Bodies of dead Russian troops abandoned near Kyiv

When their dogs started digging insistently at a spot in the woods, villagers in Zavalivka called in the authorities.

A Ukrainian military team were soon at the scene in white protective suits, carefully removing the topsoil.

They uncovered a man’s body, face down with his legs oddly twisted beneath him. It was clear from his uniform that he was a Russian soldier.

Weeks after they failed to seize Ukraine’s capital, the remains of Russian troops were still being discovered in and around the villages they passed through or occupied near the capital, Kyiv. But Ukraine said Russia showed little interest in getting them back.

From the grave in the woods, the body was removed to a refrigerated train on the outskirts of Kyiv that now operated as a mobile morgue for the Russian dead.

The white plastic sacks were marked with numbers rather than names and there were at least 137 stacked inside two carriages on the day we visited.

Ukrainians attempted to identify the dead: on the body just brought in, the forensics team turned up two bank cards, as well as badges for a Russian motorised rifle brigade.

“At least this one has a chance of getting home,” the man in charge announced, displaying the finds, including a soiled fragment of T-shirt printed with the Army of Russia logo.

Moments later, I confirmed that the man I had just seen exhumed had been a young, married soldier from Siberia. Next to his body bag, a carefully posed black-and-white photograph from his social media profile stared out from my phone.

Russia had a proud slogan: “We don’t abandon our own.” It’s a big part of President Vladimir Putin’s supposed justification for invading Ukraine, where he falsely claimed Russian-speakers needed protection.

That pledge appeared not to apply so much to Russia’s own soldiers.

“The bodies we’ve found show they treat people as rubbish, as cannon fodder,” Colonel Volodymyr Liamzin told the BBC. “They don’t need their soldiers. They throw them here, retreat – and leave the bodies.”

We don’t actually know how the young soldier in the woods came to be abandoned. The villagers in Zavalivka said they were mostly hiding in their cellars from shelling at the time – they assumed he was injured and got lost as his unit was forced to retreat. -BBC