Treading carefully between the plots, Lidiya Sribna, 51, goes from grave to grave placing a red carnation on each of the mounds of soil.
Sometimes, on these visits to Krasnopillya military cemetery on the outskirts of Dnipro, in south-east Ukraine, she will balance sweets or biscuits on the black wooden crosses – a Ukrainian tradition – or give the small plaques a wipe and pick up any litter that has been scattered by the wind.
Her son, Kostyantyn, 31, is buried on the other side of the vast scrubland, where those killed in 2022 can be found under the fluttering yellow-and-blue national flags and giant floral displays.
His pristine plot is full of orange and yellow marigolds, but Sribna, wearing her smartest black polka-dot dress, is one of a group of women who also tend to the simpler graves of those yet to be claimed – the “temporarily unknown defenders”.
Rather than carrying the dates of birth and death, the plaques bear the day on which a body arrived at the morgue and the date a death certificate was issued. The ever-expanding section she is tending to today belongs to the dead of 2023.
Last April, Kostyantyn’s comrades in the Kharkiv region carried his body for more than a mile, under enemy fire, so that he might be reunited with his wife Olena, 36, and 13-year-old daughter Evheniya. “I’m just grateful they brought him home,” Sribna says.
According to Ukraine’s commissioner for missing persons, there are 7,200 military families who are yet to have that comfort. The true figure is likely to be far higher.
Those men and women have been officially designated as missing. The best hope is that they are languishing in a Russian prison. They could also be among the unidentified dead at Sribna’s feet.
It is true what they say – it is the hope that kills. Valentyna Vetrova, 52, the wife of Hennadiy Ruban, 48, can attest to this. “I pray for him but I don’t know whether to pray as if he is alive or dead,” she says of her husband, who has been missing since February. “Oh, he won’t have to do anything if he comes home, I will look after him,” she says, her face lighting up at the thought of it.
It is not just the hope, the daily yearning for news, that gnaws away at those left behind. Those facing the unimaginable horror of having a husband, son, wife or daughter simply disappear into the quagmire of Vladimir Putin’s war speak of what can seem to be a faceless bureaucracy that they say befuddles and frustrates their every effort to get the simplest of answers.
As if to prove their point, the commissioner for missing persons issued a press release this month complaining that “there are still cases when relatives share photos of missing persons on social networks and indicate their personal data”, warning that “sharing information about military units and the ranks of the disappeared” amounts to “actually handing over all the data into the hands of the enemy”.
Yet a release sent out a day earlier had asked relatives to report any new information they might gather to an official hotline.
The system, says Valentyna, a teaching assistant, puts the onus on those left behind to do the detective work. It is evidently hard for her to talk about it, but Valentyna’s last interaction with her husband was on Valentine’s Day. “I wish you endless love,” he texted.
On 19 February, Ruban’s brigade was under fire in Vodyane, a village in the Donetsk region in the east, and he was thrown through the air by the force of an explosion. The last his comrades saw of him was that he was lying lifeless on the ground. He was not among those evacuated.
Valentyna received a call on 28 February from one of his fellow soldiers. “They said my husband had died – but there wasn’t a body and they had not seen that he was dead,” she says.
She went to the local army recruitment centre in Pavlohrad, where she lives in south-eastern Ukraine, to try to find out more. They knew nothing but suggested she come back in a few days’ time. “And then when I went back they said he was missing. I was given a document saying he had disappeared on 20 February and that is all it says. It was a shock. It was like a nightmare. I couldn’t feel the ground under my legs.”
She was given a second piece of paper with dozens of different phone numbers, ranging from the Red Cross to the ministry of internal affairs and the regimental HQ. It was suggested she report her husband’s disappearance to the police and then call the hotline for missing people.
She spent hours producing the identity documents that the authorities wanted, but like many others she also started to join Telegram channels to monitor the Russian media for pictures and video of prisoners. “I believe he is alive, I can feel it,” she says.
Yulia Staikutsa, 32, also from Pavlohrad, says the same of her husband, Yevheniy, 36, who went missing last November near the village of Spirne, also in Donetsk.
