Counting the dead
A military cemetery offers one measure of the war’s grievous toll
Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv, Ukraine, the burial site for more than 700 soldiers killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022. (c. Martin Kuz)
Lychakiv Cemetery provides the final resting place for fallen soldiers from the city of Lviv and surrounding towns in western Ukraine. When I visited the grounds in March 2022, less than a month into Russia’s full-scale invasion, the first graves of a new generation of war dead had yet to appear.
I returned in July that year and counted 78 burial plots. A lack of open space within the cemetery forced the city to create a section outside its walls for the men and women — sons and daughters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers — who had come home for the last time. Rows of wooden crosses topped with blue and yellow Ukrainian flags stood at the base of a gentle slope that rises toward a tall white cross honoring troops killed during WWII.
I found Olexsiy Tarasyev and Artem Dymyd in the eighth row. A photo of each man looked out from the center of the cross above his grave, eyes alight. Two soldiers unknown to one another in life would be forever side by side in death.
I met family members of Olexsiy, 40, and Artem, 27, weeks after the men died. Memories and emotions poured forth. Natalyia Lipska, Olexsiy’s older sister, shared that they talked by phone less than an hour before an artillery strike killed him near the eastern city of Kharkiv. Over a patchy cell connection, he had sought to reassure her. “Hello, sister,” he said. “I’m good.”
The graves of Ukrainian soldiers Artem Dymyd (left) and Olexsiy Tarasyev. (c. Martin Kuz)
An artillery blast six days later gravely wounded Artem outside the southern city of Kherson. His mother, Ivanka Dymyd, recounted that the combat medic who tried in vain to save him remained in disbelief that Artem summoned enough strength from his broken body to speak in his waning moments. Gasping for breath, he choked out two final words: “I survived.”
In February last year, with the war approaching the one-year mark, I went back to Lychakiv. The number of graves had reached 296 and the crosses had climbed the lower quarter of the slope. On my next visit five months later, the figure had soared to 476. The crosses extended more than halfway to the top of the hill, offering one measure of the vast toll of Ukraine’s stymied summer counteroffensive in the country’s east and south.
I returned to the cemetery Friday in the early evening beneath a soothing blue sky. Rounding the outer wall along the sidewalk, I stopped and stared for a long moment. The crosses had crested the hill.
A whisper of a breeze rustled the flags that rose above all of the 713 graves except the most recent half-dozen. Here and there, family members sat on benches beside their lost loved ones, immersed in silent conversation with those who now live only in memory.
The three most recently interred soldiers at Lychakiv Cemetery as of May 31, 2024. Another service member was buried the next day. (c. Martin Kuz)
From afar, war can appear indistinct, almost illusory. Graves bring the anguished truth into sharp focus. Before the invasion, a memorial walkway for soldiers who died in past wars extended up the grassy slope, the large granite rectangles cleaving the otherwise empty expanse in two. Now that the area to the right of the path has filled with the dead, workers have removed the granite and begun grading the dirt, preparing the land to receive more bodies.
Cemetery workers have begun preparing the rest of an expanse outside the walls of Lychakiv Cemetery to create space for more burial plots. (c. Martin Kuz)
Before departing Lviv on Saturday morning, I stopped by Saints Peter and Paul Garrison Church, the setting for most of the city’s military memorial services. I arrived as six soldiers in uniform ascended the outside steps holding aloft a casket. Other members of their unit and relatives of the deceased trailed behind. Passersby kneeled on the cobblestone street with heads bowed.
A light rain fell from a sun-dappled sky. In the afternoon, the mourners would gather at Lychakiv, watching as fallen soldier No. 714 entered the earth.
— You can expect to receive Reporting on Ukraine in your inbox more than once a week this month as I travel the country. The timing of the newsletters will depend on conditions on the ground and power availability. As part of its genocidal war, Russia continues to bombard Ukraine’s energy grid nationwide, causing outages and shortages (and casualties). Some of my dispatches might consist mostly of photos as I try to provide a visual sense of the destruction that Russia has inflicted — and the unbreakable humanity of Ukrainians.
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Beautiful writing, Martin. But this is just crushing...
Ugh, what a sad and sobering way to measure the mounting toll of this nonsensical war.