AWarning: This article and some of its images may offend some readers.
Vitaliy Lobas, the Bucha police chief, is sitting at a desk in an abandoned school, compiling the details of the bodies.
Every few minutes, Lobas, who has broad shoulders and short dark hair, receives a call on her phone phone.
The brief conversations are the same: a location, some details, a phone number of a family member or friend.
Before the Russians came, Lobas was an ordinary local police chief , who spent his days dealing with common crime and occasional murders.
Since Bucha’s release, he has spent his days in this abandoned classroom, where school posters still hang on the walls , coordinating the massive operation to find the dead.
In front of Lobas, on the school desk, is a map of Bucha, a once peaceful and little-known suburb of kyiv that is now a sprawling crime scene.
The area was occupied by Russian forces for a month when they tried to storm kyiv, and their liberation just over a week ago has started a slow and painful process of uncovering the horrors left here.
Every time the phone rings, Lobas consults the map in front of her and writes down the necessary information in neat handwriting, one line per body.
Early, he had filled one side of an A4 sheet and now turned to the back.
The day before there was 50 bodies, he says. The day before that, 24.
He doesn’t know how many there will be this day, but he thinks the number will be closer to 40 because a mass grave is being excavated nearby .
Lobas is only in charge of a part of this region, and many more bodies are being found outside their jurisdiction.
The policeman stops from time to time to go to the schoolyard to smoke a cigarette, but even those moments are interrupted by calls about corpses or problems related to the collection of corpses.
It is raining in Bucha and one of the vans that transported corpses to the morgue has gotten stuck in the mud.
It is necessary to find a tractor quickly, because there is a limited number ing of vans and a lot of bodies.
The story of Vitaliy Brezhnev
Lobas generally delegates the field work to his deputies, but in some particularly serious cases he goes himself.
“When people have been shot in the head with their hands tied behind their back, for example”, he says.
“Or when the bodies have been burned, I also go”, he adds.
About half morning, he receives a call from Dmytro Kushnir, a police officer from 24 years old, who is going to search a body found behind an apartment building on the outskirts of Bucha.
When Kushnir arrives at the building, he finds two men.
Wearing blue surgical gloves and standing over the partially decomposed body of a man who appears to have been shot in the back of the head.
The body lies on a stained white duvet and is surrounded by empty beer and spirits bottles.
The two men wearing blue surgical gloves introduce themselves as Volodymyr and Serhiy Brezhnev, the dead man’s father and brother.
Lying on the blanket is Vitaliy Brezhnev, a former cook of 15 years that, until the Russians arrived, he lived a peaceful life with his girlfriend on the sixth floor of the apartment building that now stands over his dead body.
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Volodymyr and Serhiy had lost contact with Vitaliy a month before, when the Russians took control of Bucha and communications were interrupted.
It was impossible to enter the suburb to check his building, so they searched for him for a month on the internet, checking social networks in vain for evidence that he was alive.
When the Russians finally withdrew, a little over a week ago, Serhiy received a call from Vitaliy’s girlfriend who told him what had happened.
The Russians stormed the building and shot their way into all the apartments.
Vitaly’s girlfriend said that they were required to people will give them their SIM cards and keys.
They interrogated her and Vitaliy in separate rooms, they were beaten and their dog was shot, according to her testimony.
Then they took her to the basement with a group of other residents and closed the door, but Vitaliy was taken away separately and told that he would not see him again. And he did not.
As soon as the Ukrainian army declared that Bucha was safe to re-enter, Volodymyr and Ser hiy left for the building.
Inside , they found dried blood on the floor of the stairs and scattered personal photographs.
In all the doors you could see the holes from the shotgun blasts, sometimes one, sometimes four or five.
The doors with steel plates had been forced. On a wooden door, where the lock had not given way to the repeated shots, the Russian soldiers seemed to have become frustrated and opened a hole right in the middle of the door to the apartment.
Behind another door, it was clear that the owners had pushed a heavy table against the frame in an unsuccessful attempt to keep invaders out .
When Volodymyr and Serhiy reached the sixth floor, they saw that the shotgun had been used on the door of the apartment 81.
There was a stale smell coming from inside. The Russians had trashed the apartment. They had broken the vents and even the bathroom drain… “for money”, Serhiy guessed.
When he entered Vitaliy’s room, he suffered the first of several blows to his hopes of finding his brother alive.
On the pillow was a deep blood stain and blood splattered the walls behind the bed.
Among the mess, on the floor, there were two 7-gauge shell casings.62 mm, the caliber used by the Russian army in their rifles.
“You could see that a man had been killed here,” says Serhiy. “But there was no body”.