She had become concerned by his failure to pick up his phone. She called one of his fellow soldiers. It was answered by the man’s wife, who explained that the unit had come under attack from a tank. “She said her husband was injured and was in hospital and I asked, ‘So where is my husband?’ And she said, ‘Well, he is dead’.”
Staikutsa received a death certificate in February. “I asked my husband’s commander what proof they had, and he just said they wanted to do something for me and that this way I would get a payment for his death. He said: ‘It will be better for your life or your children’,” recalls Staikutsa. “I will not believe his death until I see his dead body. I can feel that he is alive. Our daughter is 15. She was hysterical when I told her. But she then said that she believed me, that she felt her dad was alive too.”
Tetiana Petlina, 63, has been told various stories about the disappearance of her son, Serhiy Petlin, 35, who went missing in the same village last November.
Initially, when she called her son’s friends on the frontline, concerned that he had not been in touch, they told her that Petlin had been injured, but that he had refused to be among the first to be evacuated.
When they had returned for him, he had disappeared, they said. Soon after, she received an official letter at her home in Pavlohrad confirming her son was missing. But for the next two weeks the operators at the official missing person’s hotline said they had no such information. He was, they insisted, “continuing to do his duties”.
A further explanation was given a month later by a commander who said Petlin had been shot dead by a sniper as he was being carried out of the trenches.
Tetiana can’t accept it. Not when there is so little proof, and stories abound of soldiers feared dead emerging from Russian captivity. She believes she may have seen Petlin in an image on one of the Russian Telegram channels, but can not be sure.
The commissioner for missing persons did not respond to a request for comment.
Victoriya Solodukhina, 55, understands the plight of these women. “I don’t trust any of the authorities,” she says. Solodukhina works at an NGO called Nadiya – the Ukrainian word for hope – which tries to help relatives and has connections with mothers in Russia and lawyers who scour the court records and social media accounts for images or video footage that might offer evidence that a loved one has survived.
She works with about 1,000 Ukrainian families. It is a passion born out of the disappearance of her own good friend, who vanished on the battlefield in 2014 when Russia first invaded in the east.
Desperate cases come in every day, she says. Solodukhina opens up a secure messaging account where there are countless pleas from strangers. One writes: “Good day. So sorry. I just want to know is there any news about my son.” Another appeals: “Please help me find my son Roman.” She has seen dead men suddenly materialise, she says. It can happen. She searches for these men and women with the belief that they are alive.
It is not a conceit open to Dr Valeriy Voychenko, who runs the regional bureau of forensic medical examination in Dnipro, and who is also seeking resolution for the families, but not the one for which they yearn.
Many of the dead from the frontlines in the east end up in Voychenko’s morgue. The facility has both the latest technology and, thanks to the conflict, plenty of experience. But the war is a meat grinder.
Now is a particularly bad time to die, explains Victoria Chernyak, director of the DNA laboratory at the bureau. Bodies rot within two hours under the hot sun, making physical identification more difficult. Heat degrades the DNA. An additional complication is that Ukrainian soldiers are not required to wear dog tags. “Every death in our country in the summer is a difficult case,” she says.
Last September, 24 bone fragments from the Donetsk region were brought to the laboratory after being exposed to high temperatures for weeks, if not months. It took months more to deduce that they belonged to six people. “Even now, relatives of the missing persons provide us with their DNA samples and ask us to compare them with those 24 fragments,” Chernyak says. And yet, she adds, many will not accept the worst even when confronted with the science.
Pavlo Mazepa, 25, has seen it all, from the denial to the hysteria and, perhaps worst of all, the gratitude. He travels thousands of miles every week collecting the dead from morgues, including Dnipro’s, and bringing the bodies, or what is left of them, back to their families in western Ukraine. He was a toastmaster at weddings before the war. “That was a different life,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “I see so much death, death all around me, that I sometimes think that if it is me next, then that is not such a problem.”
Mazepa says he must have had a thousand dead soldiers in his refrigerated van over the last year – and it never gets easier. “We are losing the best of us,” he says.
