Roman Vyshynskyj died in the lavender, on a hill between two forest edges, somewhere in the eastern Ukrainian hinterland. The piece of metal that killed him halfway is still stuck in his head. His bones are brown like the mud he’s resting on.
The paratrooper was to cross the field with his comrades, taking the Russian trenches that meander through the trees on the other side. The area around the lavender had changed hands several times in the past few months. Ukrainian, Russian, now Ukrainian again. After countless battles, only craters, mines and bones are left. The village down in the valley no longer exists. The smell of lavender is almost gone and autumn is still, too still. Even the animals have fled.
In this void, liberated from the enemy but far from peace, the Ukrainian army searches for its fallen. Soldier Roman Vyshynskyj has been missing for four months, and there was a long gap between the details of his brigade and those of his family. The military only had approximate coordinates of its last battle; the family only memories of a man who did not believe in death. Every day Roman Vyshynskyj called his sister from the war, every day he laughed into the phone. “We’re fine here. We’ve got everything. The bullets can’t get to me! I’m dodging, I’m weaving through!” He spoke these words on May 31st. She missed his next call, his last, at lunchtime on June 1st.
His remains are scattered, the head lies between a large hole and the bloody clothes of a comrade who remains missing. The men searching for their fallen here are getting to work. Major Andrej, who once must have had a delicate, almost childlike face before death shaped it so much that his eyes could not hide the pain, enters the location on his smartphone.
“The dogs ate the meat,” says Denis, nicknamed “anarchist,” who, wearing plastic gloves, carefully places Vyshynskyj’s skull in the body bag. “Watch out,” the major tells him, “mines everywhere.” The day before, their Chinese pick-up drove over an explosive device, as if by magic everyone was spared.
From the rags in the mud, which used to be a uniform, the anarchist pulls an ID card. The blue envelope is frayed, but the suspicion turns into certainty: behind mud and yellowed plastic are the soft, dark eyes of a handsome man with thick, black hair. Wyschynskyj, Roman is handwritten there. Paratroopers, 80th Brigade. Born in 1976. What you can’t read: Wyshynskyj is from Lviv, once called Lemberg, the largest city in western Ukraine. In addition to his sister and niece, he also leaves behind a daughter. Above all, he loved nature: flowers and shrubs of all kinds. His balcony was always full of them. The fact that he died in the lavender suits him, says his sister.
“It’s about to rain, let’s hurry.” The Major’s orders are quiet but heard. The anarchist and the others take pictures before closing the body bag. They silently carry Roman Vyshynskyj to the old Mercedes truck that is waiting at the edge of the lavender field. The clouds gather.
Vyshynskyj lies on the ground, the rest sits on the creaky wooden benches, holding on to the metal while the car struggles through the deep mud. The wheels just skid past the green mines waiting for victims along the way. First it thunders, then the rain bursts. It’s September 30: Rasputiza, the time of no roads when the streets are covered in mud, has begun.
Arrived on the main road, Wyschynskyj is loaded from the truck into the refrigerated truck. Then the column drives through the rain to the morgue in Sloviansk. “200” is written on the sheet metal of the refrigerated truck. Every child in Ukraine knows the number. It means: This wagon transports the dead.
Soldiers humbly wave the car through the checkpoints. Colleagues are already waiting at the concrete ramp of the morgue. “What did you find today?” asks the Major. “Two of ours,” replies a man with dark circles under his eyes and firm paws as he lays the dead on the tiles: two Ukrainians and a Russian, whom he swears at. Sometimes they also call the dead Russians “Orcs”, like the green, ugly mythical creature from the Lord of the Rings saga. The war dehumanized the Russians in the eyes of the Ukrainians. Nobody here thinks that the tattered body, which is now lying next to Vyshynskyj on the same cold tiles, might also have had children. The suffering caused by the attack of the big neighbor is too close. The language reflects the hate, but it also helps to forget the fear.
