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‘I’m used to walking among corpses’ How Mariupol residents search for their dead under Russian occupation

Source: Meduza

The siege of Mariupol lasted 85 days. No one knows how many lives were lost, but some estimates place the number at up to 100,000. It will take years, if not decades, before the real toll is known. In the midst of constant air raids, missiles strikes, and crossfire, Mariupol residents buried the dead wherever they could, often in the courtyards of residential buildings. When the risk of leaving basements and shelters was too great, bodies were left on the street where they fell. After the Russian military occupied Mariupol, they began to dig up the graves and pull bodies from the wreckage. Some, they simply disposed of with the rubble. Others were photographed and put into a database. Survivors are still trying to find the bodies of their loved ones in any way they can. But in a sea of mutilated corpses and unfeeling bureaucracy, it can seem a nearly impossible task.

In the fall of 2022, Anna (name changed) went to the Mariupol city morgue. She and four other people were taken into a small room where a morgue employee turned on a computer. As hundreds of pictures of burned, mangled, and decomposed bodies flashed across the screen, Anna tried to find her grandfather, Sasha. She couldn’t. Either he wasn’t there, or the photos were going by too quickly.

Sasha was hospitalized with COVID-19 in early February 2022, just before the start of the full-scale war. He was still in Mariupol City Hospital No. 9 when Putin sent troops into Ukraine. The roads in Mariupol were blocked, and Russian troops began bombing the Livoberezhnyi District where Sasha lived with his daughter and granddaughter.

Anna called her grandfather at the hospital and told him she wouldn’t be able to take him home yet. He tried to reassure her, saying that the situation near the hospital was calm. That was their last conversation. Soon, there was no cell service in the city. Anna still doesn’t know how her grandfather died.

The family learned that Sasha was dead, not missing, from one of the hospital’s nurses. In spring 2022, the nurse had photographed the hospital’s list of dead and sent it to her friend, Anna’s aunt. Anna found her grandfather’s name on the list, but no signature or cause of death. So far, this is the only proof Sasha’s family has of his death. With no body, the Russian police will only issue a death certificate three years after a missing person’s report is filed. And so, his family is doing everything possible to find him.

Trying to find out anything at all, Anna went to the hospital where her grandfather reportedly died. An employee remembered that in the first days of the war, all of the dead bodies were stacked in a room that was later shelled. “There weren’t bodies there anymore, [just] ground meat. Back then, Ukraine was still burying them. [Apparently] they scooped them all up with an excavator and buried them in a pit. No one knows where that pit is,” the employee told her. Anna’s mother took a DNA test, hoping to find her father in a database, but so far, no luck.

Only charred bones

In August 2022, the then-head of the occupation administration of Mariupol, Konstantin Ivashchenko, said that the city was making a DNA database of the dead. He didn’t specify which agency would be responsible for this task. “Each unidentified, unrecognized dead person will have their DNA analyzed and put into the database,” Ivashchenko said. “Then, anyone who’s lost a loved one and can’t find him or her will be able to turn there — and will know whether this person is alive.”

Meduza couldn’t find a single Mariupol resident who was able to locate a deceased relative’s grave through DNA testing. Nikita (name changed), a volunteer from Russia who traveled to the city in April 2023 to help the elderly and people with disabilities, said that anyone can take a free DNA test, but “there’s a caveat.” “It’s still not known when — if at all — they’ll compare relatives’ DNA samples with those of the deceased.”

It’s not even clear if the authorities know what to do with the samples. Halyna (name changed) told Meduza that in an attempt to find her husband Volodymyr’s body, she asked his daughter from a previous marriage to send a DNA sample for the database. Halyna brought the sample to the laboratory at the city morgue, but they refused to accept it and directed her to the prosecutor’s office. There, they simply asked, “Well, why’d you bring us DNA?”

Some people whose relatives died in Mariupol haven’t taken a DNA test. They’re already certain the bodies of their loved ones didn’t end up in morgues and weren’t buried. Petro Andryushchenko, an aide to Mariupol’s mayor who left the city before the occupation, twice reported that, while demolishing destroyed buildings, occupation authorities hauled away human remains along with the debris and simply threw everything out. Ivan (name changed) thinks this is what happened to his mother’s body. She lived in an apartment building in the Livoberezhnyi District — the aforementioned neighborhood that was heavily shelled at the beginning of the full-scale war.

