LUHANSK, Ukraine – From 100 feet away, the stench is unbearable. You smell it well before you can see it, the Luhansk morgue, located a mere 50 feet away from where life begins, at a baby hospital.
Inside the three-storied building it’s dark and dank. The air hangs still and clings to your clothes. Anatoliy Leonidovich, who would only identify himself by his first name and patronymic, is in charge here. He’s ready to share his cell number, but won’t give his last name. But he tells plenty of stories.
He has lived in the morgue for the last three months. Literally. He has not left the premises. When I ask him where he sleeps, he points to the couch I am sitting on, and says: “Well, right there.”
He lost his sense of smell a long time ago. It’s the first sense that goes away when it’s constantly assaulted, he says.
Another thing he has lost is the count of bodies that have passed through his morgue during wartime. “More than 500 bodies have come in since the beginning,” Anatoliy Leonidovich says.
Electricity has been out for months, so long that he can’t remember the exact date it went out. In any case, 10 bodies is the maximum amount that can be held in the freezer. So, even if the electricity was on, the facility could not possibly cope. At one point more than 20 bodies were squeezed inside while others were piled up on a lawn outside.
Among them were five unidentified Ukrainian soldiers. They have been resting in coffins set outside the morgue for two weeks at least. They are wrapped in plastic inside the simple wooden coffins, but it does not save them from the elements, of course. Bees and flies swarm around them, and maggots squirm atop them. It’s sickening sight, to say the least.
Anatoliy Leonidovich has no idea what to do with the bodies. “The Ukrainians haven’t told me what to do. The LNR (Luhansk People’s Republic) hasn’t told me what to do. I don’t know what to do,” he says. “I am waiting for a body exchange, or something.”
But nobody has been looking for these unidentified soldiers. Ukraine says there are hundreds of people missing in Ukraine due to the war. The list of missing soldiers hanging on the door of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast state administration last week showed 422 names. The Interior Ministry at the same time said the number is more than 500. Many of them went missing in the highly contested areas in eastern Ukraine that are controlled by Russian-backed separatists.
But it seems it has not occurred to the authorities to look for some of them in one of the most obvious places, such as the Luhansk morgue.
This Kyiv Post alerted a government agency about the five bodies on Oct. 2 and was told that all necessary steps will be taken to identify and recover them.
Beside the five bodies that have been sitting in the yard, there is another resting mere feet away. It’s another Ukrainian soldier, but you could not tell by its appearance. Charred and in pieces, it hangs over a bloody stretcher just outside the building.
It’s half-covered with some kind of a blanket, and you would not even know it was a human being if it weren’t for the fingers, which, unlike the rest of the body, look human and real.
The workers of the morgue said the remains were recovered after a fierce fight for the Luhansk airport. The place was heavily shelled and reduced to ash and rubble. What did not explode there burned in the fight. That includes this man. The workers said the fighter had been identified, but they would not release the name to this reporter.
As of Oct. 2, Anatoliy Leonidovich was still waiting for instructions what to do with these bodies. “They will stay there until we get instructions on what to do,” he said.
Kyiv Post editor Christopher J. Miller can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter at @ChristopherJM. Staff writer Ian Bateson contributed to this story.
