Zenyk and Nyk are inseparable. The man and his dog walk the Donbas road every dayon the Eastern Front, to Dnipro to evacuate the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers killed in combat.
In a small white refrigerator truck with the logo of the “Ukrainian Armed Forces”, Zenyk, a 51 year old recruit who did not want to give his last name, come at dawn to collect bodies from a military morgue in the eastern Donetsk region.
With a bulging belly, a small mustache and a long beard, the man receives the greeting of everyone present in the morgue when he arrives at the site.
It is a small discreet house, without visible signs, isolated next to the road and with an old closed and refrigerated shed. The black and white plastic bags containing the bodies are placed on the cement floor.
Zenyk calls his work “atypical,” but “it has to be done.” “You have to bring the heroes home, to the dead. They too must return home where wives, children and parents are waiting for them,” he explains to AFP. former construction contractor.
This 50-year-old man tells how, in 2014, he volunteered volunteer to return the bodies of dead soldiers to their families in clashes with pro-Russian separatists orchestrated by Russia.
With the February 2022 invasion, Zenyk He was recruited into the Army.
“The hardest thing was handing the body over to the relatives. Now I don’t contact the families,” says the father of two children, one of them a combatant in the Donetsk region and the other a border guard.
In the distance you can hear the muffled sounds of shell explosions on the front, less than 20 km away.
no crying
The funeral bags are taken to the morgue by units dedicated to collecting bodies in the field, or by the brigades to which the soldiers belonged.
Zenyk says be “accustomed” to your jobbecause “if you stand there crying over each one, it’s hard to bear.”
“You arrive and there are 10, 15 bodies. You know that you must photograph (the faces), check (the clothes) in search of grenades or ammunition, describe the bodies and then the boys load the vehicle once the administrative procedures have been completed,” he details.
That morning he loaded around twenty bodies, AFP confirmed, and took them to the Dnipro mortuary.
Neither kyiv nor Moscow report their losses, but according to analysts, the wounded and dead soldiers on both sides since February 24, 2022 reach tens of thousands, at least.
In a rare statement on the subject, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had told an American media in June 2022 that between 60 and 100 Ukrainian soldiers died daily in combat at that time.
“At the beginning of the invasion there were many dead, now they are less“, according to Zenyk.
“In the event of an offensive, more bodies arrive, because offensives cause even more victims,” he points out.
According to him, at the beginning of the conflict “there were no young people, but today even the youngest ones are starting to die, kids born in 2003, 2004.”
The arrival of winter makes the work “less complicated (…) because the bodies are preserved thanks to the ice,” Zenyk added. “When it’s 30 degrees in the summer, the bodies become unrecognizable.”
Sometimes it also transports Russian soldiers which are handed over to the General Staff of the Armed Forces to be exchanged for the corpses of Ukrainian soldiers.
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At the end of the morning, Zenyk got behind the wheel of his small truck and set off for Dnipro, 200 km away.
Next to him, in the passenger seat, goes his dog Nyk, only one year old, recovered in Bakhmut, city devastated by fighting that lasted for two months.