Oleksii Yukov, the 40-year-old head of Ukraine’s search unit Platsdarm, died Wednesday, Aug. 5, after two decades of service.News of his death first surfaced through his wife, Yevheniia Kaluhina, who announced her husband’s death in a brief Facebook post. His fellow service member and activist Serhiy Hnezdilov followed with a longer tribute, confirming that Yukov sustained fatal injuries during the exhumation of bodies on the frontline.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official.“This is a great loss for me personally and for the people close to me,” Hnezdilov wrote, adding that “for much of his life, he gave names back to the dead.”He noted that Yukov’s name “will always be associated with Donbas and with respect for every fallen soldier he helped bring back to their family.”Yukov died while exhuming bodies in the Lyman community of the Donetsk region, after being wounded on the contact line itself, United24Media reported.A career spent recovering the fallenYukov grew up in Sloviansk, a city in the northern part of the Donetsk region, and had spent nearly 27 years searching for the remains of fallen and missing service members, according to Ukrainska Pravda.He was still a teenager when he first joined a group excavating World War II battle sites, a pursuit that would eventually define the course of his life’s work.He later became head of the search group at the Platsdarm Association of Researchers of Military and Historical Heritage in 2014.