"Cargo 200". He washed his fiancée, clothed her in her favourite dress, and buried her

A text by Tatiana Kolesnychenko and Patryk Michalski, special correspondents for Wirtualna Polska in Ukraine, also available in Polish. Translated by Antoni Górny. Pictures by Maciej Stanik.

The morning is particularly cold and gloomy. The grey sky looms heavy above the head. Snow turns to rain.

The prosecutor for war crimes, three officers of the investigation department, and the forensic medicine expert cram into a tiny Peugeot. Today’s page in the prosecutor’s notebook has five addresses. Each marks a spot where people killed by Russians are buried.

The reports usually come from relatives of the victims. They saw their children, parents, loved ones die with their own eyes. Risking their lives, they buried the bodies in home gardens, parks, under the windows of houses.

Now, they are asked to relive the pain. Exhumation, post-mortem, investigation. They know that the bodies and stories of their relatives are evidence of Russian war crimes

BODY OF A WOMAN BURIED AT A CEMETERY. LEONTOVYCH STREET, GOSTOMEL

Maksym is already waiting. He points to where the body of his mother, 69-year old Valentyna, is buried.

The conversation with the prosecutor is brief. He has very little to say. During the occupation, he and his family were elsewhere. His sisters saw how she was killed. They negotiated with the Russians to bury her in the cemetery.

Gravediggers get to work. Maksym recedes a few dozen yards back. He’s smoking a cigarette, trying not to look at where the exhumation is taking place.

The grave is shallow. A few stabs of the shovel is all it takes to uncover the blanket the body was wrapped in. Gravediggers argue how best to pull it out. ‘By the legs? No, it’s safer to hold under the knees and pull very slowly’.

When the body is out, Oksana – the forensic medical expert – draws nearer. A tidy, diminutive woman, light make-up, carefully coiffed hair. She hangs her small handbag on the fence by the grave. Rubber gloves on, she slowly unwraps the blanket.

The raw scent of freshly-dug ground is pushed out by the sweet odour of decay. Gravediggers turn away. The body is bloated. Home clothes. Bare feet.

***

After a cursory examination, the prosecutor states that Valentyna died of a chest wound. The bullet entered an inch or two below her heart. Alyna and Anzhelika saw it with their own eyes. On that day, they were with their mum inside their three-room apartment. She refused to be evacuated.

‘She was a very warm person. She trusted people. She looked at the young Russians and asked, "What sort of killers are those? These lot won’t hurt civilians"’, Alyna says.

On 4 March, they heard gas would be cut off in the city.

‘Mum was roasting a chicken. It was supposed to last us through the next few days. She bustled about the kitchen. She touched a curtain. A Russian soldier passing by in the street must have noticed that. He fired. Mum fell to the floor’.

Alyna ran outside. She pleaded with the soldiers to send in their doctor. He came. He gave Valentina an injection. He poured some powder over the wound to stem the bleeding and then he left. He never came back.

‘Mum was in agony for 24 hours. She screamed with pain and fear. She asked how they could shoot a regular person. Meanwhile, the Russians stood by our window. They lighted a fire, cooked, washed themselves. Nothing is worse than seeing a loved one die and not being able to do anything about it’.

Valentyna died before dawn. Her daughters covered her with a duvet. In spite of the lockdown, they went out to negotiate her burial. The Russian commander, nickname "Razor," agreed. Neighbours brought Valentyna to the cemetery on a wheelbarrow. With Russians looking on, they dug a shallow ditch. They put the body inside and hastily covered it with dirt.

Alyna takes a deep breath to hold back the tears. A few days after the burial, their apartment was hit by a missile.

‘War took away everything. Our nearest, our home, and our dignity. Under occupation, we suffered hunger and violence. After all this, I don’t know if God exists at all. I only know Russians are soulless fiends’.

BODY OF A WOMAN. CITY PARK. 5 PRORYZNA STREET, GOSTOMEL

Clean air, woods all over. A modern housing estate opened four years ago. A symbol of the small town’s surge ahead. Nothing is left of it. Almost all the windows are broken. Russian tanks forced the staircase entrance doors.

