Ukraine honors its 'collector of souls' killed while recovering the war dead

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine paid tribute on Saturday to Oleksiy Yukov , a volunteer who spent more than two decades recovering the bodies of civilians and soldiers — many of them Russian — killed by war. He was 40.

An Orthodox Christian service was held at the Cathedral of Saint Volodymyr, in central Kyiv, where thousands of people gathered to pay their respects following his death in a landmine explosion during a recovery mission on Aug. 5.

Yukov founded the Platsdarm (''bridgehead'') organization because he believed all the dead require a proper burial. He became known as a “collector of souls.”

Yukov, from the war-torn Donbas region , was a martial arts instructor, He began recovering the dead as a teenager after encountering the remains of Soviet and Russian soldiers from World War II .

Platsdarm’s volunteers go into fields and forests, among ruins and across territory, where the ground is often mined.

Yukov suffered leg injuries and lost an eye in a mine blast in 2022. Still recovering from those injuries, he returned to the fields.

In a social media post last month, Yukov described the landscape in which he worked.

“Remote mines, shelling, drones — everything is against you. But you go and do everything to ensure that every soul returns home,” he said.

He also addressed those who believed Russian bodies should simply be left behind: “When they say: ‘Let them rot,’ I do not agree. This is how we fight for every soul.”

Yukov spoke of his work in religious terms, saying a body was a soul waiting to go home.

“This is action,” he wrote. “Action every day in the fields, in the forest belts, among the ruins, where your life can end at any moment.”

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Derek Gatopoulos in Athens, Greece contributed to this report.