Donbas.
The territory in Donetsk Oblast still held by Kyiv is under almost continuous bombardment.
The ring around the fiercely contested and strategically vital city of Pokrovsk is tightening. At the same time, the front is advancing toward the twin towns of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. Parts of Kramatorsk now lie only some 15 kilometers (9 miles) from Russian positions. Fiber-optic-controlled drone strikes are increasing. Access roads are almost continuously secured with anti-drone nets. The suburbs of Kostyantynivka and Druzhkivka face near-constant drone and artillery attack. Regional authorities urge evacuation, but getting out safely grows harder each day; evacuation routes come under fire and repeatedly break off.
Amid this extreme tension – shaped by fear and flight – there is a count being taken that has nothing to do with saving the living. Another reckoning begins here: not by voices, but by bodies. Oleksii Yukov and his team follow the gaps in the terrain, even into occupied territory, to recover the fallen where police and official services no longer have access.
Our mission knows no sides.
A white van stops in the center of Sloviansk, the number “200” painted on its side – a military shorthand for transporting the dead from the battlefield. Oleksii Yukov climbs out. His walk is calm, purposeful, without haste.
“Our mission knows no sides: Ukrainian soldiers, Russian soldiers, civilians. Everyone is found, everyone is given a name, and returned.” Since the large-scale Russian invasion began, Yukov’s group has located, exhumed, and recovered more than 3,000 bodies.
And the numbers keep rising. Their operations have increased year by year: in 2022, the workload was only a fraction of what 2023 brought; 2024/25 have seen the scale settle at a persistently higher level.
“The war today is fought increasingly by drones,” Yukov says. “In direct firefights, losses were often in the single-digit percent range; in combinations of infantry and drones, we sometimes see casualty rates up to 90%.”
Their task is clear: search, recover, transport.
“We find the dead and take them from point A to point B,” Yukov says.
Formal identification is the job of forensics; DNA samples are taken there. Yukov’s team does not collect DNA – they are a recovery squad. Yet, on-site, a first identification is often possible from what people carry with them.
“You can learn a lot about a person from their belongings,” the 40-year-old says: patches and insignia, service or army ID cards, dog tags, notes, letters, sometimes a photograph tucked in a wallet. Russian dead are handed over for repatriation as part of exchange procedures. When the deceased are Ukrainian, the team often accompanies the farewell at the grave.
During the “Anti-Terror Operation” (2014–2018) Oleksii was part of Jaroslav Shylkin’s volunteer network “Black Tulip.” After the encirclement of Ilovaisk in 2014, the team pulled bodies out of fields, trenches, and ruins amid the inferno of battle and brought them home – mission after mission across the Donbas. “Black Tulip” has since dissolved. In February 2022, Yukov formed his own group, “Platsdarm,” to continue the work.
In military jargon, a “platsdarm” denotes a secured staging area. Yukov chose the name deliberately: from such a fixed point in the front line, his team sets out to bring the fallen home.
A single recovery can take weeks
Yukov and his team operate independently, without state funding. “The government has enough on its plate; bureaucracy would only slow us down,” he says. Financing comes from private donors at home and abroad: they donate money, provide vehicles, and deliver equipment. There are no salaries; everyone volunteers – every euro goes into operations: fuel, food, protective gear, and equipment.
“There are no ordinary days. This is not work; it’s a mission. And we carry it out,” Yukov says.
They set out, turn back, and try again. How an operation unfolds depends on the front sector and the terrain: a strip of woodland, a row of houses, open fields – each demands different preparation and brings its own risks. Search and evacuation are distinct tasks. Enemy drones overhead, mines, and surveilled access routes can delay every step.
“In 95% of cases we are attacked from the air,” he says. “A recovery rarely succeeds on the first attempt; it usually takes several tries. Even bringing back one body can take a week, sometimes two.”
Yukov races against time, against what decomposes the bodies. What they find hardens them.
“Otherwise you could not bear what you see,” Oleksii says, gaze steady. “Sometimes I just want to scream. There are more and more. My life won’t be enough to finish this search.”
Yukov, a father himself, speaks quietly of the recoveries that stay with him.
“Children and their parents – we have recovered whole families. Raped, shot, wiped out. You stand there and know: you could do nothing. You cannot protect your child. After that, it’s your turn.”