A cross was erected in front of the main gate. It was made by the inhabitants of the estate to mark the temporary grave of 51-year old Inna.

The uncovered body is laying with its hands to the sides. Two nearly symmetrical wounds above the caved-in breasts. Bloodstains on the cap.

‘Numerous fractures below the knee’, Oksana reports.

The neighbours didn’t really know one another prior to the war. They would sometimes exchange a few words in the elevator. War changed everything. With no power, no gas, and no water, they cooked together under the bare sky.

On 22 March, the sun was breaking through the clouds. ‘It was warmer outside than in our unheated apartments. Inna and Tetiana were sitting on a roundabout in the playground, catching the sun. A bonfire was roaring close by. Larysa was slicing vegetables for the borsht’, Iryna Sholokhova remembers.

The woman returned to her apartment to check on her paralysed son. She heard a blast, then screaming. She ran back downstairs. They were dragging Larysa into the staircase. Her legs were gone. She didn’t scream. She was weirdly calm, looking with vacant eyes at the neighbours applying tourniquets to the stumps.

Iryna went outside. She saw Inna in the playground. She was lying in a pool of blood.

‘I knew right away she was dead. Tatiana was right by her. A piece of shrapnel damaged the left side of her face. She was in shock. Kept touching her wound. She was looking for the nose that was no longer there’.

The Russians had set up sleeping quarters in the block next door. The inhabitants said they were counter-intelligence. After a discussion, they agreed to let the wounded women leave the town and to have Inna buried.

After the burial, Iryna took her neighbour’s phone. She started looking through recent calls. That’s how she found the number for Bogdan – the dead woman’s only son. He was fighting in the Ukrainian army. He got a two-day pass to go back to the outskirts of Kyiv and give his mother a proper burial.

Iryna looks over the devastated estate. She remembers boarding the last train from Donetsk to Kyiv in 2014.

‘We were running away from russkiy mir, but it caught up with us here. There’s no escaping it’.

Under the roundabout, the bloodstains remain.

BODY OF A MAN. YAROVA STREET, GOSTOMEL

It was Red Army Street before decommunisation. A plaque with the old name still hangs on the wall of Anatoly’s house. The fence by the house is half-destroyed. The plot’s in disarray, as is the inside of the crumbling cottage. Russians stationed by that street. They rummaged through each house one by one. At Anatoly’s, they broke down the doors and ransacked every drawer.

Ruslan leads the investigators through the yard. He points to the grave dug right behind the house. He buried Anatoly sometime in the beginning of occupation. No one remembers the precise date of death. The body had been laying in front of the house for almost a week. Someone covered it with a blanket.

Gravediggers quickly uncover the body. The old man was buried as he was, with a backpack and a wooden cane he needed for walking.

Oksana turns the body around with ease. It’s so light it resembles a mannequin. She takes out a phone from his coat pocket. She pulls the backpack off of his shoulders through stiff arms. An officer checks the contents. He says: ‘Clean pot with cover, spoon, glass’. Anatoly was probably going out to cook dinner. He died at the fence of his house.

The forensic doctor finds no wounds on the body. She carefully examines the back of his head, combing through the blood-clotted hair. There’s an indent at the top of the head. She can’t say if it’s a bullet or a piece of shrapnel. An autopsy will decide.

Ruslan’s eyes wander away. He doesn’t want to look at the decaying body.

‘I’ve known Anatoly for years. He worked at the cemetery. He helped bury my mum. He took care of the grave when I wasn’t around’.

Anatoly had three children. The daughter and the younger son had left town. The older son remained in Gostomel.

‘He had other things to do than to bury his father. They caught him drifting and tied him to a post, as is the Ukrainian custom. He came to the grave a few days later. He left his father a bottle of beer and three chupa-chups. I told him he had no conscience. His father had been lying on the pavement for a week’, says Ruslan in anger.

