MYKOLAIV, Ukraine — Sergey was at the morgue to pick up the body of his baby brother. Then he walked into a room with corpses organized in rows on the floor. Most were dressed in military fatigues and mangled. Some were missing limbs. He wondered if he knew some of them, he said, but it’s hard to keep track of who is alive and who is dead these days.
Ukraine’s Mykolaiv has held off Russian forces. Bodies are piling up anyway.
March 23, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
“There must have been 200 in there,” said Sergey, a Ukrainian soldier. Like others in this report, The Washington Post is only identifying him by first name for security reasons and in keeping with military rules.
Ukraine’s southern front-line city of Mykolaiv is considered a success story for how its military has defended against Russia’s invasion. This is where Ukrainian forces have held their ground, delaying any Russian offensive on the strategically critical Black Sea port of Odessa. This is where they’ve even launched counterattacks to push back Russian troops. And this is where bodies continue to pile up.
While Ukrainian forces have inflicted punishing losses on the Russians, interviews this week at Mykolaiv’s front lines, funeral homes, morgues, cemeteries and residential neighborhoods illustrated the terrible price Ukraine has paid in lives lost.
Separatist-
Dnipro
Kirovohrad
Donetsk
controlled
UKRAINE
Zaporizhzhya
RUS.
area
Voznesensk
Mariupol
Melitopol
Mykolaiv
Front line
Berdyansk
Russian-held
areas
Kherson
Odessa
RUSSIA
Kerch
CRIMEA
50 MILES
Annexed by Russia
in 2014
Simferopol
Sevastopol
Black Sea
Note: Control data as of March 22
via Institute for the Study of War
Dnipro
UKRAINE
Zaporizhzhya
Kirovohrad
Melitopol
Mykolaiv
Front line
Russian-
held
areas
Kherson
MOL.
Odessa
50 MILES
CRIMEA
Annexed by Russia
in 2014
Black Sea
ROM.
Sevastopol
Note: Control data as of March 22
via Institute for the Study of War
50 MILES
Dnipro
UKRAINE
Zaporizhzhya
Kirovohrad
Melitopol
Mykolaiv
Front line
Russian-
held
areas
Kherson
Odessa
CRIMEA
Black
Sea
Annexed by Russia
in 2014
Sevastopol
Note: Control data as of March 22
via Institute for the Study of War
Ukraine’s military has not released any casualty figures. But in Mykolaiv just this past week, Russian missiles struck a Ukrainian barracks, killing dozens. Blue-and-yellow flags around the city were lowered to half-staff. At the morgue, one van after another arrived with a “200” sign in the front windshield — an old Soviet marker for a vehicle transporting a corpse. Some bodies were delivered wrapped in checkered picnic blankets.
“Their methods of warfare are incomprehensible to a normal person — and a not normal person,” said Andriy, a Ukrainian sergeant who’s posted at one of the front-line positions in Mykolaiv. “They’re bombing peaceful cities. They’re bombing barracks with new recruits sleeping inside. But they won’t come storm our actual military positions.”
Meanwhile, Mykolaiv Gov. Vitaliy Kim has urged residents to notify local authorities when they come across “the many” Russian cadavers left strewn around the city’s outskirts. He said people could also just place the corpses in bags, which will eventually be shipped back to Russian mothers because “we’re not animals.”
“The problem is they don’t always take their bodies,” Kim said in a video message on Telegram on Saturday. “The dogs won’t eat that much. Same with the wolves.”
Dmitry Smirnov, who owns a funeral home in Mykolaiv, said the city of 500,000 typically sees about 20 deaths per day. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, that jumped to 50 per day, he estimated. Now, Smirnov said, the city is dealing with more than 100 deaths per day — not counting the Russians.
His funeral home and others will soon reach a breaking point. He only has enough caskets to last until the end of this week. The wood to make them was typically sourced from forests in the Kherson region, which is now largely occupied by Russian forces. Some bodies might soon have to be buried in sealed bags.
At the cemetery, gravedigger Yuri Malashuk starts his days surveying the grounds for new artillery shells. At least one had landed there nearly every night since the start of the war, he said. Some have disturbed graves. Several fell on a nearby landfill, setting fire to the trash and causing pungent smoke to waft over the cemetery.
“Even the sacred places aren’t safe,” Malashuk said.
The near-constant booming thuds in the distance have scared some people away from coming to the graveyard, sacrificing saying goodbye for safety. In the past month, Malashuk has dug graves for whole families who had to be buried by their neighbors. He’s also dug solitary plots for men — left behind after their family members evacuated. Ukraine is requiring men between 18 and 60 to remain in the country to fight.
“I’m sorry for our guys. We are burying them every day,” he said.
Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War think tank have predicted that “if the war in Ukraine settles into a stalemate condition, Russian forces will continue to bomb and bombard Ukrainian cities, devastating them and killing civilians, even as Ukrainian forces impose losses on Russian attackers and conduct counterattacks of their own.”
With much of their artillery now out of range of Mykolaiv’s downtown, the Russian military on Monday dropped a bomb on a hotel, the first strike in the city center. No one was seriously injured in the blast — the hotel had been empty — but several apartment buildings behind it were damaged. Less than an hour after the explosion, residents were on the streets outside, working together to sweep up debris from their homes’ walls and windows.
Across the street from the hotel was another barracks for local law enforcement. When the bomb dropped, shattered glass flew onto their cots. Three officers sustained minor injuries. The unit’s commander, Oleksi, sat in the lobby with gauze wrapped around his hand and his knee. He considered himself more lucky than wounded.
“Russians are trying to intimidate the population,” he said. “It’s all psychological pressure to create panic.”
At the trenched front line the next day, soldiers sat around jars of borscht and cured lard that volunteers had brought them. They were waiting for the orders to move their trench positions forward, in the direction of the Russian military in Ukraine’s southeast.
A different unit, just one kilometer ahead, was hit with artillery shells overnight.
“They are more or less okay,” said Maksim, a soldier. “The losses aren’t big.”
“The enemy has suffered quite significant casualties, both the injured and the killed,” he added. “Well, this is what war is about.”
At the morgue, Sergey spoke of the toll of a month of war on his family and friends. He said his brother Danil was 17 when he died during a shootout with Russian troops. He had wanted to defend his country like his older brothers, so he joined the local Territorial Defense Forces. He was two days short of his 18th birthday when he died.
Sergey carpooled to the morgue with two other families from his neighborhood to pick up their dead together.
“How do I bring our mother her dead son right now?” he asked. “I just have no idea.”
Oleg Oganov and Salwan Georges contributed to this report.