On the threshold of death
In June 2014, on a sunny day in Sloviansk, Oleksii was stopped on his way home, bound and taken into the building of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) – then under the control of paramilitary forces aligned with the Russian-backed self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic.
Soon, they read out his execution order. As they led him outside to be shot, Ukrainian artillery suddenly opened up.
The separatists leapt into the trenches they had dug around the SBU building; Oleksii threw himself down too.
After the shelling eased, they dragged him up again and searched him. They found his phone and dialed the last number in the call log. At the other end, a pro-Russian fighter answered – someone with whom Oleksii had arranged a body exchange the day before: “Who the hell have you arrested, you idiots – that’s a searcher. If your dead are lying here, he’s the only one who will pull them out, not step over them.”
Minutes passed. Then came a call from Igor Girkin (aka “Strelkov”), then leader of the separatists in Sloviansk. The execution was called off. Oleksii remembers every word to this day.
Since then, he has escaped death more than once. During a mission in a recently liberated forest area of Kharkiv Oblast in September 2022, Oleksii suffered serious injuries. Hearing the telltale click of a MON-50 (a Soviet bounding fragmentation mine), he leapt aside – a reflex that saved his life. Shrapnel scattered over more than 40 meters (130 feet), striking his legs and face. He lost sight in his right eye and has worn a glass eye ever since.
I promised the dead I would bring them home.
For Oleksii, the meaning of his missions is more than the mere return of bodies. Proximity to death has shaped his worldview.
“We are not body hunters, we’re soul seekers. As long as the body does not rest, the soul remains bound. Only when we bring them home can the soul let go and the family say goodbye. We risk our lives not for a body, but for the return of a person.”
That is why he avoids the word cadaver: for the bereaved behind each death stands a name and a story.
When Oleksii sleeps, the war usually sleeps with him. Nightmares? “Everyone has them. But the worst nightmare is the life we all live. In a dream you can hide, you can run away. In life, everything stands before you – and you decide what kind of person you are and what deeds you will do. I promised the dead I would bring them home.”
As ferryman of the Ukrainian underworld, Oleksii Yukov moves between the dead and the living.
“In war adrenaline overrides brain function,” he says, “and yet I have come to value life more.”
After missions, he returns home “constantly under a kind of stress.”
“It could have been my relative in that place – or me,” he says. “Of course, that weighs heavily, but I try to fight it. When we bring the dead back, we show what war is: calamity and pain. In that way, we push it back a little.”
If Ukraine falls, Europe falls too
Where the map is now shaded red – the Russian-occupied territories – childhood loses its innocence: upbringing under the sign of war. Kremlin propaganda pervades life.
In schools and clubs, even the youngest are being taught to handle weapons. The aim, Yukov says, is “to raise universal soldiers who kill without questioning. That is a crime against humanity, committed against children who have a right to their own future.”
Putin pursues an imperial strategy: first Ukraine as an outpost, then Europe. Seen this way, the front is not a line but a threshold; should it fall, those raised there will bring their habits of war westward.
“If Ukraine ceases to exist, Europe has no chance,” Oleksii is convinced.
History repeats itself
Having, at thirteen, searched the woods around his hometown of Sloviansk for missing persons from the First and Second World Wars, Yukov recognizes a pattern that keeps returning to his land.
“History repeats itself, only differently. People are killed because of their origin, culture, or belonging – like in the Third Reich, when Jews, Roma, and Slavs were murdered. Today it is those whose grandfathers once fought in the same trenches against Hitler who are now being turned against us.”
Despite everything, Oleksii believes an end to this war is possible. “Everything can change in an instant,” he says.
What will matter most, he says, is not only the battlefield but what happens inside Russia. If Putin’s regime falls, the killing could stop “within days, not least because millions of families have long learned that the lives of their children in Russia are worth nothing – that they are treated as disposable.”
Historically, he points at Nazi Germany: “Propaganda cannot survive without dictatorial rule.” If the top collapses, the war machine loses its rhythm; without a dictator, continuation is unlikely.
In the end he returns to what sustains him.
“The dead are on my side – and I on theirs,” Yukov insists. “Sometimes I feel as if someone speaks to me in a dream, and the next day I find his body.”
The van’s engine, labeled “200,” starts. The vehicle pulls away. It is unforeseeable if and when the killing here will end. Oleksii’s search continues, “so that everyone knows who gave their life for our freedom.”