{"id":8044,"date":"2026-09-04T09:26:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T07:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/?p=8044"},"modified":"2026-09-04T09:26:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T07:26:00","slug":"at-the-funeral-of-oleksii-yukov-who-searched-for-the-bodies-and-the-souls-of-fallen-soldiers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/at-the-funeral-of-oleksii-yukov-who-searched-for-the-bodies-and-the-souls-of-fallen-soldiers\/","title":{"rendered":"At the funeral of Oleksii Yukov, who searched for the bodies and the souls of fallen soldiers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The late Oleksii Yukov, founder of the Ukrainian volunteer group Platsdarm, is seen during inspection of the bodies of fallen soldiers near Sloviansk on March 24, 2024 in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine. The volunteer group Platsdarm consists of about a dozen people who have been searching for the fallen in the war zone since 2014. One part operates on the battlefields, another makes inspections of the bodies. Currently, these bodies are being inspected, described, and then transferred to the morgue, and their ID and any data – to the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine, for further exchanges between Russian and Ukrainian armies. (Photo by Vladyslav Golovin\/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Kyiv
\nIn August 2022, Ukraine was in the grip of terrible heat. But a team of searchers led by Oleksii Yukov made their way to the village of Sydorove, in the Donetsk region, to recover the bodies of two fallen soldiers. They had died in a Russian missile strike on May 16, 2022. Their surviving comrades hadn’t been able to evacuate the bodies because of the fighting \u2014 it was too dangerous an operation. Their families knew for certain they were dead, but had not been able to say a final goodbye or bury them properly. Officially, they were listed as missing. “The search went on for two weeks,” Pavlo Ostrovsky, a friend of Vitali Pylypenko, one of the fallen soldiers, tells Il Foglio.
\nWhen Yukov arrived in the village, the situation was still dangerous. But day after day, under a scorching sun, he patiently dug through the rubble and debris, in the spot where Pylypenko and the other soldier were believed to have died. Eventually he found the remains of their bodies \u2013 the bones \u2013 and carried them away in black bags. Official forensic examinations and DNA identification procedures followed. Five months after Pylypenko’s death, his family was finally able to bury him in the Lviv region, where he was from. That happened in October 2022. “That’s when Oleksii found my son’s body,” Lyubomyra Chomicak, the mother of the fallen soldier, wrote on Facebook on August 5, 2026. That same day, word came that during a search operation in the Lyman district of the Donetsk region, Yukov’s car had hit a mine, and Yukov had been killed.
\n“He wanted every soldier to be found, and for the dead to be treated with the greatest respect,” says Ostrovsky, holding a bunch of yellow-and-blue flowers \u2013 the colors of the Ukrainian flag \u2013 at Yukov’s funeral in Kyiv. On August 8, hundreds of people gathered on the Maidan to pay tribute to a man who had devoted his entire life to the world of the dead. Not far from where the ceremony was held, a banner has hung for many months now, reading: “100,000 families of the missing. How can they not be counted?” Over the course of the war, the search group “Placdarm,” led by Yukov, has recovered more than three thousand bodies of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers. But Oleksii never called them “bodies” \u2013 he called them “souls.”
\nOleksii Yukov was 40 years old. He was born in Sloviansk, in the Donetsk region, and had developed a passion for search missions since childhood. During the Second World War, fierce fighting took place in that area between the Soviet and German armies. There were casualties on both sides, and many of them still haven’t been found or properly buried. At 14, Yukov joined the search for these remains. He also practiced sports, martial arts in particular. He later graduated from a teacher-training university with a degree in physical education, and went on to run sports programs for children and teenagers. “Children from struggling families would also come to his training sessions,” recalls Serhii Hniezdilov, a civilian and military activist, “and over time they absorbed his principles: a healthy way of living, and respect for everyone.”
\nHniezdilov had known Yukov and his wife, Yevhenia Kaluhina, director of the Ethnographic Museum in Sloviansk, long before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. “They’re the faces of the Ukrainian Donbas,” Serhii says firmly. For the city of Sloviansk, close to the front line, Yukov was a symbolic figure, even though he had never gone into politics. He was loved in the city because, back in 2014, he had been the first to start recovering bodies during Russia’s war against Ukraine, and from 2022 on he had devoted himself to it exclusively. He would venture into the “gray zones,” come under bombardment, go where others were afraid to go and where state services couldn’t reach, and find even the smallest bone fragments. He had once been badly wounded by a mine explosion and lost an eye, but he never stopped his mission. “He was our Charon,” says Hniezdilov \u2013 Charon, in Greek mythology, the ferryman who carries souls into the realm of the dead.
\nYukov’s funeral was originally supposed to take place in Sloviansk itself. But on August 7 it was called off, over the risk of a Russian glide-bomb attack on the site of the ceremony. The security situation in the Donbas is deteriorating noticeably by the day. “They didn’t let us honor his memory on his native soil,” Yevhenia Kaluhina said bitterly, standing the next day beside her husband’s coffin in central Kyiv. Dressed in a long white gown embroidered in the Ukrainian tradition, almost like a bride, she addressed everyone present: “Thank you for coming to pay tribute to my husband with such respect.” Yukov was brought to the capital from Sloviansk in a white car marked with a painted red cross and the number “200” \u2013 in military slang, meaning that the vehicle is carrying someone killed in war.
\nThe searcher, who always worked as a volunteer, recovered the remains of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers alike and handed them over to the relevant authorities. The fallen Russian soldiers made their way home through body exchanges between the two warring states. For Yukov, it was a matter of humanity: he felt no hatred toward the enemy dead who had come to his land to conquer it. “Ethically, there’s no difference. Because either way, these are the bodies of people who died,” he used to say. In 2024, Yukov received Ukraine’s presidential “Golden Heart” honor. After his death, people started a petition on the president’s website asking that he be posthumously awarded the title of “Hero of Ukraine” \u2013 which Volodymyr Zelensky did, on August 24.
\n“If you die, I will find you. Boys, I will find you,” Yukov had said, addressing soldiers in a 2025 interview on the YouTube channel Ramina. “Stay alive, come home only alive. But if you should die, then we will take your souls and bring them home. One hundred percent, we will bring them home,” he said with certainty. “And even if we should die, I will know what we died for. For each of you too, just as you would for each of us.” At the ceremony in Kyiv, one of Oleksii’s companions said: “Today even the dead wept. But the souls he saved can now thank him.” Yukov’s wife promised she would do everything she could to make sure Placdarm’s work continues. “Because there are so, so many fallen out there, believe me,” she said. “I promise we will carry on. Because the dead deserve it. And you deserve it too.” That day, Oleksii was cremated in Kyiv.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kyiv In August 2022, Ukraine was in the grip of terrible heat. But a team of searchers led by Oleksii Yukov made their way to the village of Sydorove, in the Donetsk region, to recover the bodies of two fallen soldiers. They had died in a Russian missile strike on May 16, 2022. Their surviving […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":8085,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8044"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8149,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8044\/revisions\/8149"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}