In Ukraine, the dying effort to identify war dead exceed forensic workers

In a small reception hall in a Dnipro hospital, in the Ukraine-South Center, Viktoria Lants had trouble looking at the computer screen as a judicial worker mixed through photos of the remains cataloged in the outdated morgue.

Some images were of seriously damaged bodies, military clothes and a pocket knife.

When his family was taken to a refrigerated unit to see a body, his eyes dwell on a wooden cross.

Lant’s 31-year-old son Vladyslav Kharkov received a similar by his grandmother before being sent on the front line during the summer.

The last time she spoke to her was August 19.

“He said everything will be fine, mom. He knew how everyone worried about him,” she said, remembering their last telephone conversation.

Kharkov, who previously worked as an entrepreneur before being drafted in the spring by Ukraine in his current war with Russia, is officially listed as missing – one of the tens of thousands of soldiers from a national register of missing persons.

Crowded morgues and growing cemeteries

Throughout the country, the Morgues are overloaded and medical investigators work 24 hours a day to identify the growing number of deaths – and in some cases release them for burial even before their identity is confirmed.

In more than three and a half years since Russia launched its large -scale invasion of Ukraine, there has been very little information published by kyiv or Moscow on the number of soldiers killed.

Independent Russian media have compiled a list showing that at least 130,000 Russian soldiers were killedBut they believe that the real number is almost double.

In December 2024, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that 43,000 Ukrainians Soldiers had been killed. He revealed this number on social networks after Donald Trump, who was the American elected president at the time, said that Ukraine had “ridiculously lost” 400,000 soldiers.

While Trump’s efforts to negotiate a ceasefire between the two parties waded, one of the few agreements to get out of the limited negotiations included the mass repatriation of the dead.

In June, the remains of 6,057 soldiers were brought back to Ukraine, according to officials, while the Kremlin said that he had received 78 bodies. Neither parties commented on why the exchange of numbers appeared unbalanced.

A few weeks before the bodies of mass repatriation were transported to Morgues across Ukraine, Vladyslav Kharkov was sent to military training. The father of a nine-year-old girl, he was enlisted by police when he was standing at a station in the Vinnytsia region, in the center-west of Ukraine, and put a bus.

Lants, his mother, compares her mobilization to a “kidnapping” and asks to know how many members of the political elite of Ukraine sent their sons of the country to avoid serving.

“Everyone should be equal to war,” she said. “How many mothers are there like me?”

Waiting for an answer

At the morgue, Lants and his daughter-in-law were taken to a refrigerated unit to try to identify his son. She came back clearly shaken. While she said that the body was not in good condition, she thinks it was her son because of a mole that was visible on her stomach.

She and her husband provided DNA samples, but he could do months before the return of laboratory tests.

Until then, she dreads a phone call and an answer that she does not want to hear. “I hope it is a mistake … that it is not true. It’s just a terrible dream,” said Lants.

His mind continues to return the day after the birth of his son. She said that a maternity nurse had brought a baby to her bedside to eat, but she immediately knew that it was not hers.

While the label on the cover bore its name, with a more in -depth look, another was written on the bracelet of the hospital that the babies were given a few moments after birth.

After the mixture, her son was returned to her and she retains the possibility – as small – that something similar has happened this time.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) helps medical-legal investigators in Ukraine, giving advice and helps increase the capacity of a system that has not been designed to manage the disaster of a crushing war.

“They have great expertise within the country, and they know what they are doing. It is very clear that they are however out of date,” said Tania Bertrand, a judicial specialist at the Montreal ICRC who was based in Dnipro in the past year.

Crosses the graves of unidentified soldiers

Within a medico-legal laboratory in Dnipro, Valerii Viun removed the bone fragments from a box from the front line in the Ukraine Donetsk region.

The head of the medical criminology medical department posed them on the table. His goal is to determine if they are all human and how many people they could have belonged to.

VIUN said that when the remains include soft tissue, the laboratory will make a DNA test. But due to the violent nature of the war, the investigators sometimes have only fragments of bone with which to work.

“Everyone has the right to a decent life, and everyone has the right to worthy death,” said Vun. “We don’t want to allow someone to be named nameless.”

But in a sprawling cemetery in Dnipro, there is an increasing section dedicated to unidentified soldiers. The plates affixed to simple wooden crosses describe the person as “temporarily unidentified”.

The bodies are largely buried due to a lack of space in cold storage units.

‘These children will never see their father again’

Apart from the forensic laboratory where Vun works, there is the constant buzzing of refrigeration trucks.

VIUN said he was now living in the hospital because there was so much work to do, and it becomes more and more difficult to reach his community further in the Dnipro region, where Russian forces are trying to push further and control even more Ukrainian territory.

At night sometimes, when the window is open, he said he hears the trucks, as well as the cries and cries of women who had just identified a loved one.

“The most difficult part is when you don’t have time to tighten a mother who has just recognized her son,” said Vun. “The most frightening thing is when I see children running here … and these children will never see their father again.”

Sometimes he said, despite all the tests to confirm the identity of a person, a family simply does not want to accept that their loved one is dead, rather choosing to believe that they must be prisoners of war in captivity.

VIUN, who has been working in legal medicine for 45 years, said that he thought he would spend the rest of his life trying to identify the war of this war.

At the end of the war, he said, there will be a push of remains even more recovered in areas which have been largely inaccessible along the front.

“There will be a lot of bodies that have not yet been found and these bodies must be identified,” he said. “The work will always be hell for another 10 years.”