Not to forget the victims of Mariupol – Isobel Koshiw

In a Ukrainian Telegram group, where those who have lost loved ones in Mariupol meet, the more than 26 thousand users have one goal: to ensure that the thousands of people who died during the Russian assault on this port city have a worthy burial or at least, in many cases, find their remains.

The amount of corpses in Mariupol leaves you speechless. Petro Andyushchenko, adviser to the mayor of the Ukrainian city, estimates that at least 22 thousand have died in the two months of fighting. But one of the many people who coordinate the burials in the city, and who preferred to remain anonymous, believes that the total number is closer to fifty thousand.

Some of the participants of the Telegram group have found the bodies of their loved ones and are going through the chaotic process of recognition and burial. Others spend their days browsing social media groups looking for news and are afraid of not finding any. Still others post photos, footage of gravestones and handwritten lists of the dead by unknown authors, which sometimes even indicate burial sites. Some people who have been to the city have reported that, as summer approaches and temperatures rise, a corpse smell invades many streets.

There are bodies still trapped under rubble or in apartments, or buried in shallow makeshift mass graves, many of which are poorly marked or even not marked at all. Other corpses were left on the street, while some bodies may have disintegrated on the spot, if hit by heavy artillery, or charred in the numerous fires that broke out in the city.

“I entered the chat to let people know that my father had been killed and, I don’t know, also to share my pain”, says Mariana, who explains that she lost contact with her parents when the telephone signal was interrupted. beginning of March. The bombing had made it too dangerous to reach them, until she had decided to flee with her children. His father was killed while trying to put out a fire and his mother buried him with her own hands next to the building where they lived, and then left the city, says Mariana, who wants to return to Mariupol as soon as possible to give a worthy burial. to the parent.

Deaths such as those of his father are listed in a spreadsheet created and updated by members of the Telegram group and which for now has over 1,200 people. The document includes information on how they were killed and often where their bodies are supposed to be.

The section on the causes of death included in the spreadsheet is the testimony of the horrors suffered by the besieged civilian population: starvation, lack of medicines and medical care, heart attack, covid-19 and stroke. Died when their apartment was bombed, shot while trying to get water, died while putting out a fire, died from freezing, death from shooting and death from shrapnel wounds.

The battle for Mariupol was fought in a densely populated city of about four hundred thousand inhabitants. The Ukrainian army sent grenades and missiles and the Russian army’s response hit residential areas, residents say. People want to know why they have not been rescued and why the civilian population has become “hostage” to a war that according to their mayor – who fled on February 27 – would never have reached the city.

As the intense fighting made travel nearly impossible, the courtyards between apartment buildings began to fill with makeshift graves dug by residents during the bombing. Some of the tombstones were made by hand, others were provided to the inhabitants by the emergency services, who took them from a local funeral home. Sometimes it was not even possible to build makeshift graves. On a photo shared in the Telegram group, the name and date of death of the person who lived inside appear scribbled on the door of an apartment, presumably it was a neighbor who wanted to leave a trace for who would later come to recover the body.

Yulia, who left Mariupol for Russia as an adult many years ago, says she found out on Telegram that her father had died in his apartment in late March via her former classmates. Her father’s neighbor told her she wrapped him in a blanket, took him out in a wheelbarrow and left him next to their building. “He didn’t bury him because he was too dangerous. Maybe some emergency services took the body later because it started to get hot and hungry dogs were all over the place, ”says Yulia.

The bureaucratic chaos
Yulia wrote to the new municipal agency, set up to identify bodies and issue death certificates. She replied that her father was not on the list of identified bodies and asked her to come to Mariupol to provide a DNA sample. “From their letter, it appears her body will never be identified. I think maybe the neighbor didn’t leave any documents with her body, ”says Yulia, who adds that she will return to Mariupol as soon as possible to look for her father’s body.

The new authorities say the burial and identification process is underway and that each body will be buried separately, in a dignified manner. But the Telegram posts of people burying their dead show that this process is fraught with problems. Since Russia declared victory in April, Mariupol has come under the control of the self-proclaimed republic of Donetsk, a proxy-governed authority created to administer the homonymous region in occupied eastern Ukraine in 2014.

Footage shot by Donetsk Authority TV channels shows emergency services workers digging up the bodies from makeshift graves and retrieving the bodies from the rubble, they say they are touring the city to dig up or re-bury all the bodies. Authorities have publicly called on relatives to exhume the bodies on their own, even without supervision. The bodies are taken to Mariupol’s only morgue still in operation, the Metro morgue, for examination and recording, when the state of decomposition is not too advanced or if identity documents are found in the clothes.

Photos of the Metro morgue taken by a Mariupol reporter, Vyacheslav Tverdokhleb, show piles of bodies piled up in a courtyard, next to people wearing masks. “You queue for the death certificate in the yard and there are only piles of bodies next to you,” says Daria, who left Mariupol at the end of March but returned for two weeks in May to bury a close friend of hers. account of his relatives. If the bodies are not claimed or identified for two weeks, authorities will bury them in tombs marked with numbers, reads in some Telegram posts written by a representative of Ritual, the only funeral home still operating in the city.

As hundreds of thousands of people have left the city and are unable to return, many try to use Ritual’s services remotely. The company, nationalized by the Donetsk separatist authority, offers a paid service to dig up or recover a body, if you know its whereabouts, and bury it. In this way, as one of Ritual’s representatives wrote in a post on his Telegram channel, relatives can prevent the body of their loved one from getting lost in the bureaucratic chaos of the Metro morgue, or, even worse, ending up in a pit. common.

Erase all tracks
Satellite images from the Maxar company and a CNN report, both made after Russia took control of the area, show that Russian forces have dug mass graves. In the CNN report and in another video posted on Telegram by Ritual on May 9, both made in the cemeteries outside Mariupol, it is seen that the graves are numbered and that they are probably connected to a database managed by the authorities.

Daria and another person we spoke to, as well as the Telegram posts of those who have been confronted with this trial, confirm that the Donetsk authorities are in possession of this database, which in addition to collecting photos of the corpses, it also records other information left on bodies or clothing.

But not all the bodies that should appear in the database are registered. In March, Olesya’s husband died and her son was seriously injured by a rocket that hit their apartment. Olesya decided that her only chance was to take her son to a doctor and she left her husband near the entrance to their building. She today she cannot find her body and she does not know if it was buried. But she, she tells her, her documents were beside him in his jacket pocket. “I think he will most likely be missing from now on,” says Olesya, who said all the neighbors all fled because their apartment building was burning, along with five other buildings around them.

Donetsk authorities say relatives can provide DNA samples for identification, which would theoretically indicate they are collecting samples from the bodies. But one person coordinating the burials said he had not heard of such a practice or the creation of a database for the genetic material. If DNA samples are not collected, thousands of bodies may never be identified. And so the extent of what happened in Mariupol and the truth will never be known.

Ukrainian authorities accuse Russia of using mass graves to cover up their crimes. “They should bring in the Red Cross to supervise the identification processes, collect DNA samples and create a database that would then be delivered to Ukraine,” says Serhiy Taruta, born in Mariupol, member of the Ukrainian parliament and oligarch whose companies employed thousands of people in the city.

(Translation by Federico Ferrone)