SIX BODIES IN A MASS GRAVE. THREE BODIES BURIED IN AN ORCHARD. SEMASHKA STREET, BORODYANKA

SERHIY

Oleksandr Salov stands right by the police tape. Behind him is a dug-up ditch. The bodies are arrayed next to it, one by the other. Most are in a state of advanced decay. There’s no eyes – they are the first to go. The feet and hands of the victims are contorted in unnatural ways.

Oleksandr points to the body in the middle. It’s wrapped up in a Russian army sleeping bag.

‘That’s my dad. His name was Serhiy. February 24th, the day the invasion began, was his 64th birthday. He didn’t believe there would be a war. When the first bombings began, he was furious. He was Russian himself, born in the Chelyabinsk Oblast’.

On 28 February, when the first Russian columns entered Borodyanka, Serhiy snapped. He left a message for his family: ‘I’m going out to stop them. I speak Russian. They’ll listen’. He left his phone with it so that no one would try to change his mind.

‘He had no weapon, not even a Molotov cocktail. He went at the tanks with bare hands’, Oleksandr says.

The father never came back home. The next day, Oleksandr and his brother Dmytro went out searching for him. They saw Russian armoured personnel carriers on the main street. Close to one of them was a body, under a thin layer of snow. No head – just bloody pulp. They recognised him immediately.

‘You can’t describe the pain. I imagined Russian treads smashing his head’, says Oleksandr.

There was no time for the brothers to despair. They knew another column would soon pass through. They looked around. All that was left in the street was a Russian sleeping bag. They wrapped their dad’s remains in it. The staff of a passing ambulance agreed to take the body to the hospital morgue. The brothers tagged along. They wanted to see everything through. They used painter’s tape to stick a piece of paper with his full name onto his sleeve.

Two days later, Russian air force began the bombing of Borodyanka. The brothers evacuated their families from the town.

Oleksandr is still unsure who to thank. On 22 March, when power was cut in the hospital morgue, someone dug a mass grave. His father was among the buried.

‘Dad was always a hero to me. I want to be able to tell him how much I love him and how much I hate Russia. There’s not a single family in Borodyanka that wasn’t hurt by them. They destroyed our lives,’ he says.

KOSTYA

A few hundred yards away, Oleksandr’s two friends, Kostya and Yura, are buried in an orchard by their house. They’ve known each other since childhood. They lived in the same five-story block.

Nadiya, Kostya’s mother, doesn’t move an inch from her son’s grave. She watches the gravedigger’s every move. The chequered blanket is already peeking out.

‘Careful, careful’, she says to the gravedigger, ‘don’t hurt his face. I don’t want him in pain’.

‘Don’t worry, I’ve been doing this for years. I’ve dug in, I’ve dug out. I buried mine and others’. Besides, he can’t feel anything any more. Be calm’, says the gravedigger impersonally, then he points to the sky: ‘His soul is already up there’.

It takes several men to drag out Kostya’s body. He was six feet tall, a heavy-set man. When the prosecutor draws away the blanket, the mother moves toward the body of her son. She sinks to her knees and starts to cry.

‘Your life was so short, my little boy. Why wouldn’t God let you stand up from your grave?’, wails Nadiya. She draws the sign of a cross on his chest. She caresses his stomach.

Kostya’s face is covered in spots of purple, blue, and red. The nose is sunken. There’s no eyes. Nadiya looks at the white fungus on her son’s ear.

‘The hardest thing was to look at the body when it was still fresh. In the first weeks after death, he looked so natural’, she says.

Kostya died on 28 February. Together with Yura and his brother, they were a street away from their house. They were crossing the street when a Russian personnel carrier appeared. The soldier inside shot at everything – buildings and people.

‘His friends shouted for him to lie down. Before he understood, he caught a burst in his left side and stomach. He died long and hard, writhing in convulsions on the concrete. A healthy heart doesn’t give in easy’, says the mother.

Kostya was taken to the hospital in Borodyanka. It was pandaemonium. The staff was running all over the place. There were wounded everywhere. The doctors told the mother the body would stay in the morgue – a small building in the courtyard of the hospital. She was stuck in the basement of the building. Because of the shelling, she couldn’t get back home.