Margarita, the small, plump gravedigger with jet-black hair and lots of mascara, calmly takes care of the paperwork. The major signs it, and with an empty stomach, but the biting, sweet and sour taste of death in the mouth, we go to the base in the pitch-dark night. The light in all of Slowjansk has to go out, the danger of an attack is too great. Without light there is no life, and so everyone is in bed early. At six the next morning the men of Cargo 200 are back on the mat. War doesn’t wait, and the longer a corpse can decompose, the harder it is to find.
Nine thousand soldiers: That was the official death toll of the Ukrainian armed forces since the beginning of the war in August. According to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, an average of 50 Ukrainian soldiers die every day. How many dead there are today remains a military secret. The enemy should learn as little as possible so that Ukraine remains unpredictable and its own population cannot be demoralized.
But although the subject is extremely sensitive for both the people and the army, dying has become an unavoidable part of everyday life since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24th. Death is everywhere, even far behind the front lines. People are being reminded of this through drone and rocket attacks, on the internet, on television and in cemeteries. And by the ringing of the church bells that have been ringing from one funeral to the next since the beginning of the war. According to the UN, at least 6,000 civilians have already died, other sources speak of almost 30,000 dead.
The interface between the military and the people, between war and everyday life, that is Colonel Volodymyr Volodymyrovich Lamsin. The head of the department for civil-military cooperation, called J9 for short. A man with a friendly smile and serious eyes. Freshly shaved, neat in dress, demeanor and speech. officer through and through.
In addition to the cooperation between military and civilian population in contested areas, his department also takes care of the cargo 200. “Our teams are looking for the soldiers who are not directly recovered by their comrades on the battlefield,” he says. It’s men like Vyshynskyj who die where nobody else can go. On the front line, in sight of the enemy.
One of the many duties of Lamsin’s men is to ensure that all soldiers receive their last respects. The men of Cargo 200 are also looking for Russian soldiers. There are many of them. “At the beginning of the war it was shocking to see that the enemy made little effort to recover their own dead.” There is barter in this war. Russian and Ukrainian corpses have a one to one value. Every dead Russian they recover means one of their fighters can go home.
The term “Fracht 200” actually belongs to the old, which has no place in the new: the numerical code still comes from the Soviet army. Why exactly “200”, there are numerous stories. For Colonel Lamsin, the most popular is also the most likely: In the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, a corpse including a zinc coffin is said to have weighed 200 kilograms as a guideline. There are many such abbreviations. 100 represents ammunition, 300 represents wounded. 400 for prisoners of war.
But hardly any other term is as controversial in Ukraine as cargo 200. According to Lamsin, it was veterans who drew attention to the fact that the Ukrainian dead were not cargo, but people who should be treated with honor and respect. They instead promoted the term “On the Sign”. “By order of our supreme commander, General Valeriy Fedorovych Zalushnyi, we have started to implement it.”
It is a project that fits the general mood in the country. Anything Russian is currently outlawed. The Russian language and Russian books, as well as Russian music on radio and television, are sorted out from public life. One wants to withdraw from the culture of the occupiers. The name of their endeavor changes little about the work of Lamsin’s soldiers. The mission is the same: there are thousands dead and someone has to recover them, identify them and bring them to their families.
But who are these men who know how death smells, tastes, feels? The death of one’s own friends and compatriots, but also the death of others. What drives you? The two officers in the field, Major Andrej and Colonel Oleg, seem like opposites, but complement each other.
Andrej used to be an engineer, speaks calmly and carefully, he smiles a lot. Oleg is a former paratrooper, a tough dog. He smokes Rothmans, always wears an earplug, and alternates between delegating and smoking, if need be he does both at the same time. Both are efficient in their own way. The lower level is a motley heap. Alongside Denis, the “anarchist”, there is Sascha, whom others affectionately call the “looter”. He never misses an opportunity to rummage through the abandoned Russian positions for anything useful. Leonid, Ljona for short, is the “professional”: He used to work in a museum.
