For coverage of the more than 1,000 people missing since Russia launched its war against Ukraine in 2014, see also Oksana Grytsenko’s articles here:
Families of missing people tell their stories
SLOVYANSK, Ukraine — The Russian-instigated war in Donbas, which is now in its fourth year, has created many symbols and myths, popularized in the media and overused by the authorities for their political needs.
But when it comes to real life, they mean close to nothing.
The “cyborgs” — the term used for the Ukrainian defenders of the now-ruined Donetsk airport from May 2014 before surrendering it in January 2015 — glorified those soldiers in books and movies. But still, their fate is not worthy for the state.
Oksana Remishevska, whose husband fought and disappeared in the Donetsk airport in January 2015, doesn’t like the word “cyborg.” She wants instead to hear what happened to her Vitaliy. But none of his commanders have agreed to meet with her face to face and explain what happened to him. Because of the constant stress, the mother of three children has developed a serious eye disease and has to daily travel to hospital for treatment. She refused to recognize her husband as dead or start receiving the special benefits of a soldier’s widow. Instead, she hopes that one day he returns home.
For more than three years of traveling to the war zone, I and photojournalist Anastasia Vlasova witnessed dozens of cases of surprising firmness of ordinary people against the inhumane attitude of the state.
When working on a recent story about people missing at war, we saw a lot of humanity amid the grim reality.
Liudmyla Yakovenko, from the small Donbas town of Yampil, with 2,000 people nearly 700 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, told us that she initially didn’t want to pick up the body of the separatist fighter who was killed in her yard in June 2014. After all, two local persons still haven’t been found after the separatists arrested them at their homes.
But then she changed her mind, thinking that the killed separatist was someone’s father and deserved to be treated like a human being, regardless of the side he fought on.a human attitude regardless of the side he fought for.
Members of the Black Tulip volunteer group, who have searched for and exhumed dead bodies in the war zone since 2014, witnessed many of the best and worst examples of human behavior.
Oleksiy Yukov, the group’s head in the Donetsk Oblast city of Slovyansk, controlled by the Ukrainian government since its liberation from Kremlin-backed separatists in July 2014, told us about the residents who tore apart the pieces of a fallen helicopter with the remains of the pilot’s body in order to sell for scrap metal.
But he told us about other people, who regardless of the risk for their lives and freedom, told volunteers about places of burials. Now the group often struggles, arguing with the local authorities in different towns who refuse to show or exhume the unidentified burial sites and common graves, many of which still exist in Donbas.
The Black Tulip members also struggle to make law enforcement bodies do their job and pick up human remains.
In June, we witnessed how Yukov and his colleague spent many hours of carefully digging and examining a burial site near the village of Zakitne in Donetsk Oblast. Their work revealed a lot about the killed person. The Orthodox Christian amulets showed he was religious. A good warm sweater and expensive spoon showed that someone cared about him. By the human bones, Yukov also was able to identify the age, the height and the kind of wound that the victim sustained.
Soon after the findings, Yukov called the police, whose officers are authorized to retrieve and register the remains. Police promised to come later.
Yukov hid the bones in a small hole in the ground, hoping that there will still be something left when the police eventually come. He grimly admitted how little the search for missing people meant for police.
