A founder of the NGO “Black Tulip” that evacuates dead bodies from the frontlines. Interview done on February 15, 2023.
As long as bodies remain in fields, as long as soldiers are not returned to their families, the war is not over. I believe this to be the main motivation of my work. Since 2014, my organization has been evacuating dead bodies from the battlefields in the east of Ukraine – Ukrainian soldiers, Russian soldiers, and killed civilians. With the start of the big war, we are receiving hundreds of calls from soldiers’ families, local citizens of the frontline villages, and the military itself on a daily basis, asking to evacuate those killed. They send us the locations of found bodies, and additionally, we scout the places of recent battles and search for photos of dead Ukrainian soldiers through Russian Telegram chats – we collect all information available and try to find and evacuate the bodies to commemorate the soul and give respect to the lost life.
An average day of my mission starts the evening before. We pack metal detectors, special clothing, and body bags. In the morning I receive a signal with the approximate location of the found bodies and we drive toward it. The roads are often shelled, often full of mines, and so are the locations to which we arrive. With metal detectors and drones we spend hours searching for mining devices, unexploded missiles, sometimes even traps. Deminers help us to clean the area and look for a body. We use drones and metal sticks to detect the smell and locate a body. It’s a brutal sight. Some bodies are grouped and buried by the enemy, some bodies are piled under the mud, some bodies are scattered in pieces around the area, some are burned in tanks.
We fix the body’s position and identify it after the area has been cleared of mines. Take videos, record the exact location and the approximate day of death, identify the cause of death, and give a body a number. We look for documents, specific birthmarks, tattoos, scars, jewelry, personal belongings – anything that could connect the body to a search request of the relative. Most of the time, the dig out or demining the location takes a whole day. But once we find the body, we have to finish the evacuation even if it’s during the night. If we leave it till the next day we might never find it again – the frontlines are active, and animals can pull apart the remains.
Every day I encounter death as it is. Naked and merciless death. I see human tragedy. Each was caught by this tragedy in their own position – fighting back with a gun, unaware with a pack of cigarettes in hand, standing with their hands up, laying down, covering their head or defending a buddy. A still ticking watch on a wrist, wife’s photo in a pocket, the final look in the eyes. Every mission changes me. I see human life devalued to a statistic, I see that on Earth human life can be worth nothing, can be thrown away. I can’t allow myself to cry about it or even pause to unpack my own pain. During the war, a sense of future is absent. The war is ugly and the only sentiment constantly felt is anxiety. I only know what there is today and I know that if it’s not me, these souls will forever remain in the war.
I was 13 years old when I found the first body. It was May, I was in a forest, scouting for adventures with friends. With all the greenery around, we suddenly stumbled across a meadow fully covered in white scurf. It was a field full of bones, a lot of white bones and parts of military equipment. I remember the first shock, remember coming back with the police, I remember one of the adults trying to persuade me that what I saw was snow. That sight has made a huge impact on me for the rest of my life. I delved into local history, searched the surroundings and found out that that forest was a place of a big battle during the first years of the second World War. By the marking on the remains of the equipment I realized that the bones were of Soviet soldiers. At the time of my discovery, an abandoned crypt in the area was excavated, near which was a Soviet mass grave, “brotherly grave” as they called them. That excavation took along the bones from the grave and left them in the forest. Dozens and dozens of people were not taken away from the war half a century later, were not buried with respect, but were left decaying, unknown and unidentified.
My story of evacuating the bodies from the war started before 2014. Two years prior, affected by my teenage discovery, I started an organization that was searching for the bodies of soldiers of the First and Second World Wars. The goal was to find, perpetuate and commemorate the lives of those people, give them their due respect. I believe that the world of the dead exists too close to the world of the living. If we treat the dead as debris, as something unnecessary – we will live in the same paradigm. If the souls are not found and buried properly, if they stay in their wars forgotten, we will live in the shadows of these wars and will keep reliving them.
We opened the vaults, opened Soviet mass graves, we took out the bones, counted them and started disclosing a real number of victims of the first two World Wars. The amount of death was heavily concealed by the Soviet army. Sometimes we would open a Soviet grave “for ten unknown heroes” and find the bones of over 400 men. To hide the losses, the dead were proclaimed missing or claimed to be traitors. We would research the remains of the belongings in the graves, try to contact their descendants to let them know their relative was found. Once we found a story of a whole family exiled to Siberia because their relative was claimed to be a traitor that ran away, when in reality he died defending his country. In that period we have reburied around 8,000 bodies and their remains and with that we only started to show the world the reality of those wars and the Soviet government. Bodies were hidden, buried in mass graves, and the amount of almost a century old bodies is still colossal all over our country.
Evacuating the bodies of today’s brutal war comes from the same motivation – to bring the soldiers home for a proper respectful burial and to prevent our land from becoming a cemetery of forgotten fighters and, thus, protect our future. Since the 24th of February, we have evacuated close to 800 bodies, and I understand that reality calls for much higher numbers and years, even decades of work ahead, even after the end of the war. We do the same procedure for Ukrainian soldiers, our civilians and Russian soldiers. I think we have to remain humane to their death, even if they are the enemy, even if they came to kill us.
The work we do, I believe, is for our future, even if it concerns the past. I understand this every morning that I go on a new mission and take the risks. The work in the battlefield implies constant shelling and a lot of mines and, unfortunately, we were subjected to a loss as well. In January our youngest volunteer, Denys, was killed on a mission. He joined our team of three people at the beginning of the invasion and we have been closely working together since then. Denys’ car rode over a mine while he was driving to the location. A tragedy that happened unjustly and reminded us that no one is immune to this, there is never a guarantee. But we realize the stakes. Our time is very limited and we cannot afford to stop. We must understand that the boys that we launch our missions for, have already given their lives for our future, and to take the risks in return is now our duty.