Ukraine’s body collectors

We shared Katie Livingstone’s story of two volunteers who traveled to Ukraine to become war heroes, only for chaos to ensue. Photojournalist Alan Chin got access to the mobile command that’s keeping Ukraine’s trains running and filed a dispatch on board a packed train. Our documentary team has profiled a group of amateur fighters who started their own battalion and used satellite images to show the damage to historic landmarks in Ukraine.

Nicholas Carlson will be dedicating his notes next week to the true cost of this war — and what comes next. Stay tuned. But now, let’s get started.

— Emily Cohn

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Ukraine’s body collectors

Black Tulip is a humanitarian mission of Ukrainian civilians: They carry the dead from the battlefields, or exhume and retrieve bodies from shallow graves in newly liberated territories.

Oleksiy Yukov, 37, leads one of those groups. He estimates his team has retrieved at least 800 bodies since last February — just a fraction of the deaths recorded since the beginning of 2022.

“I see death exactly the way it is — not like the statistics that you see in the news,” Yukov said. “I see people and their encounter with death, in the very moment that it happened. I see the position in which the person died. I see under which circumstances the person died.”

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