Then Volodymyr and Serhiy began to search for Vitaliy, knowing that their search was now probably for a body and not of a living son and brother that they could hold in their arms again.
Serhiy carries a passport photograph of Vitaliy. “We searched and searched,” he says, “and at first we were looking for his face.”
Behind the building, by the woods, they found what appeared to be a shallow grave and began to dig.
It took time to exhume the remains there.
First they saw a quilt with a flower print that they did not recognize and their hearts found some hope.
But when they took the body up they saw that inside the duvet there was a curtain from Vitaliy’s apartment.
Then they saw the dead man’s shoes and thought they recognized them. The light was fading at that point and they had to be home before curfew, so they covered the body with the sheet. Some hope remained.
“Today was the final check,” says Serhiy, looking at the body. “Today we took off his shoes and we saw his feet.”
Because Vitaliy’s feet had been inside socks and shoes, they are better preserved than the rest of his body after a month on earth.
“We saw the shape of his feet” , says Volodymyr.
“Then we look at the shape of the nose and hands”, adds Serhiy. “And we knew he was our relative”.
Volodymyr had bought the small apartment in Bucha two years earlier, an investment in his son’s future.
Vitaliy had been a cook in a restaurant in kyiv, until the pandemic hit and he was fired. He worked in construction and was looking for something more stable, but he had a girlfriend he loved and a dog, and now an apartment in a nice neighborhood.
He loved to fish and hunt, find mushrooms in your spare time and cook.
“He was living a peaceful life here,” says Serhiy. “He was a normal guy, that’s all, a man with a good heart.”
“He was a good son and a good brother,” says Volodymyr, trying to hold back his tears.
Nine bodies
At the front of the building, Officer Kushnir is completing his police report.
Volodymyr goes to his car and takes two small pieces of cardboard and writes his name and phone number and Vitaliy’s name and address on each one.
Then he asks some neighbors transparent tape to cover the ink, because the rain begins to fall harder on Bucha, and returns to the body, this time without surgical gloves, to tie a piece of cardboard to Vitaliy’s ankle and another to his wrist.
“I don’t want my son’s body to be lost“, he says.
The Kushnir officer finishes his report and calls Lobas. The chief will arrange for the truck to pick up the bodies.
Volodymyr and Serhiy take shelter from the rain and wait for the truck to arrive.
As the day progresses, Lobas’ command post in the classroom gets busier.
Officers come and go, filing reports of deaths. The list on the desk got longer and her phone keeps ringing.
A dead woman has been found in a well next to a destroyed column of Russian tanks.
There is another body on the ninth floor of a building. A driver of one of the vans called to say that he couldn’t find the body he had been sent to pick up.
A woman walks in person to the classroom to report that their neighbor has died.
Volodymyr changes the thin sheet where his son was involved.
Two of the district police departments de Bucha had been destroyed in the Russian assault and Lobas makes efforts to obtain resources.
There are not enough body bags. Their equipment has also been reduced in the previous days.
“Those who were weak they left from the beginning”, he says.
Lobas receives another call. “Nine?” he asks. “Where?”
The call is from a unit in a neighboring police department.
Nine bodies were buried in a nearby field. Lobas hangs up and marks one of his mobile units.
“The team there is exhausted and they don’t have any body bags left,” he says.
“They have been collecting bodies all day. Please go and help them now. Find body bags and help them pack the bodies,” he orders a deputy.
The nine graves are arranged in a row at the edge of the field, behind a fence at the end of a dirt road.
The dead they had been buried by their neighbors during the Russian occupation and are now being exhumed by the same neighbors, with the help of the police.
“Some of these people died because they could not obtain drugs and others were killed by the Russians,” says Gennadiy, a Ukrainian from 45 years.
“These were our neighbors”, he adds, with a look of deep anger on his face.
“Here is Tolya, from the building next door, and another neighbor. Here’s another person I met from the building next door. This man has a gunshot wound, we didn’t know him but we found a passport on his body. This old lady had severe diabetes and we tried to get her out of Bucha but there was no way, so she died. This man went for a walk with his dog and did not return. We are not pathologists but it seems that he was shot”, he says.
The work to remove the bodies is hard.
They had buried them well, in deep graves, and the rain soaked the mud and made it slippery.
Gennadiy, wearing a green plastic raincoat, climbs onto each grave, one after another, and removes the earth around the bodies to be able to tie them with thick straps to hoist them up.
Each body had been wrapped in what it hadn by hand: curtains, blankets of different colors and designs.
They are examined by the police and any obvious injuries are photographed with an iPhone.
After a while, the truck arrives. The bodies are loaded inside. The sky is gray and the rain keeps falling.
The funeral
In Vitaliy’s apartment building, Volodymyr and Serhiy waited as long as they could for the van to arrive.
