In Ukraine, agonizing efforts to identify the dead of war overload forensic workers

At a small hospital at DNIPRO, in the southern central Ukraine, Viktoria Lants struggles to look on the computer’s screen as a criminalist who was mixed through pictures of the remains cataloged in the overloaded morgue.

Some images had heavily damaged bodies, military clothing and a pocket knife.

When her family was refrigerated to see a body, her eyes lingered on a wooden cross.

The 31-year-old son of Lent, Vladislav Kharkov, received a similar one from his grandmother before being sent to the front line in the summer.

The last time she spoke to him was on August 19.

“He said everything would be fine, Mom. He knew how everyone was worried about him,” she said, recalling their last phone conversation.

Kharkov, who had previously worked as a contractor before being prepared in the spring from Ukraine in his continued war with Russia, was officially named as disappeared – one of the tens of thousands of soldiers in the National Register of the missing persons.

Crowded morgues and growing cemeteries

Throughout the country, Morgs is overloaded and the criminals work around the clock to identify the increasing number of dead – and in some cases they release them for a funeral, even before their identities are confirmed.

For more than three and a half years, since Russia started its full -scale invasion in Ukraine, there is very little information from Kiev or Moscow about 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 the bigger than that.

In December 2024, Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenski stated that 43,000 Ukrainian The soldiers were killed. He revealed this number on social media after Donald Trump, who was the US president was elected at the time, claims that Ukraine “ridiculously lost” 400,000 soldiers.

While Trump’s efforts to end the ceasefire between the two sides have been ignitedOne of the few agreements that will come out of limited negotiations included the mass repatriation of the dead.

In June, the remains of 6 057 According to officials, soldiers were transported back to Ukraine while the Kremlin said he had received 78 bodies. None of the countries comment on why the exchange of numbers seems fenced.

A few weeks before the mass repatriation bodies were transported to Morgs through Ukraine, Vladislav Kharkov was sent to military training. The father of a nine -year -old girl, he was recruited by officers while standing at the station in the Vinity area, in Western Central Ukraine and put on a bus.

His mother, his mother, compares her mobilization with “abduction” and wants to know how many members of the political elite of Ukraine have sent their sons outside the country to avoid service.

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

Waiting for an answer

In the Morga Lant and her daughter -in -law, they were refrigerated to try to identify their son. She returned clearly shocked. As she said the body was not in good condition, she believes that this was her son because of a mall that was visible on his stomach.

She and her husband provided DNA samples, but it may take months before the laboratory tests were returned.

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

Her mind continues to come back the day after her son was born. She said her sister brought a baby to her bed to eat, but immediately realized that it was not hers.

While the label of the blanket bore his name, a more close look at the hospital bracelet was written that babies were given moments after birth.

After mixing, her son was returned to her, and she was able to have the opportunity-as much as something like this may have happened this time.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) assists the criminals in Ukraine, giving advice and helping to increase the capacity of a system that is not designed to cope with the grinding fee of the grinding war.

“They have a lot of experience in the country and know what they are doing. It is very clear that they are overloaded,” says Tanya Bertrand, a forensics specialist at the MSF from Montreal, who has been based on DNIPRO in the last year.

Crosses mark the unidentified graves of soldiers

Inside a forensic laboratory in DNIPRO, Valerii Viun pulled bone fragments from a box that comes from the front line in the area of ​​Ukraine Donetsk.

The leader of the Forensic Department of Medicine laid them on the table. His goal is to find out if they are all people and how many people could belong.

VIUN said that when the remains include soft fabric, the laboratory will do a DNA test. But because of the violent nature of war, sometimes researchers have only bone fragments to work with.

“Everyone has the right to a decent life and everyone has the right to a decent death,” Vin said. “We don’t want to let a person be buried without a name.”

But there is a growing section of unidentified soldiers on a scattered cemetery in DNiPro. The plaques attached to simple wooden crosses describe the person as “temporarily unidentified”.

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

“These children will never see their father again”

Outside of the forensic laboratory where VIUN works, there is a constant rustling of refrigeration trucks.

Vin said he now lives in the hospital because he has so much work and it is becoming more difficult to reach his community in the east in the Dnepo area, where Russian forces are trying to get further and control even more uncroll.

At night, sometimes when the window is open, he said he hears the trucks, along with the screams and shouts of women who have just identified a loved one.

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

Sometimes, he said, despite all the tests performed to confirm the identity of a person, a family simply does not want to accept that their loved one is dead, and instead chooses to believe that they should be a prisoner of captivity.

Vin, who has been working in forensics for 45 years, said he believed he would spend the rest of his life trying to identify the dead of Ukraine from this war.

When the war is ultimately over, he said, there will be a jump of even more resolved remains of areas that were largely inaccessible to the front.

“There will be many bodies that have not yet been found and these bodies need to be identified,” he said. “The work will still be hell for another 10 years.”