Ukraine mourns “collector of souls” Oleksiy Yukov, killed recovering war dead

Ukrainian military members carry the coffin of Oleksiy Yukov, head of the Ukrainian platsdarm search unit, during his funeral at the St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral in Kyiv on Saturday.

Roman PILIPEY/AFP via Getty Images

Roman PILIPEY/AFP via Getty Images

Oleksiy Yukov, a Ukrainian known as the “collector of souls” for his decades-long work recovering the remains of soldiers and civilians on the frontlines of war, was honored in Kyiv on Saturday after being killed by a landmine during a recovery mission in the eastern Donetsk region.

Yukov, 40, was killed on Aug. 5 when he stepped on the mine during an effort to exhume a body, according to a social media post by his friend, Serhiy Hnezdilov. “This is a great loss for me personally and for the people close to me,” he wrote in a translation published by Kyiv Post. “[H]e gave names back to the dead.”

Thousands of Ukrainians paid their respects to Yukov in an Orthodox Christian service in the capital. Before the service in Kyiv, Yukov was mourned and honored in his hometown of Sloviansk in Donetsk province.

Yukov was known for his tireless efforts to bring closure to the families of those killed in the war. In carrying out that task in 2022, he lost an eye and sustained a leg injury in a mine blast, the Associated Press says, but returned to his work even as he was still recovering.

As a teenager, Yukov became interested in searching for the remains on WWII battlefields in Ukraine, according to Ukrainska Pravda. After the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, he founded Platsdarm (“Bridgehead”) to recover remains and provide dignified burials for the dead, the newspaper said. Through this work, he became known as a “collector of souls.”

FILE — Oleksiy Yukov examines the body of a Russian soldier he collected on the frontline in the Sloviansk region, Ukraine, Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2023.

Bram Janssen/AP

Bram Janssen/AP

As part of a profile of Yukov, the newspaper quoted him as saying that he and a small group of Platsdarm volunteers would set off early every morning. “If it’s a safe area, we survey the territory with a drone. We check trenches, craters, shell holes, belongings, rubbish bins,” he said. “Then we divide the area into grids and search for mines and explosive devices using probes and metal detectors. We call in bomb disposal experts, who destroy or neutralize them. Then we carefully search the area for bodies.”

Yukov and his team recovered not just Ukrainian soldiers, but Russian soldiers, too, as well as civilians killed as a result of the conflict that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides of the fighting.

Months into the full-scale war that began in Feb. 2022, Yukov told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that Russia “has caused tremendous grief for us.”

Russia, he said “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.”

In an International Emmy-award winning documentary about Platsdarm’s work, titled Ukraine’s Frontline Sacrifice, Yukov said that he believes souls are reborn.

“If the body is not yet buried, the body remains with the soul. And until it is mourned, until its loved ones let it go, it cannot be reborn – the soul wanders. And the war will not end as long as souls wander.”

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