The bodies arrive by hundreds on a dusty station platform. Anonymous, mutilated, extricated from mud, sand or collapsed trenches. In a rapid procession, they are unloaded in their white mortuary bags of a refrigerated wagon and transported to a laboratory of field located near the tracks, where they are examined and documented with discreet efficiency.
This important cargo of remains, returned by Russia as part of an exchange with Ukraine, is one of the few results of the three cycles of ceasefire negotiations orchestrated by the United States. These negotiations and the August 15 summit between President Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin hardly helped to slow down fights on the ground.
Ukraine hopes to identify each of the 6000 bodies it has received from Russia as part of an agreement concluded in Istanbul – which also provided for a prisoner exchange – and make soldiers’ bodies to their loved ones.
These bodies represent only a fraction of the more than 70,000 people in Ukraine, military as civilians, reported as “disappeared in particular circumstances”, the legal designation of those who have disappeared during more than three years of war.
The first remains arrived in Ukraine in June. A process similar to a mounting chain in a railway station in the Odessa region, in the south of the country, aims to accelerate identification without practicing traditional autopsies in the Morgues, which are already overloaded.
In total, six teams are doing a medical work under a part of the shaded platform by a stretched camouflage net to block the hot summer sun. Each team includes a police investigator, a medical technician, a pathologist, an intelligence agent and a health worker.
PHOTO DAVID GUTTENFELDER, THE NEW YORK TIMES
Officials responsible for identifying the remains of repatriated soldiers work under a camouflage net.
“We are the first in Ukraine to organize this type of work,” explains Tetiana Papij, director of the Regional Bureau of Legal Medicine.
The bodies are moved from one station to another as part of a process which takes about 20 to 30 minutes for each. The workers check the presence of explosive materials, document any personal object found with the leftovers and take samples for DNA tests.
When it is possible, the teams take fingerprints with the help of a technique consisting in dipping the fingers in heated water at a temperature close to the boiling point, then injecting cold water to make the imprints visible again.
The bodies receive 17 -digit identification numbers, which codify the date of arrival, the institution which received the body and an individual sequence number.
Documents, labels, jewelry or clothes and clothes of clothes recovered from the bodies can help identify. If we find them, a technician photographs them, puts them in separate bags and puts them with the remains in a new mortuary bag.
“Personal effects are extremely important,” said Andriy Chelep, senior police investigator in charge of crimes committed during the war.
Some families do not trust the results of DNA tests. They refuse to accept death. They believe that their loved one is still in captivity. But when they see the objects found, doubt disappears.
Andriy Chelep, senior police investigator
The tension linked to work with the dead is tacit, but present in each movement on the station platform, where the air is charged with an odor of decomposition.
PHOTO DAVID GUTTENFELDER, THE NEW YORK TIMES
A soldier’s boots whose body has been repatriated
Rouslana Klymenko, 27, pathologist, looks at a half decomposed body. Stations from body fluids have permeated the multiple layers of its protective combination. She knotted two pink ribbons on her head, the only luminous element in this dark scene under the camouflage nets.
“The lower jaw is missing”
From time to time, a new white bag is placed on the table and open. What looks like rags and dirt inside can contain putrefaction tissues, does it point out to an investigator, which records this observation.
During an exchange last month with Russia, which must receive an equal number of bodies, 1,600 remains were sent to the Odessa region. Tuesday, 1000 additional bodies arrived in Ukraine. The Russian media have not largely covered the return of the Russian bodies, mentioning only several shipments of a few dozen remains.
The identification of the 6000 remains could take more than a year, according to the Minister of the Interior of Ukraine, Ihor Klymenko. The process is complicated, he said, by the fact that some mortuary bags contain the remains of several people.
Among those waiting for the return of a loved one tetiana dmytrenko, from Kyiv, the capital. Her husband, Oleksandr Dmytrenko, was killed at the age of 45 with all the other members of her unit on November 15, 2023, near Bakhmout, she explained. The Russian forces took control of the area and it was not possible to recover the bodies.
PHOTO DAVID GUTTENFELDER, THE NEW YORK TIMES
Uniform of a soldier who lost his life
“All that was left was his latest text:” I love you, “said Mme Dmytrenko. Then followed a year and eight months of waiting, of uncertainty, which were worse than hell. »»
June 23, Mme Dmytrenko received a call from a police investigator who announced that the DNA of one of the repatriated bodies corresponded to that of Maryna, their 21 -year -old daughter. Mme Dmytrenko went to the morgue to carry out official identification, even if she noted that there was nothing left to recognize.
She remembers that her husband had told her that her greatest fear was to die in battle and never be found. “Now I am soothed because I know he is at home.”
This article was published in the New York Times.
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