‘I watched over my son’s body in the morgue every day. The corpses lay on the floor. Every now and then, they brought in someone new. The doors were ajar, and there’s dogs about’.

All the time, there was one thing Nadiya was afraid of. ‘When it gets warmer, my son’s body will start to decompose. I imagined someone would be bothered by the smell. They would come in, throw the bodies into bags, and bury them who knows where’.

When the hospital was evacuated, she understood there was nothing to wait for any more. She went to the people who lived nearby and asked them to let her bury Kostya in the orchard.

‘I promised that as soon as the war was over, I would take the body. I wanted him to be in the ground’.

Next to Kostya, they also buried Yura. He was shot by firing squad the same day Kostya was hit.

***

Nadiya feels nothing now. She says she doesn’t even hate the Russians who killed her son.

‘I’ve been going to church for thirty years. I deeply believe in God. He prepared me for this. Three days before Kostya’s death, I dreamed I was washing his body. Chest and stomach. That’s where his wounds were. I knew something would happen’.

She says her son keeps coming to her in her dreams.

‘My lovely boy. He said he would watch over me, see to it that I will make my life again, get married again. And I promised I will take care of his beloved pit bull. It’s not been easy. He’s dragging me all around the neighbourhood on every walk. Kostek, I believe your death was not in vain. I don’t know what it was yet, but you have fulfilled your mission’.

KATERYNA

They dig up Katya last. The diminutive 15-year old is wrapped in a navy blue hospital blanket. Gravediggers quickly put the body in a black bag, as if they couldn’t bear to look at it. The prosecutor stops them before they close the zip. Examination first.

The girl lays stripped to the underpants. There’s just a bedsheet over the top of her. Hands crossed, tied lightly with a bandage after her death. Through parted lips, you can see even, white teeth. Face frozen in a painful grimace.

‘She was so pretty’, says Ivan Onofreychuk. They attended the same school in Bucha. She was going to have her final exams next year. She wanted to go to university. The 16-year old watches the prosecutor bow over the body of the girlfriend.

Ivan is joined by his grandfather. They live a few hundred metres from the grave.

‘I buried the girl. I made a cross for her’.

The man can’t speak any further. He gasps again and again, desperately trying to hold back tears.

Katya was riding away from Gostomel to Borodyanka in a car with her mum and stepfather. Russians opened fire on them. The grown-ups were fine. Katya was wounded by the sacrum.

‘The wound was small, but the bullet had a shifted centre of mass. It tore through organs. It damaged the peritoneum and the lungs’, says Zoya, an anaesthetist from the hospital in Borodyanka. She participated in Katya’s operation.

The parents brought her to the hospital after two hours. They have been waiting for the shelling to pass. The girl began to suffocate. She was losing more and more blood.

There was very little the doctors could do. Half an hour after the operation, Katya stopped breathing. The air raid sirens blared. The staff went into the basement. You could hear the mother’s cries all over the hospital.

Katya landed in the morgue. She lay on the floor next to Yura, Kostya, Serhiy, and other people killed by Russians. Her family kept calling up the hospital for several weeks, asking for the girl to be buried. They couldn’t do it by themselves – travelling through an occupied city meant death

BODY OF A WOMAN IN A GARDEN. OSTROVSKY STREET, GOSTOMEL

Tall green fence. A young girl opens the gate.

‘The relatives of the victim are inside?’, asks the prosecutor. The girl replies with a nod. ‘I’m her daughter’, she says quietly. She opens the main gate and a van with a sign that says "Cargo 200" enters the courtyard. The sign is used for all cars transporting the bodies of those killed during the war.

The body of 43-year old Lena was buried a few dozen yards away from the house, in a garden by a pond. The gravediggers cast the dirt to the side. This grave is particularly deep. A quarter of an hour later, they reach a wooden crate made from raw planks. They use ropes to pull it to the surface. It’s sealed tight.

