Their work in recovering the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers is not over. But volunteers from the Black Tulip group have run out of money and, lacking support from Ukraine's government, have been forced to give up their mission of finding and identifying the nation's missing slain soldiers. There may still be hundreds of soldiers not accounted for.
In October 2014, Black Tulip volunteers dug up a common grave near Shakhtyarsk in eastern Ukraine. It contained eight bodies. One was Yevhen Serdyukov, a mobilized sergeant in the Ukrainian army’s 25th brigade from Dnipropetrovsk, killed on July 31, 2014.
Eight months later, on a hot June day in a Dnipropetrovsk cemetery, Tatiana Serdyukov brought flowers for her son’s grave.
“He’s 30; finished two institutes; had his own company,” she said, holding a photograph of a fresh-faced, blue-eyed young man, the colors already faded after several months marking his simple grave. “And Russian.”
Tatiana and her Russian husband were nuclear power station workers based in Armenia when Yevhen was born. “When the destruction started there, the Nagorno-Karabakh [war], we fled here, and brought our son to another war.”
Yevhen Serdyukov’s is one of only a few graves with a photograph and a name on, among more than 200 unknown soldiers from eastern Ukraine war buried in this cemetery. A few yards away from where Tatiana stood, 16 new unidentified bodies had just been laid to rest, accompanied by an out-of-tune military band.
When the first such burials of unknown soldiers took place in Autumn 2014, the Dnipropetrovsk city council provided buses so that people could attend.
On this June day there had been no public announcement and no buses. Just four mourners came.
It was an indication of the Ukrainian government’s unwillingness to acknowledge its failure to recover and identify its mounting wartime dead. Another, damning indictment came on 15 July. Black Tulip, the volunteer organization which since September 2014 has returned many soldiers like Serdyukov to their grieving families, announced it was stopping work for lack of any government support or acknowledgement.
“Too much time has passed while we worked on our own resources and money,” said Yaroslav Zhilkin, a former businessman who heads the National Memory Foundation, of which Black Tulip is a part. “And it’s especially hard when you feel your work is not noticed or valued by the government. You get the impression that the search for those missing in action is expected to be the job of their families, and no one else.”
No one knows exactly how many Ukrainian servicemen are missing, held captive or buried in mass graves in Luhansk and Donetsk regions of eastern Ukraine since the war started in May last year. According to the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, 1,200 people, military and civilian, are officially missing, and nearly 300 soldiers are being held prisoner.
Ukraine has no single coordinated database of names and no centralized government agency accountable for those missing or killed in action. Instead, the painstaking, difficult and often dangerous job of recovering bodies from the battlefields has been left to enthusiasts who used to spend their summers restoring fortifications, putting on war reenactments for schoolchildren, and traveling the country to find and identify some of the six million Soviet soldiers missing in action in World War II.
Zhilkin and his team of more than 60 volunteers turned what used, for most, to be a hobby, to something more deadly earnest in September last year, after Ukraine lost hundreds of soldiers in the Massacre of Ilovaisk. Funded entirely by non-government and voluntary donations, they have been running continuous recovery missions to both Ukraine and non-Ukraine controlled territory ever since. Volunteers receive no state compensation for the time they take off work, or for transport, insurance and maintenance of a permanent base in eastern Ukraine. Nor, despite working de facto under the Ministry of Defense, do they have any de jure status for their work.
Since September, Black Tulip has brought back 609 bags of human remains from eastern Ukraine. They have no way of knowing how many individual bodies that may be. Often fragments turn out to belong to the same body, while all that is left of other corpses is a few traces of ash.
Because this war is largely fought with artillery, 40 percent of the bodies of those killed are just fragments, according to Olha Bohomolets, Ukraine presidential advisor on humanitarian affairs. Many bodies are only found months after they died; those left unburied have been mauled by wild animals. Ukraine does not collect dental records or fingerprints from its serving soldiers; until January this year, it did not issue dog tags. Documents and effects have often been removed from battle sites, some to end up posted, along with videos and photographs of the dead, on websites supporting the Russian-backed separatist regime against which Ukraine is fighting.
Tatiana Serdyukov found out her son’s fate from a video uploaded to a separatist website. It shows the 31 July 2014 battle in which 66 soldiers from the 25th brigade died. Eleven are still missing in action. Yevhen’s body is visible at the end of the video, lying naked but whole, with a bloody arm. Tatiana hoped he was concussed and had been taken prisoner.
But the video instead provided evidence of where he had died and been buried in a common grave. After Black Tulip exhumed and returned the body, it was buried in Dnipropetrovsk cemetery under the number 7593. It was identified by a DNA match as Tatiana’s son in early 2015.
Olha Bohomolets organized Ukraine’s first ever unified DNA database last October, in order to identify soldiers. By early June, over 700 DNA profiles had been created from recovered body fragments; of those, more than 300 had been matched to their families.
DNA identification is not always possible, because there are no close relatives or because body fragments are too burnt. Ideally an identification is made by putting together DNA matches with other evidence: visual identification, recovered documents or personal effects, and recorded or witness testimony, like the video showing Yevhen Serdyukov. But in Ukraine no one organisation is responsible for this investigation process. Black Tulip volunteers have no legal right to assist in identifying bodies, even though it is they who find documents and personal effects, witness where the bodies lie, and talk to locals and to fighters on both Ukrainian and separatist sides to find out what happened in clashes and where other corpses may be buried or abandoned.
“No one does this investigative work, except families on their own,” said Zhilkin. “We have a huge amount of information that could cast light on many situations, but we don’t have the authority to use this information further for an investigation, and no central state organ is doing this work, and so in fact no one uses this information.”
After Zhilkin’s announcement of stopping work on July 15, Ukrainian newspaper Ukrainska Pravda sent out an information request to all relevant state agencies, asking how much the government spends on recovering and returning for burial those it sent to war. The answer: no funding at all was allocated, either last year or this year.
The government has made no response to a detailed Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe report and recommendations on missing people in Ukraine, published this June.
Zhilkin’s advice for families waiting for information on their loved ones’ fate, or for their bodies to come home, is blunt. “I suggest they sue the government and go to the European Court, because a part of these cases where they can’t bury their body with dignity is the fault of the government,” he said. “This is the government’s responsibility, and its obligation.”
Since her son was returned, Tatiana Serdyukov has been donating regularly to help Black Tulip. “Let them keep finding other people’s children,” she said. “The government doesn’t cover a program, so (volunteers) do it but they don’t have cars or petrol or body bags or the means to fix refrigerated vehicles, so they sent out this plea for help.”
Tatiana should receive a compensation payment for her son, and the state will also pay for a new monument to replace the simple wooden cross, identical to so many others, in the Dnipropetrovsk cemetery. It is no consolation.
“He was so beautiful, he has such blue, blue eyes,” she said, as she held her son’s photograph tightly. “He said to me, ‘Don’t worry, mum, I’ll provide for your old age, you’ll have everything you need.’ He was the best student at school. Now in the school they’ve made a museum to him. That’s how this mother is provided for in her old age. This mum has everything she needs. She just doesn’t have him.”
