‘Relatives need to say goodbye’: Meet Ukraine’s body collectors who take fallen soldiers home from the frontline
Dealing with death is the grimmest reality of war – something few understand better than Taras.
The sergeant is part of a unit tasked with collecting the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers killed in action from morgues near the frontline and delivering them back to their families.
“I try to return our fallen warriors home as soon as possible,” Taras, 44, told Sky News as he drove his lorry through the city of Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine.
“Their relatives need to say goodbye and bury them as it should be. So, that is my mission.”
It is a relentless cycle for him and the rest of the On The Shield team as Ukraine battles wave after wave of Russian attacks along the frontline across the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
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The Ukrainian authorities have not released figures of their war dead, but Western officials have put the number at more than 100,000 killed and injured since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022. The Russian toll is even higher, with the United States most recently saying the death toll alone was some 188,000.
Just one morning spent with Taras offered a sense of the scale of Ukraine’s loss.
He collected the bodies of 22 soldiers from two morgues alone.
Taras said seeing first-hand the price that his country is paying can become too much to bear.
“Sometimes I can’t sleep because of the young boys and girls,” he said.
“Sometimes I cry – like any normal person. Sometimes when I get back to our base, I am just lying there thinking and crying.”
Taras’s truck shuttles between frontline morgues and slain soldiers’ families
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Yet he puts on a brave face when greeting other members of the Shield team – part of the Ukrainian armed forces – as well as workers at the morgues and the medics, who retrieve the fallen from the battlefield and transport them to the frontline body-holding facilities.
They exchange greetings and hug.
Asked how he managed to keep smiling when dealing with death every day, Taras said: “It’s hard but we try to find a moment to smile. I call home, talk to my wife, to my children, parents, brothers. After that, my heart is warm and I want to smile.”
At the first morgue we visited with Taras in Kramatorsk, four bodies were waiting, each in a white, plastic body bag, with the name and date of birth of each of the deceased written in marker pen, where known.
The purpose of On The Shield is to return the military dead with dignity to their loved ones.
Working with officials at the morgue, the first two body bags were carefully carried forward and unzipped.
Soldiers must identify the dead at morgues near the frontline before they can be taken away
The face of one of the soldiers had been partially ripped off. A morgue official said the injuries had most likely been caused by an artillery shell.
There was no obvious sign of injury on the second soldier. He looked to be in some kind of frozen sleep. The same morgue official said he had been killed by the blast wave from an explosion. Both men died fending off Russian attacks around the area of village of Bilohorivka in Luhansk, where fierce fighting is raging.
Taras bent over the bodies in turn and took a photograph as part of the trail of evidence.
Identity papers are also checked, such as passports and ID cards.
The bags were then zipped up and transferred to the back of his lorry. Then the next two body bags were brought out.
The date on one of those bags – 8 February 1996 – revealed that the soldier it was holding would have been celebrating his 27th birthday. He was found with a military flag from his air assault brigade unit. The flag was folded up neatly, put into a plastic bag and placed on his torso before the body bag was zipped back up.
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A combat medic, who had brought the dead soldiers back from the battlefield, said it was clear that a new Russian offensive had already started.
“You can sense it because the frontline is not far from here. This is audible,” he said.
Asked whether he was seeing a concurrent rise in the number of dead soldiers being collected, he said: “It is not so relevant because we can’t always retrieve them from the battlefield because the aggressor does anything [to stop us]…
“Those bodies brought here do not reveal the true situation. We only bring the bodies that we can pull out. We can bring some out, but not all of them.”
With four bodies in the back of his lorry, Taras moved to a second morgue in the nearby city of Sloviansk. There, 15 bodies were already waiting to be collected, many in black rather than white plastic body bags. Four more then arrived in two military ambulances.
The body collector and other workers methodically processed the majority of the dead, with help from a young woman called Margo who oversaw the morgue.
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She said the number of fallen soldiers passing through varied by day. The highest number in a 24-hour period was 43.
“It does impact me, strongly,” she said, sitting at a small makeshift desk, where she signs off paperwork for each body.
“When I am taking documents and open them and see the date of birth, my tears are welling up from inside me. It is hard to keep myself composed. It is very hard.”
A military paramedic who gave her name as Lina was at this morgue, having helped retrieve some of the fallen from the frontline. She was in a rush to return to her unit.
“In our direction, it is pretty tense,” she said. “My guys are dying at this very moment and they need my help.”
Lina raced off to a waiting vehicle and left.
For Taras, his next stop was the much larger city of Dnipro, about a four-hour drive north. Two more On The Shield drivers, operating in other parts of the eastern frontline, also had collected bodies that morning and were heading in the same direction.
The bodies are transported to the main Dnipro morgue or two other morgues in the vicinity, where the military has established large, refrigerated lorries to be able to handle the volume of death rotating through.
Forensic experts at these facilities examine each body to determine the cause of death. Finally another member of the Shield unit transfers each fallen soldier to their respective families via recruitment centres in their local area anywhere in the country.
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Colonel Vladyslav, 42, the commander of the whole unit, urged the UK and other Western allies to give Ukraine more weapons and ammunition to bolster their capabilities and reduce the number of future losses they incur against Russia.
“The best men die for this war,” he said, speaking in good English, standing outside the Sloviansk morgue.
“We protect our country – that is obvious – but we do not have as many troops as Russia. Therefore, it’s most important to move on to victory as fast as we can.”
World
Body of missing rabbi Zvi Kogan found in UAE – as Israeli PM says he was murdered in ‘antisemitic terror incident’
The COP29 climate talks have reached a last ditch deal on cash for developing countries, pulling the summit back from the brink of collapse after a group of countries stormed out of a negotiating room earlier.
