In a military cemetery in Kyiv, a brother and sister walked between the crosses, holding a bunch of carnations. Each cross in that section read: ‘unknown defender of Ukraine,’ with an ID number below and a note that identification continues. Yet, one grave stood out - that of Ihor Yalynych, a soldier last seen alive in 2022 in the Kharkiv region. After four years of searching, Stanislav and Oleksandra Yalynych found their father.
The identification of the dead is a reckoning that will stretch on for years, among the longest-lasting wounds of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Some graves may remain nameless forever, with the families left to wait. For most of the war, there was nowhere to bury the unidentified dead. The bodies lay in refrigerated storage while the national military cemetery was still being built.
More than 300 unknown soldiers now lie beneath numbered crosses, with more graves being dug. ‘I was a daddy’s girl, and I took the loss very hard,’ said Oleksandra Yalynych, 21. ‘All these four years, all I wanted was to come and sit with him, to talk. … Now I’m glad we found him. Now I have somewhere to go.’
Ihor Yalynych was killed in April 2022 in eastern Ukraine. He had served in the military since 2015, the year after armed conflict began in eastern Ukraine and Russia illegally annexed Crimea. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, he was in a brigade stationed in eastern Ukraine. He returned safely from his first mission and sent photos to his son, but he never returned from the second.
The family had to navigate layers of bureaucracy, including DNA testing, before they could reclaim his remains, a process that took four years. ‘It could have been faster if the police hadn’t lost the case,’ Stanislav said. According to him, the file was sent to the police of Mykolaiv region, where his father was from, and sat unprocessed for more than two years.
At a Ukrainian military funeral, the flag that covers the coffin is folded and handed to the family. With no one to receive the flag of an unknown soldier, the state stands in, accepting each flag and holding it until the soldier can be identified, Veterans Affairs Minister Natalia Kalmykova said. ‘Honoring a person who gives their life for their country is, first of all, truly needed by those who remain,’ she said.
Since the full-scale invasion, more than 40,000 samples from unidentified bodies have been registered, said Ruslan Abbasov, deputy director of the State Scientific Research Forensic Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Most of them have now been matched with some of the 170,000 samples taken from relatives. Often, Abbasov said, identification moves beyond the lab, with investigators seeking other ways to obtain a person’s DNA like searching an apartment or belongings they left behind.
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