"Modeling the situation that could have happened during battle." How the bodies of the dead soldiers are searched for

Captain Nazar and I are frantically scraping the soles of our shoes on the ground and grass, trying to clean them from the blood that has leaked from the black bags onto the morgue floor.

"The smell of human remains is harder to get rid of – I have to wash my clothes often," says Nazar. "At first I had very unpleasant feelings. But now I see it all as part of my job. It is very important, because our soldiers deserve to be buried at home."

Nazar is the head of one of the groups of the Armed Forces of Ukraine's On the Shield project, which searches for the bodies of fallen soldiers at the battlefields in the Izyum sector. The bodies of Ukrainians are being searched for burial with proper honor, and the bodies of the occupiers are being searched for exchange with the Russian side for Ukrainian dead.

hromadske spent several days with a search group on the border of Kharkiv and Donetsk oblasts, where fierce fighting took place last year. Certain episodes in this article may shock some readers.

The second body

The villages around are deserted, foxes and roes run freely on the road, and grouses fly over it right in front of the car. Red signs warning of mines bring us back to reality.

Forest belts and fields are overgrown with bushes. How can you find a body through which plant shoots could have already sprouted among this dense weave of trunks, branches, and grass?

We arrive at the location where Nazar's group is to conduct the search. Between the field and the forest belt, there is a turret and exhaust pipe from a Russian APC, shell casings from self-propelled artillery systems, and bags of Russian dry rations. It is obvious that this was once an enemy position.

"The previous group had already found a body in this place but where there is one body, there may be another," explains Nazar.

The guys first comb the forest belt. They split into pairs: a sapper and a searcher. The pairs walk towards each other. It is empty. Except that Yevhen, the sapper, found a Lepestok, a Russian anti-personnel mine. He marks the spot, and the group sends information about it to the rescuers.

"The State Emergency Service unit will come here, find all the explosive devices, and destroy them," explains Nazar.

The task of combing a large field seems impossible to me. It looks like you need 100 searchers who will form a line and walk across the field from one end to the other. And there are only five of them in the group, along with the sappers.

"Follow me step by step," Yevhen is the first to enter the field thickets.

The wind is so strong that the searcher and the group's driver Kostyantyn are forced to refuse the help of the drone. By the way, according to Kostya, drones have been used to search for the dead since last year. They can be provided by the relevant military unit or volunteers. Sometimes searchers buy them at their own expense.

"Nowadays, searchers are also completing drone courses, because if you want to work effectively, you have to find a drone and learn how to fly it," Kostyantyn notes.

But when you don't have a drone, you have to rely on your intuition. The guys' intuition doesn't fail them: after a while, they find a human skull. It becomes the center of a conditional search circle, the radius of which the group gradually increases.

"Since the skull is lying separately, it means that foxes and dogs or other animals have pulled the remains apart," another Kost in the group explains to me. “Most likely, these will also be bones gnawed by animals. There is no guarantee that they actually belong to the same person. But forensic experts will figure it out."

The guys put the bones of human limbs into a black bag. Some of them still have half-rotten clothes on them. There is also a shoe with an inscription on the sole "Donobuv".

"I'm 99% sure it's a Russian," says Nazar.

Kostya the driver determines the coordinates of the find – they are recorded on a tag that is attached to the body bag. The number of the search team and the date the body was found are also indicated. Usually, at the end of the day, the group takes their findings to the morgue in Donetsk Oblast. But these bones without flesh can lie in the back of a truck until tomorrow.

Not for the casuals

"The locations for work are chosen by me, the team leader. I use data from the automated Delta system. The system itself receives information about the bodies from intelligence, combat units, local residents, search groups, police, etc.," says Nazar.

According to him, in about 90% of cases, the locations indicated by Delta are not absolutely accurate. That's why the search radius sometimes has to be increased up to a kilometer from the specified coordinates. This means deviating from the trails laid by the group's sappers at your own risk.

"In a combat zone, for example, you have to either mine a specific area or clear it of mines -– everything is clear and straightforward," says Yevhen. “For example, you have to lay a route for a group through the forest, and you don't know what mines are lurking along the way and where they might be. And whether they can be there at all. Because if we were practicing on a former Russian position, we couldn't have been bumping into mines under our own noses. My partner Yura and I are laying a corridor so that the group can pass through, and our car can drive through. But no one can guarantee that there are no mines within a meter of the corridor."

"That's why we need experienced searchers on the route so that they can identify mine danger and work competently on the location," Nazar adds.

This is the first time Nazar has headed a search team. Before that, he was involved in the transportation of bodies that had already been found. But he has completed special courses to work in the Central Department of Civil-Military Cooperation (CMC), and his guys are experienced – you can rely on them.

Yevhen, for example, has been in the Armed Forces since 2015 and has extensive experience in combat zones and in search groups. Kostya, the driver, has been searching since 2014, and another Kostya was searching for bodies of those killed in World War II before the war with Russia. Although Yuriy has only been in the Armed Forces since March of this year, he is a judicious person and works thoughtfully.

The groups are formed at the CMC, and the guys are sent on field trips from their military units.

"First of all, a searcher needs to be able to recreate the situation that could have occurred at the location during the fighting. Where was whose position, who could have fired at whom, where the wounded soldier could have crawled to, where his comrades could have dug up the body to take it away later," says Nazar.

