Warning: This story contains graphic language and images of human remains
It must have been a cold, lonely, terrible death for Gavril Vanyushev.
A young Russian soldier was killed on the outskirts of Kyiv in a sleepy wooded village about 50 kilometers west of the Ukrainian capital.
Retired teacher Katerina Karabchuk, 81, said she remembered a wounded Vanyushev wandering in her fenced yard. Her dog had started barking.
Russian forces, to which Vanyushev belonged, were trying at the time to cut off the M06 highway – one of the main roads leading to Lviv to the west – to complete the siege of Kyiv. His unit exchanged blows with Ukrainian forces when he was hit.
The Russian mission failed. Bloodied, Vanyushev wandered to the winter-burnt village of Zavalivka before collapsing and dying. Many locals say he has been abandoned.
Vanyushev is buried in the woods near Karabchuk’s house, on a path that winds along a small lake. His temporary grave, excavated by locals, is marked by a pile of branches and surrounded by a handful of discarded bottles of vodka.
“I realized that this is someone’s son and I can’t sleep at night,” Karabchuk said, her hands trembling as she spoke to international journalists through an interpreter.
She said she knew nothing about the Russian soldier, except that he looked as if he had come from far away, perhaps from Siberia. Her good, happy face became stern as she described the horror of the battles that raged around her village last winter.
She said she saw a Russian “tank” on one side of a nearby pond and Ukrainian troops, including territorial defense reservists, on the other. “They fired at each other,” she said.
The tank, she said, seemed lost, found itself in a dead end on her street, and then left.
Retired teacher Katerina Karabchuk, 81, remembers a wounded Russian soldier wandering in her fenced yard last February after a battle. She said the soldier later died and was buried in the woods by neighbors. The Ukrainian military has removed the remains of the soldier. (Murray Brewster / CBC News)
Vanyushev may have been injured in this exchange. No one in the village seemed sure. Apart from a glimmer of sympathy for his mother, Karabchuk and her husband had no sympathy for the young soldier, who may have been in his early 20s.
“Our people buried him because the Russians just left him,” she said. “A dog found his body. He died like a dog, so I guess that was his fate.”
In the last few weeks, an ad hoc team of Ukrainian soldiers has been inspecting fresh battlefields around Kyiv to collect the dead. Ukrainians say they have found the remains of about 200 Russian soldiers across the country.
On Wednesday, the team visited Zavalivka after receiving a call about the body buried in the woods. Ukrainian troops were accompanied by a group of international media members who joined in documenting the thorough exhumation – a very public demonstration of how the country says it is meeting its international obligations.
Colonel Vladimir Lyamzin, head of Ukraine’s civil-military branch, spoke to the media as troops prepare to exhume the body of a Russian soldier killed in fighting last Kyiv. (Murray Brewster / CBC News)
“This is definitely not a pleasant job,” said Colonel Vladimir Lyamzin, head of Ukraine’s civil-military branch. “Nobody likes to do that, but they understand it’s part of the job.”
Most of the time, they turn out to be exhuming the remains of hastily excavated graves, which they photograph thoroughly and geomark to record the location.
Lyamzin said Vanyushev was found face down and partially wrapped in blue cloth. The identity documents were collected by locals who buried him, he added.
Troops, dressed in white protective suits, carefully scraped the damp, dark earth around their bodies as a faint odor of death and peat moss hung around them.
The tomb offered possible clues to his fate. The Ukrainians pulled an improvised turnstile from the ground. They found hardened blood near Vanyushev’s hip.
Using spades, they carefully cleaned the area around the body before carefully lifting it into a white body bag.
The remains of a Russian soldier believed to be Gavril Vanyushev were exhumed from a temporary grave near Kyiv on May 11, 2022. He was apparently killed in battle in late February as Russia attempted to seize the Ukrainian capital. (Murray Brewster / CBC News)
He was taken back to Kyiv to an unsightly train station and loaded into a gray refrigerated wagon, where Ukrainians stored the bodies of 136 dead Russian soldiers awaiting repatriation.
The problem, Lyamzin argues, is that Moscow is reluctant to accept remnants collected on Ukrainian battlefields.
“Russia does not seem interested at all,” he said, noting that the Geneva Convention contains provisions for the exchange of remains.
“We couldn’t show them to their mothers”
So far, only one such exchange has taken place during the war. Lyamzin said the poor decay of the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers returned home made it impossible to identify them.
“We couldn’t show them to their mothers,” he said through an interpreter.
In late March, Ukraine exchanged six dead Russians for two living prisoners of war.
The government in Kyiv has said it is ready to continue collecting bodies and awaiting their exchange. At some point, he will have to consider re-detaining the Russians if no one claims them.
After Vanyushev’s body was loaded into the car, Ukrainian troops searched his pockets for the last time. They found his bank card and credit card, which they held for the cameras.
It was a brief glimpse of ordinary life destroyed by brutal war, set against a terrifying backdrop of a growing pile of white corpse bags.
Lyamzin looked at the whole scene with an indifferent look.
“I have no pity for them because they come to my country, kill children and rape our women,” he said.
“They have brains, so they knew what they were doing [were doing]. They were aware [of what they were] doing – a crime. So I can’t feel any regret [for] them. “
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