In March 2022, an airstrike hit the building, killing almost all of its residents. Ivan’s mother’s body was never found, along with those of a dozen others. “Maybe they just raked them all into a pile and took them out with the debris?” Ivan wonders aloud.

Olena’s parents were having tea in their kitchen when a shell hit their building. (Olena’s name has been changed.) Her mother died instantly. Olena’s father survived the shelling. He had a concussion but managed to run out of the apartment and get to the building’s entryway, where a neighbor found him the next day. She helped him down to the basement where, in severe shock and barely able to move, he died. Neighbors took his body outside, and then it was taken to the morgue. Olena, who has lived in Moscow since 2014, found out about her parents’ deaths from the building’s group chat.

The family’s apartment was completely burned. According to Olena, the buildings were so destroyed that “the people who came to take the bodies to the morgue were afraid to go inside.” Olena asked a friend who was still in Mariupol to go to her parents’ home. There, among the burned things and debris, the friend found Olena’s mother’s charred bones. She put them in a plastic container and brought them to the morgue where a death certificate was issued. Olena says that in May 2022, when the fighting stopped and Russians gained full control of the city, “they gave [a death certificate] to whomever was burying the person and wrote down whatever they said for the birth and death dates.”

Olena’s parents were buried together in the same grave. She wasn’t able to come and say her goodbyes because of restrictions imposed by the Russian military during the first months of the occupation.

Olena says the occupation authorities are steeped in bureaucracy and indifferent to the pain around them. Officials won’t help families find, identify, and bury the bodies. Ivan said the same. He no longer has any hope of finding his mother’s body.

‘I saw the horror in men’s eyes’

At the edge of Mariupol, some three kilometers (less than two miles) from Starokrymske Cemetery, stands a large, shuttered store. This is where, in May 2022, the occupation authorities set up an improvised open-air morgue. The Russians opened makeshift graves in high-rise courtyards and brought the bodies to the defunct store. Covered in dirt and blood, clothed and half-naked, the bodies were piled in rows, directly on the asphalt.

It was sweltering. People from Mariupol wandered among the remains, looking for their loved ones. “I was looking for my husband’s body there. I could smell the decomposing bodies. I saw arms, legs, and head[s] lying separate from each other. I saw the horror in men’s eyes,” a local wrote in the comments of a post on the Mariupol Now Telegram channel. (She did not respond to Meduza’s request for comment.)

Simple, wooden coffins were handed out on the spot. The coffins waited in perfect, even rows in blue storage sheds.

That summer, the occupation authorities opened another temporary morgue at Mariupol City Hospital No. 1. In an August 2022 interview, the appointed head, Donetsk forensic expert Elnur Huseynov, said that more than half the bodies there had yet to be identified. Huseynov said that every day, 70 to 100 people came looking for their loved ones. They closed the temporary morgue at the end of 2022 and moved the forensic examination office to a new three-story building on the grounds of a different hospital. It was built in only a few months by the same Russian military contractor who designed the new “Nevsky micro-district.”

Head physician Sergey Orleansky, who worked at the hospital before the occupation, described the new building as a “typical Russian project.” Nikita, the volunteer, says that in April 2023, the morgue was “one of the better” buildings he’d seen in occupied Mariupol. “There were white plastic doors everywhere, fresh renovations,” he recalled. A morgue visitor told Meduza that “a priest [will] bless the body for the cost of about 3,000 rubles [$30]. For another 1,500 [$15], the nurses will dress the dead.”

When remains are exhumed, they are photographed and the pictures are uploaded to a database so that family members can come to the morgue, look through the photos, and identify the bodies. (Andryushchenko, the advisor to Mariupol’s exile mayor, once referred to the database as the “death catalog.”)

In the summer and fall of 2022, Mariupol residents waited in lines to look through the database. By the end of spring 2023, there were no more lines. Only close relatives are allowed in, but many people who fled Mariupol aren’t able to return, given the Russian occupation. 

People are let in to see the database in groups of five. Halyna, who came to look for her husband Volodymyr, describes the process as follows: “There’s a table and a computer. A young woman [an employee] swipes through the photos, and we look. If you see something familiar, you write down the number [of the photo]. Then you ask [her] to show that number again.” But many people don’t find their relatives in the photo database. Halyna says she didn’t find Volodymyr in it either.