The searcher must also know anatomy so as not to confuse human bones with animal bones. You also need to understand the legal aspects of the work and carefully document the search results. In addition, you will need a stable psyche and the ability to work as a team.

"Casuals shouldn't join search groups. They only get in the way, they get underfoot," Kostya the driver concludes.

"And Margo will do the paperwork"

In the morning, the group handed over the bones of a Russian soldier found the day before to the morgue in Donetsk Oblast. A few hours later, we brought there six more enemy bodies, which we had gone to the Ukrainian Armed Forces units in the Lyman sector to pick up.

"D**kheads?" Margo, a morgue worker, clarifies and adds a few more strong expressions.

The bags are laid out on the floor. Kostya, the driver, and Margo deftly cut the corpses' clothes, empty their pockets, and feel every scar. They found soldier's dog tags on two of the bodies, documents on one, and Margo read a meaningful inscription "thief" inside someone's helmet.

"We are looking for anything that will help identify these bodies as occupiers’ bodies. We are currently conducting an initial examination. Later, they will be examined by forensic experts and the police, biomaterial will be taken for DNA analysis, and all information will be recorded in the relevant criminal proceedings," explains Nazar.

The bodies are photographed, the bags are fastened, and a tag filled out by Nazar is attached to each one. They draw up body acceptance certificates: where and when they were found, the condition of the body or its parts, what belongings and documents they had with them, and so on.

Margo will later give one of the copies of the act to the transport group, which will take the bags with the Russians to their temporary storage places, where they will wait for the exchange. The same acts are drawn up for the bodies of the Ukrainian defenders.

When the documents are completed, Margo closes the morgue door and starts the freezer. She has written a warning on the door: "Once opened, close it. Or you’ll be killed. And Margo will do the paperwork!"

"Don't pay attention to my jokes. If I didn't joke, I would have gone crazy here a long time ago," the woman says.

The searchers take off their gloves, disinfect their hands, and take a long drag on their cigarettes.

I tell Yevhen, the sapper, that I've been trying to control my nausea and dizziness all this time, and that it must be hard for the guys who have been on the front line.

"Someone has to do it," Yevhen reasonably replies.

Our next route that day is 15 kilometers long, to another town in Donetsk Oblast. There, we need to coordinate the preparation of documents so that the prosecutor's office will give permission for the exhumation of the Russian body, which will also be exchanged.

"The exhumation will be carried out either by ours or by another search group," explains Nazar. "If this katsap had been buried in a field, we would not have needed to get permission. But he had an autopsy in a local hospital, and for some reason he ended up in a local cemetery, so now we have this headache."

I understand Nazar. For a long time, he had a "paperwork" job at the CMC: he processed information related to the search for missing persons. And now there is more paperwork, which he tried to avoid in the first place when he asked to join the search group.

"But orders must be obeyed," Nazar says, not so much to me as to himself.

Locations are almost worked out

In the afternoon, my train to Kyiv leaves, so the dew on the bushes has not yet dried, and we are already at the location. A few hundred meters from the road, on the slope of a gully, there is a burnt-out Russian tank. It is to become the center of the search.

The guys put on their armor, Yurko arms himself with a mine detector – he will go first. He is followed by Yevhen and Nazar with probes (to examine the ground in case the mine detector suddenly "beeps"). I jog along behind them: it's a bit scary to follow the group, because the mine detector keeps pinging over and over again, reacting to numerous pieces of debris, but I don't want to get too far behind, so as not to get off the path laid out by Yuriy.

We climb to the top of the hill and go down the slopes into the wild rose and thistle thickets. But there’s nothing. Near the tank, there is a large pile of garbage: cans, bottles, and packaging. There are inscriptions on them in Ukrainian.

"Maybe the Russians dumped it from our stores, or maybe our ‘black treasure hunters’ have already been here," Nazar speculates.

According to him, some locals have probes and mine detectors, so they come to the battlefields. Sometimes they find the bodies of the dead and either hand them over to the morgue or inform the police or search groups of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. It may be that they are not interested in the bodies at all, but in the equipment of military machinery: phones, money, rings, chains, bank cards of the dead.

"This is all illegal activity and very dangerous, because these self-taught people can easily trip a mine," Nazar notes.

We move to another slope and see nothing.

"There are no signs of the former positions here, and there was no battle here – not a single branch on the tree has been cut off by the shrapnel. Apparently, that tank hit a mine. But where on earth did it intend to go on these slopes?" says Yuriy and puts down the mine detector.

"Many search groups have already passed through this area during the year, these locations have been worked out by 90%, and it is a rare thing to find someone, especially our guys. But you know how it is: three groups have not found anything, and the fourth one has. No one can guarantee that no bodies are left in these thickets," Nazar concludes.

In a few days, the group will probably move to finish the fall search season closer to Bakhmut. Winter work depends on the weather. If there is a lot of snow, then there is a chance to find the dead only immediately after the end of hostilities. Therefore, in winter, the searchers mainly record locations where work may be fruitful in the future.

During my time in the group, we have not found a single body of a Ukrainian soldier. I would like to think that all of our soldiers killed in the Izyum sector have already been buried and mourned by their families.