A Ukrainian man who spent years exhuming and identifying soldiers killed in the war is getting a final send-off in his hometown of Slovyansk after being killed during one of his missions to exhume bodies near the front line.Oleksiy Yukov organized a small volunteer group in 2014, when conflict broke out with Kremlin-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Its work helped families recover the bodies of fallen loved ones and provide them with dignified burials.Since Russia's fall-scale invasion began in 2022, the group's workload has increased exponentially -- as have the dangers from booby-trapped bodies, unexploded ordinance, shelling, and drones."For us, it's very important that every guy and girl comes home," Yukov told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service in April last year.
A Grisly JobYukov's interest in his field began during peacetime. As a teenager, he was involved in searching and exhuming the remains of Soviet and German soldiers killed during World War I and II. He later recalled seeing the bones of unidentified bodies in forests near his home and feeling an intense emotional response.But in 2014, war ceased to be a subject of historical interest as Slovyansk became an epicenter of intense fighting in the new conflict. Yukov, who had been working as a Thai boxing coach, quickly started to recover unidentified bodies of recently killed soldiers and civilians from both sides of the lines.Amid ongoing fighting and fluid front lines, this was dangerous work. At one point, he was captured and nearly executed by armed separatists. At another, his vehicle came under fire, according to Ukrainian media reports.Some 13,000 people were killed in the conflict between 2014-22. The war that has followed since then has been on a massively larger scale with hundreds of thousands of fatalities. Yukov was busier than ever and RFE/RL frequently documented his work.In November 2022, RFE/RL filmed him and fellow volunteers exhuming Russian war dead in a rain-soaked Ukrainian forest near the village of Dovhenke in the Kharkiv region."Russia has caused tremendous grief for us. It started a war against us; it is ruining our cities and killing our people. But we remain human even in these circumstances and gather their military's dead bodies," he said at the time.The bodies would be included in periodic exchanges of the dead between Russia and Ukraine.