A mass grave

The Starokrymske Cemetery is one of the largest in Europe. Before the Russian invasion, there were up to 5,000 new graves there every year. In 2011, the city doubled the size of its grounds and mortuary workers thought it would be enough for 30 years. Hundreds of new rows have appeared since the start of the full-scale war. In December 2022, Associated Press journalists counted about 8,500 new graves there (and at least 10,300 in Mariupol itself). Amateur videos taken at the cemetery show thousands of wooden plaques sticking out of long, uneven earth mounds. The numbers on them are handwritten.

Journalists nicknamed Starokrymske the “ghost cemetery.” It was here that Mariupol residents were buried for the second time, after the mass exhumations. Most of the bodies are unidentified. In a row of 16 graves, sometimes only two have a name. The cemetery looks more like a huge mass grave. To identify the victims and return their remains to their families, some unmarked graves will have to be dug up and the bodies reburied. Similar work has been done in Rwanda, Srebrenica, and other massacre sites.

Georgian forensic archaeologist Irakli Anchabadze says it will take up to two years to identify the dead in Mariupol. And about half a century to find and name every person killed in the war. Usually, forensic archeologists and anthropologists do this work, but there are very few of them in the world. (The Russian language doesn’t even have an established name for them.)

“To begin with, we’ll need to find the relatives [of dead Mariupol residents]. Ask them for a description, including clothing (it might still be there), find out what illnesses the person had, whether there are dental records,” Anchabadze says.

‘Not a bad place’

Shortly before the full-scale war began, Halyna’s husband Volodymyr got dental implants. A few months later, in mid-March, he died. In an attempt to find his body, Halyna described Volodymyr’s implants, tattoos, and even the socks he was wearing when he died (plain black, seamless) to a Donetsk prosecutor.

Before the war, the couple lived in a detached house in Mariupol. At the start of the full-scale invasion, Volodymyr and Halyna sheltered several families: 14 people and three dogs, the largest of which was put in a shed out back. On March 14, Volodymyr woke up to the sounds of explosions. He and a friend went to let the dog out, smoke a cigarette, and see what was happening. The city was being bombed from the air. Volodymyr was hit in the stomach by a piece of shrapnel.

“My husband was a former investigator. He understood perfectly well how serious it was. He said immediately: ‘I’m losing blood, I’m very cold,’” Halyna recalls. A friend helped her take her husband to the hospital, where he died a few hours later. They operated, but he couldn’t be saved.

It was dangerous to move the body out of the hospital during the crossfire. Halyna recalls the doctor saying: “Leave him here. When they take the corpses away, they’ll take [his] too, they won’t leave anyone on the street.” By that time, Volodymyr’s body had already been taken out into the courtyard, along with two dozen other victims, and covered with a sheet. Lifting the sheets one by one, Halyna found her husband’s body and tied a plastic bag to his arm. On it, she wrote his last name and date of death.

When a humanitarian corridor opened a few days later, Halyna fled Mariupol. She went to Dnipro, then to Kyiv. The whole time, Halyna wanted to come back and find Volodymyr’s grave. Finally, she made up her mind. She found transport and headed back to the occupied city. On the way, they came under fire, which they had to wait out for two days, she says. Only a few walls remained of her home in Mariupol. Hospital workers found a record of Volodymyr’s stay there and were able to give Halyna a certificate of her husband’s admission, surgery, and death. There was nothing else they could do to help.

Halyna tried to find her husband through DNA testing and the morgue database. “I went there for two days because it was impossible to look at [all the photos] in one day. But I wasn’t able to identify him because there were charred bodies and bodies without arms and heads,” she said with no visible emotion. When asked what it was like looking at hundreds of mutilated bodies, Halyna said she felt nothing. “It was already normal to me because I’m used to walking among corpses. It didn’t bother me. I haven’t been to any psychologists. I understand everything; I’m an adult. It’s war.”

Halyna managed to find her husband only a year after his death. An employee at the Mariupol prosecutor’s office told her that one of the lists of the unidentified dead had a man with a similar last name, off by just two letters, and advised her to go to Donetsk. In Donetsk, Halyna described her husband in painstaking detail. Her description was a perfect match for what was written in the documentation. This is how Halyna found the number of the unmarked grave where Volodymyr was buried in Starokrymske Cemetery.

“I could [have him exhumed for verification] and reburied, but I’m 100 percent certain my husband is there. And it’s not a bad place,” Halyna said.

She took the number off his grave. In its place, she put a cross.

The Mariupol emergency hospital where the morgue is located and the Mariupol occupation administration did not respond to Meduza’s request for comment.