraine has not shared its own military casualty information, but at Davos last week, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that as many as 100 servicemen might be dying every day in the brutal fighting in the eastern Donbas region.
Allies of Ukraine have also been reluctant to comment on the casualties that the country’s troops have suffered, but U.S. intelligence agencies estimated in mid-April that between 5,500 and 11,000 soldiers had been killed and more than 18,000 wounded.
One of the soldiers handling the Russian corpses in Kharkiv said he hoped Ukraine’s decision to safeguard Russia’s war dead may improve its chances of getting its own back from behind enemy lines. He said, “for me, ‘it is most important that we bring the bodies of our boys back to their families, so we treat these bodies respectfully.”