The first body arrived in late February, a few days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. Two more the next day. At the beginning of March, the morgue on the outskirts of Kyiv no longer had room for the dead, who arrived every day from a dozen of the cities of Bucha and Borodyanka – at a time occupied by Russian forces.
When Moscow’s withdrawal from areas north of the capital in early April revealed the brutality of mass graves with hundreds of civilian corpses buried in residential neighborhoods, every morgue in the Kyiv region was already breaking.
Today, more than two months after the start of the war, bodies are piled up in refrigerated trucks in front of morgues as authorities struggle to deal with the death toll.
Morgue employees in a truck storing bodies. Photo: Alessio Mamo / The Guardian
“We were not prepared for that,” said the investigator from a village a few kilometers from the capital. “No one would have thought that would happen.”
The survivors of Bucha, Borodyanka, Irpen and Hostomel, where the Russians are accused of war crimes against civilians, did not stop celebrating their release, but instead immediately began counting and identifying their dead. Every day, dozens of people approach refrigerated trucks to place the names of their loved ones on bodies enclosed in black bags and piled on top of each other.
“By Sunday, 1,123 bodies had been found in the Kyiv region alone, including 35 children,” said Oleh Tkalenko, a senior prosecutor for the Kyiv region. “These are the bodies we dug up from mass graves or found on the streets. We found brutal people. All 1,123 cases are documented and checked by detectives. And every day we continue to reveal more bodies. I can’t give more accurate information because thousands of reports are being written. “
Vladislav Perovsky, a Ukrainian forensic doctor who, with a team of forensic doctors, performed dozens of autopsies on people from Bucha, Irpin and Borodyanka who died during the month-long occupation of the region by Russia, explains that the process of identifying corpses is complicated. Considers the state of decomposition of the bodies found in the mass graves and the high level of cruelty inflicted on the victims, even after they had been killed.
He tells of people killed and then crushed by tanks. “There are a lot of burnt and disfigured bodies that are simply impossible to identify,” he said. “The face can be broken to pieces. You cannot reassemble it. Sometimes there is no head at all. ”
His team, working in the morgue, which cannot be identified for security reasons, inspected about 15 bodies a day, many of them mutilated.
An elderly couple approaches the rear doors of the car. Through tears, they announced the identity of the victim to the men standing inside the trailer, among at least 30 bodies. He was their son who served in the civil resistance. The couple claims he was betrayed by a woman when Russian soldiers occupied their city on the outskirts of the capital and hunted Ukrainian soldiers and ex-soldiers involved in the war in Donbass.
The new sector of the cemetery in Irpin, where the victims of the war are buried. Photo: Alessio Mamo / The Guardian
Their son was one of them. The Russians captured him, tortured him, broke his arms and legs, and placed a plastic bag on his head. He was then shot in the head and his body thrown off the road. His body remained there for days until he was found by volunteers.
When the men in her car show her son’s body, the woman bursts into inconsolable shouts and screams, cursing the Russian soldiers, wishing them the same fate.
The tattoo on his shoulder is the only identifying mark on an almost completely unrecognizable body, marked by decay and brutality. When the woman sees him, she nods and is accompanied to the car, crying.
However, before his body is buried, it will first have to be examined by Perovski’s team, which together with 18 experts from the forensic department of the French National Gendarmerie began documenting the terror inflicted on civilians during the one-month occupation.
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“We see a lot of mutilated bodies,” Perovski said. “Many of them have their hands tied behind their backs and shot in the back of the head. There were also cases of automatic fire, such as six to eight holes in the backs of the victims. And we have several cases of elements of cluster bombs embedded in the bodies of victims.
Russia has repeatedly denied targeting civilians, saying Ukrainian and Western accusations of war crimes are fabricated. Evidence of death and destruction in areas occupied by Moscow troops seems to suggest otherwise.
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