On Saturday, thousands gathered at Kyiv’s St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral for an Orthodox service for Oleksiy Yukov. His casket was later carried to Maidan Square, where mourners dropped to their knees as it passed. Memorial services were held in other Ukrainian cities as well. Yukov was 40 years old. He was not a soldier, and he was not a priest. He was the man who walked into the fields, the forests and the ruins to bring out the dead, all of them, the Russians included.
He came from the Donbas, the region the war has torn apart, and he made his living teaching martial arts. In 2014, when the first war came to his home ground, he founded an organization called Platsdarm, the Ukrainian word for bridgehead, on a single conviction: every dead person deserves a grave. He had started the work as a teenager, after stumbling on the wartime graves of Soviet and Russian soldiers who fell in the Second World War, and he never stopped. Over two decades he became the country’s best-known collector of the fallen, called the collector of souls by the volunteers who worked with him.
The work is simple to describe and nearly impossible to do. Teams of volunteers walk ground that is mined, shelled and watched by drones, and they bring back what the fighting has left behind: soldiers and civilians, Ukrainians and Russians. Most people in Ukraine will not touch the body of a Russian soldier, and many argue the invaders’ dead should be left to rot. Yukov disagreed, and he said so publicly. Recovering them, he argued, was how the country fought for every soul; the dead do not choose which side they died on, and burial is what makes a society stay human. He described the work as action carried out every day in the fields and the forest belts and the ruins, where a life can be cut off at any moment. He wrote that everything was against him, but he went anyway, so that every soul could return home.
He knew the cost of that ground better than almost anyone. In 2022, a mine blast cost him an eye and wounded his legs badly enough that he needed months of recovery. He went back to the front-line ground anyway, and he was still doing the work when the ground took him. On August 5, while out on a recovery operation in the Donetsk region, he stepped on a landmine and died.
His widow promised through tears that the work would carry on, for the sake of the dead and for his sake; his daughter said he had served the dead and tended to the living. Platsdarm’s volunteers will keep going. The organization outlives its founder because the need outlasts him. The war is now in its fifth year, the front line is dense with mines laid by both armies, and the ground is not getting safer for the people who walk it with body bags.
There is a terrible symmetry in how he died. The weapon that kills soldiers killed the man who came to collect them. The war has reached the point where the profession of burying it is itself a front-line job, and the body collectors are dying in the same fields as the soldiers they came for.
Somewhere in the Donetsk region there is a piece of ground where the mines are still waiting. The men and women of Platsdarm will go back to it, because that is what he would have done, and because the only tribute the collector of souls would have accepted is the one he spent his life earning: the dead still coming home, one by one, whatever the ground costs.