Ukraine mourns body-recovery volunteer Oleksiy Yukov killed by landmine

A farewell service was held Saturday at St. Volodymyr Cathedral in Kyiv for Oleksiy Yukov, the 40-year-old head of Platsdarm, the volunteer body-recovery group he led across Ukraine’s front line. Priests presided over the Orthodox Christian service, relatives gathered at the coffin, and fellow soldiers carried it as Ukraine mourned a man who spent much of his life bringing the dead home.

Yukov was born and raised in Sloviansk in Donetsk Oblast and spent more than 20 years recovering the bodies of soldiers and civilians, including many Russians. He founded Platsdarm in 2014, when Russia launched its war in eastern Ukraine, building a team that worked near the front line to find, exhume, identify, and rebury the dead so families could bury them properly.

That work made burial a battlefield task in itself. Platsdarm recovered remains from both sides of the war, along with civilians caught in the fighting, and helped hundreds of families receive a name and a body to mourn. Yukov’s mission was not limited to Ukraine’s own dead; he treated every body as someone’s loss, and every recovery as a chance to restore dignity and memory before war erased both.

Yevheniia Kaluhina, Yukov’s wife, confirmed his death after he stepped on a landmine during a recovery mission near the front line. Just days before that announcement, he had been filmed on one of his missions. Tributes to him also came from Natalka Cmoc and the Ukrainian Museum, while news organizations described him as a tireless worker for the war dead and, in one AP dispatch, as a “collector of souls.”

His death underscored the danger faced by those who search for the missing in a war zone laced with mines and shell holes. Yukov had devoted his life to finding the dead, identifying them when possible, and returning them to families that had waited for years. In a war that has swallowed so many names, his work insisted that the missing should not remain missing forever.