San Francisco Frontiers - Kyiv mourns recovery volunteer, whose life 'intertwined with the fallen'

The 40-year-old was killed stepping on a mine during what would be his last mission, his family said, and his remains were brought to Kyiv for a farewell ceremony.

"His face was intact. Mum says that the gods gave us this chance to say goodbye to him. And his last words were, 'I'm leaving'," his adopted daughter Diana told AFP.

As the rain fell, Yukov's teammates carried his open coffin into the Volodymyrska Cathedral, a 19th century church in central Kyiv, where a few hundred people had gathered on Saturday.

Yukov's six-year-old daughter Yevgenia, her blond hair tied back with a black bow, pressed into her mother's skirt and stared, wide-eyed, at the priests and at her father's coffin.

"I always thought nothing would happen to him," Diana said, fighting to maintain her composure in her long black dress.

"He was constantly answering calls from mothers on his phone. He told everyone he'd bring their loved ones back."

Yukov was well-known in eastern Ukraine, often appearing in the moments of grief that have come to define life the Donetsk region, battered by years of Russian assaults.

AFP journalists came across him last week as, with his wife and young daughter, he was sending a flower crown to float over a river in memory of an attack on Ukrainian prisoners of war.

- 'The soul will remain' -

"My life journey has been intertwined with the fallen and dead bodies," he told AFP in an interview in 2024.

That path began when he stumbled upon skeletons of World War II soldiers as a teenager.

The episode set him on a lifelong mission to recover the dead to allow dignified burials.

During Russia's invasion, with his organisation Platsdarm, he would embark on dangerous recovery missions,during which he once suffered bad injuries to his leg and eye.

His unit would bring the bodies back and carefully look for clues to identify the deceased, as AFP journalists witnessed on one occasion in April 2024.

"I never perceive the bodies of the dead as just corpses. There is a soul. It is right there beside them," he said.

"You realise that until this body is buried, the soul will remain next to it."

One time his team drove from the east to Kyiv, to return the bodies of a young family killed in the capital, where they had sought refuge from the Russian advance only to be felled by an aerial attack.

Ukrainian media reported his team had recovered thousands of bodies throughout the conflict.

- 'Live long enough' -

When AFP met Yukov in 2024, his team had lined dozens of bodies in black bags on a patch of grass.

The wind was blowing the smell of the decomposed corpses across a nearby hill, while artillery pounded in the horizon.

But the team was focused on their task.

All the remains recovered that day were of killed Russian servicemen, Yukov said.

They would later be exchanged for bodies of Ukrainian soldiers.

At the funeral, women came bearing flowers, including Olena Tropina, one of many widows whom Yukov had helped bring their husbands' bodies home.

"He brought back the souls of our missing loved ones. And he gave them peace," Tropina told AFP.

Beyond helping Ukrainian families recover their loved ones, Yukov said he was driven by a need to rid his region of the lingering presence of the dead, which he believed prevented peace.

"This energy of war will remain here until they are brought home, until they are mourned and buried," he said.

But he added, almost as a premonition: "I think I won't live long enough to see that work through."

C.Lewis--SFF