A few steps away, Oksana smokes an e-cigarette. The officers unscrew the lid with hex keys. They remove the top and side sections. They leave one side screwed in to save the family the gruesome sight of a corpse in a state of advanced decay.

Even the gravediggers aren’t ready for this. The diminutive body laying on the boards is white as a sheet. The thighs have dissolved into a singular mass. The face is covered by a thick layer of mould that looks like cobwebs, particularly on the chin. Oksana removes successive layers with a rubber glove.

The skull is intact. The forensic medical expert cuts the dress with scissors. She stops by the chest area and removes the sacred painting from the bloodied dressing. ‘Three shrapnel wounds. About 10 centimetres in diameter’, she dictates to the prosecutor. She turns the body on its side and adds: ‘They went clean through’

***

Oleg feels queasy just looking at the black bag the paramedics are carrying across the yard. That tragic morning is coming back to him again.

‘Me and Lena were eating breakfast. The shelling began. We ran away from the house, toward the dugout. Then, a rocket fell on the yard’.

The shock wave threw Oleg to the side. He came to after a bit and began to search for her. There was lots of shrapnel about, scattered objects, a lot of smoke. Something was burning. He ran to the cellar. He was hoping she managed to hide. She wasn’t there, either. He came back to the yard. That’s when he finally saw Lena laying in the doorway of the house.

‘I saw the wound on the leg, but the face was in one piece. I thought, nothing serious. I began to bring her around. She was still breathing. The neighbour came a bit later. She’s a doctor. She caught Lena’s arm, tried to find a pulse. A few minutes later she said it’s over’.

Oleg carried his beloved into the hall. There was blood everywhere. He saw the wounds in the chest, so large he could see her lungs.

He insisted he would ready Lena for the burial himself. He washed her, dressed her wounds. He prepared fresh underwear and her favourite dress – black with white patterns. It reached to the top of her knees.

The workers from the furniture factory close by nailed together a rectangular coffin. Oleg laid out a white bedsheet and a pillow inside. He put Lena in there with her arms cradled over her stomach.

The next day, neighbours came. They dug a hole among the din of constant shelling. They lowered the coffin and said "Our Father" as best as they remembered how.

***

Nina, Lena’s mother, paces around as if in a trance. She has no more tears. She’s talking about her daughter.

‘My poor thing, she had such an unhappy life. The first marriage ended in divorce. She raised the child herself’.

Lena met Oleg four years ago. They liked each other. She felt things were finally coming into place. He proposed. They even bought rings, but first she broke her arm, then the pandemic began, and then war came.

‘We couldn’t leave. We’re poor, only the rich went away. I collected bottles to make ends meet. Lena had been waking up at dawn every day to get in time to the "Kozachok" kindergarten in Bucha. She was a cook’, says Nina.

All of a sudden, she breaks off and runs into the house. She must show Lena’s picture and diplomas.

‘They valued her highly at work, liked her a lot’, she says. Her words sound more and more like a lament. She throws them out incessantly. She’s shaking all over. She kisses the picture.

‘I don’t know how I should live now. Why was it her, and not me, in that doorway? She was a precious child. There’s been hundreds of times that I wanted to take a line and hang myself. Or swallow all the pills. How do I live now? My lovely child. My little daughter. What do I do with my life now?’

Nina falls silent. Her face sets. She remembers the words of the neighbour: ‘She told me to go to a monastery and live my life out there. But how can you believe in God after all this? If he existed, people like Lena wouldn’t die. We’ve seen hell here.’

The officers took Lena out in a black bag. They laid her inside the van, next to the other corpses.

Nina’s lovely daughter, the love of Oleg’s life, will now serve as yet another proof of Russian savagery.

***

Since 1 April, when Ukrainian authorities regained control over the Kyiv Oblast, thousands of bodies of civilians murdered by the Russian troops have been uncovered. Hundreds of people are still being sought. Prosecutors for war crimes continue to locate new graves. Every death leads to an investigation.

Text: Tatiana Kolesnychenko, Patryk Michalski.

Translated by Antoni Górny.

Photography: Maciej Stanik