It is getting dark and they need to go home.
Vitaliy’s body will have to spend another night in the floor.
It’s already too late to comply with the 9 o’clock curfew: 00 PM in kyiv, but in the military checkpoints along the route show the report of the death of their relative and allow them to pass.
At dawn the next day, the father and son get up and they start the trip back to Bucha.
They can’t wait any longer for the van, they load the c Vitaliy’s body in the back of his car and they drive to a morgue in the town of Boyarka, about an hour to the south.
Before the invasion, the Boyarka morgue staff received about three bodies per day, the vast majority of them dead of natural causes.
Since Bucha was released, they have been performing autopsies on about 50 bodies per day, the 80% of which were violent deaths, says Semen Petrovych of 39 years, who has been the forensic expert there for 16 years.
The morgue, a small outbuilding at the back of a hospital, had just acquired two rented refrigerated trucks and both are full of bodies.
Body bags lie on the floor next to trucks, against a fence, and on both sides of the morgue entrance.
“There are not enough staff and there is not enough space”, says Petrovych, the forensic expert.
“Even if we had more people, where would we put the bodies?”
Normally I would do a careful autopsy on each body and print a death certificate. “Now we just quickly dissect them and write something simple by hand,” he admits.
Volodymyr and Serhiy are not the only ones to bring a body.
Private cars stop at the morgue and take out the bodies wrapped in blankets and rugs.
Tatiana Zhylenko searches for the body of a friend’s father who was abroad.
Oleksander Zakovorotnyi comes for his father-in-law, who, when the Russians cut off the gas supply in the middle of winter, installed a makeshift heater with a gas cylinder, but fell asleep and was poisoned when the flame went out.
Volodymyr and Serhiy wait outside until they are called to identify Vitaliy. They are standing inside the narrow, low-ceilinged morgue, where there are bodies on the floor and on every stretcher, and the smell is unbearable.
They have to squeeze between two stretchers, side by side. to an open corpse, to approach Vitaliy’s body, and they search it for scars that they could remember.
They repeat to the pathologist that they think they recognize their feet. Volodymyr looks away. He is struggling with doubt and hope.
Later, he walks behind the refrigerator truck and is left alone sobbing, his chest heaving with tears.
Vitaliy’s body is placed in a body bag labeled with the number 552: body number 552 processed by this small morgue since the beginning of the year, almost double the number in a normal year.
The police take fingerprints and tell Volodymyr and Serhiy that formal identification will be takená about a month due to the accumulation of work, but otherwise they can take it to the cemetery to be buried.
Instead of waiting for the body van, Volodymyr and Serhiy carefully lift Vitaliy back onto the p They rear their car and drive for an hour or so to Bucha, passing the rows of destroyed houses and the places where bodies had been lying in the streets for weeks.
In the cemetery, which is already full, new graves are being dug outside the fence in a thin strip of land along the road.
A priest sings the funeral rites over a coffin. The dead man’s mother cries.
Volodymyr and Serhiy enter the cemetery and unload Vitaliy next to a long row of body bags arranged on the ground.
Because Vitaliy had already been identified and would be buried here in Bucha, he is placed in a simple wooden coffin and given the small dignity of resting inside a brick building on the cemetery grounds.
They will bury him within two days.
Vitaliy’s funeral.
Volodymyr and Serhiy leave the cemetery and the former decides that, although he is far from his house in kyiv, he will buy a piece of land there for his wife Lily, Vitaliy’s mother, who is suffering from terminal cancer, so that when the time comes she can rest near her son.
Two days later, on a bright and cold morning in Bucha, the family gathers at the cemetery.
Once again, Volodymyr and Serhiy take the lead and enter the brick building to prepare to carry the coffin.
Lily sits outside on a bench, smoking a cigarette, alone among the body bags.
The coffin is carried to a stone pedestal and the family gathers around it while the priest reads the funeral rites.
Then Vitaliy is taken to one of the fresh graves along the roadside outside the cemetery and is entombed.
Volodymyr is still in doubt. “I hope the fingerprints show that this was not my son,” he says.
Later that day, back at Bucha’s abandoned school, Lobas is sitting at his desk, listening intently to a man who has come in person to ask for help finding a relative who had heard that he was in a mass grave.
Wants to give him a photo to Lobas, but Lobas explains that this is not how things are done. “We can’t go around opening all the body bags,” he says. “You understand? It would waste too much time.”
Lobas explains that they had to start burying unidentified bodies, because there was not enough space in the morgues.
But assures the man that fingerprints and photographs are being taken.
“Although the bodies are being buried, the information is being processed”, he explains.
The calls keep coming in: a body on Yablunska street, another body next to a school…
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