The slew of deals finally signed off in the small hours of Sunday morning in Azerbaijan includes one that proved hardest of all – one about money.
Eventually the more than 190 countries in Baku agreed a target for richer polluting countries such as the UK, EU and Japan to drum up $300bn a year by 2035 to help poorer nations both curb and adapt to climate change.
It is a far cry from the $1.3trn experts say is needed, and from the $500bn that vulnerable countries like Uganda had said they would be willing to accept.
But in the end they were forced to, knowing they could not afford to live without it, nor wait until next year to try again, when a Donald Trump presidency would make things even harder.
Bolivia’s lead negotiator Diego Pacheco called it an “insult”, while the Marshall Islands’ Tina Stege said it was “not nearly enough, but it’s a start”.
UN climate chief Simon Stiell said: “This new finance goal is an insurance policy for humanity, amid worsening climate impacts hitting every country.
“No country got everything they wanted, and we leave Baku with a mountain of work still to do. So this is no time for victory laps.”
The funding deal was clinched more than 24 hours into overtime, and against what felt like all the odds.
The talks were rocked from the start by the incoming presidency of climate denier Mr Trump, the moment Argentina’s team were recalled back to Buenos Aires by their right-wing president and a controversial letter that sent shockwaves through the United Nations.
Pic: AP
The fraught two weeks of negotiations pitted the anger of developing countries who are footing the bill for more dangerous weather that they did little to cause, against the tight public finances of rich countries.
A relieved Juan Carlos Monterrey Gomez, climate envoy for Panama, said there is “light at the end of the tunnel”.
Just hours ago, the talks almost fell apart as furious vulnerable nations stormed out of negotiations in frustration over that elusive funding goal.
They were also angry with oil and gas producing countries, who stood accused of trying to dilute aspects of the deal on cutting fossil fuels.
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Climate-vulnerable nations storm out of talks
The UN talks work on consensus, meaning everyone has to agree for a deal to fly.
A row over how to follow up on last year’s pledge to “transition away from fossil fuels” was left unresolved and punted into next year, following objections from Chile and Switzerland for being too weak.
A draft deal simply “reaffirmed” the commitment but did not dial up the pressure in the way the UK, EU, island states and many others here wanted.
Saudi Arabia fought the hardest against any step forward on cutting fossil fuels, the primary cause of climate change that is intensifying floods, drought and fires around the world.
Governments did manage to strike a deal on carbon markets at COP29, which has been 10 years in the making and will allow countries to trade emissions cuts.
‘Not everything we wanted’
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The UK’s energy secretary, Ed Miliband, said the deal is “not everything we or others wanted”, but described it as a “step forward”.
“It’s a deal that will drive forward the clean energy transition, which is essential for jobs and growth in Britain and for protecting us all against the worsening climate crisis,” he added.
“Today’s agreement sends the signal that the clean energy transition is unstoppable.
“It is the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century and through our championing of it we can help crowd in private investment.”
Protesters at the summit in Baku. Pic: AP
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The Azerbaijan team leading COP29 said: “Every hour of the day, we have pulled people together. Every inch of the way, we have pushed for the highest common denominator.
“We have faced geopolitical headwinds and made every effort to be an honest broker for all sides.”
At least 20 people have been killed and 66 injured in Israeli strikes on central Beirut, Lebanese authorities have said.
Lebanon‘s health ministry said the death toll could rise as emergency workers dig through the rubble looking for survivors. DNA tests are being used to identify the victims, the ministry added.
The attack destroyed an eight-storey residential building and badly damaged several others around it in the Basta neighbourhood at 4am (2am UK time) on Saturday.
The central Basta neighbourhood in Beirut
The Israeli military did not warn residents to evacuate before the attack and has not commented on the casualties.
At least four bombs were dropped in the attack – the fourth targeting the city centre this week.
A separate drone strike in the southern port city of Tyre this morning killed two people and injured three, according to the state-run National News Agency.
The victims were Palestinian refugees from the nearby al Rashidieh camp who were out fishing, according to Mohammed Bikai, spokesperson for the Fatah Palestinian faction in the Tyre area.
Israel’s military warned residents today in parts of Beirut’s southern suburbs that they were near Hezbollah facilities, which the army would target in the near future. The warning, posted on X, told people to evacuate at least 500 metres away.
The army said that over the past day it had conducted intelligence-based strikes on Hezbollah targets in Dahiyeh, in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where Hezbollah has a strong presence. It said it hit several command centres and weapons storage facilities.
Pic: AP
Israel has killed several Hezbollah leaders in air strikes on the capital’s southern suburbs.
Heavy fighting between Israel and Hezbollah is ongoing in southern Lebanon, as Israeli forces push deeper into the country since launching a major offensive in September.
According to the Lebanese health ministry, at least 3,670 people have been killed in Israeli attacks there, with more than 15,400 wounded.
It has displaced about 1.2 million people – a quarter of Lebanon’s population – while Israel says about 90 soldiers and nearly 50 civilians have been killed in northern Israel.
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Meanwhile, six people, including three children and two women, were killed in the southern Gazan city of Khan Younis.
Some 44,176 Palestinians have been killed since the start of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, according to the Gaza health ministry.
The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count, but it has said that more than half of the fatalities are women and children.
The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel on 7 October 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking another 250 hostage.
US envoy Amos Hochstein was in the region this week to try to end more than 13 months of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, ignited last October by the war in Gaza.
Mr Hochstein indicated progress had been made after meetings in Beirut on Tuesday and Wednesday, before going to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Israel Katz.
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