At the beginning of the third year of the Russian war in Ukraine, the situation does not change: from Kyiv, and with numerous troops spread throughout the territory, the Ukrainians continue to resist Moscow’s constant offensives. Attacks with which the numbers of refugees, injuries and fatalities increase, practically daily, and which already number in the tens of thousands. The conflict does not allow breaks, not even to give a worthy burial to those who have risked their lives in these battles without ever seeing the end of them. This, in fact, has become a real problem.

Currently, one of the most important issues to discuss in this war are the thousands of bodies that are lying in the middle of a nowhere full of dangers; stationed between the lines of Zelensky and Putin’s armies. Bodies that have not been cared for or removed from fighting areas for days, weeks and even months, leaving evidence of the cruelty of a conflict prolonged over time. Right now there are fields full of corpses that no one dares to collect because it is too dangerous, given that, for the most part, they continue to be conflict zones not exempt from gunshots or bombs.

But there are those who, despite everything – despite the danger, the fear, the hopelessness – do try to carry out this task, whose purpose is not only the removal of inert bodies from the ground. This is the case of Oleksiy Yukov, whom a laSexta team accompanies on his route through Donbas, now largely occupied by Vladimir Putin’s forces. Yukov, 38, is a history buff. Before this war, which started on February 24, 2022, he was dedicated to similar work: looking for corpses from World War II that were never collected in Donbas.

Now, their relationship with the dead is similar, although the conflict, the parties involved and the interests on both sides of the trenches is different from that of that great war that marked the end of Nazism and its expansionist desire. Of course, one could say that the risks of this work are practically the same: entering no man’s land, where the danger of seeing yourself killed is always constant, and collects corpses. It is the first of many steps, since the objective of this device that Yukov, among others, has launched is to determine the identity of the victims of this war.

On February 25, just after two years of war, the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, stated that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers who would have died since the beginning of the Russian invasion, this being the first official balance in several months. A number that is far from the calculations made by Russia, which, as of December 19, 2023, estimated that 383,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed or wounded, without specifying the specific number of casualties. In that same speech, Zelensky stated that until then 180,000 Russians had died in the war, compared to the just over 10,000that Moscow recognized.