Why are you doing this job? They don’t really know. Denis, Andrey, Sasha and Leonid were all amateur historians before the war, scouring the Ukrainian countryside for WWII artifacts. Semi-professional scavenger hunts, so to speak. None of them would have thought that their hobby would become such an urgently needed task.
There is nothing ordinary about the day-to-day life of the Cargo 200 squad. There are many hours full of violence and moments that sometimes seem tender, sometimes sad, sometimes cruel and sometimes even beautiful. It’s hard to understand if you don’t touch several corpses a day.
A morning among sunflowers and wheat. A rocket tore apart the road between Izyum and Sloviansk. Four meters wide, two meters deep. At the edge of the hole, on the crust of asphalt, sits Valentina. Your son died in May, right here, from the missile that caused the hole. She wants to find him. A friend of her son drove her here.
Cargo 200 combs the fields. Valentina walks alone down the street, almost disoriented, until she stands deep in the wheat. She looks over the hills and weeps. After less than an hour, the squad finds some clothing, the remains of a gun, and a jaw. Know? Who knows. Major Andrej offers consolation, although it is difficult for him. “Talking to the parents is the hardest part,” he says. “I try to avoid that. It hurts a lot and it keeps me from my work.”
But here, where the mother is standing where he cannot escape all her despair, he puts his arm around her. Very easy. “We will find him, everything will be fine,” he says. After that they separate. The mother goes home. The Cargo 200 goes to the next battlefield. The jaw goes to the DNA analysis. If it does indeed belong to her son, mother and jaw will be united, and at least she can bury what remains of her flesh and blood.
Jampil, the last village before the Russian position. Missiles fly a few meters above the street. Everyone is immediately on the ground. Everyone except Oleg, the former paratrooper. He just turns his head back, cigarette smoke coming out of his mouth and nose. “These are our rockets,” he says, and keeps walking. The squad follows. Leonid the Pro, quoted from “The Ninth Company,” a Russian war film released in 2005. Before the Soviets open fire on their enemy in the Afghan mountains, one says, “And now your favorite tune, by the band AC /DC!” Rockets fly over Jampil again. You can hear them hitting. Leonid is not wrong. If it wasn’t a real war, it would be cinematic. Not Hollywood, not high gloss with heroes. Something darker.
A few villagers lead the men behind an old shack. “This is where the Buryats buried them.” A woman who smells of liquor points to the mud. After seven months of war, she and her companion seem neglected. The Buryats, an ethnic minority from Russia on the border with Mongolia, are often derided as “goatherds”. Their area is poor, and they are readily used as cannon fodder by Putin’s army on the front lines. “We wrapped our soldiers in bear skins,” the woman slurs. “The Buryats stole the skin and left the boys here.”
Less than 15 centimeters below ground, the men first find a hand, then an arm, then a body. Two pieces as advertised. An old woman walks by, she is on her way to the forest, looking for mushrooms. She cries. There is no electricity in Jampil, no running water, no shop. Although the forests are mined, the hunger for something fresh drives people on dangerous quests.
Sascha, the looter, has also struck gold. He shows mushrooms and two Russian preserves. “One is rubbish,” he says, “but the green one doesn’t taste bad.” The two Ukrainian soldiers are freed from their muddy grave behind the barracks. Two dogs come and want to gnaw on them. “Once they’ve tasted the meat, they always come back to the dead,” says Leonid, the professional. “Dogs, especially in no man’s land, are often a sign of corpses.” They scare away the dogs and load the soldiers.
The next spot, a few hundred meters further. An old couple waves the soldiers in. In the vegetable garden, next to the tomato bushes, is a grave. Kravchenko likes it. Born in 1998. The Russians lived in the couple’s basement and buried the 24-year-old Ukrainian soldier Kravchenko here. Neither of them know exactly how he died. Leonid finds a tourniquet wrapped around the dead man’s leg, which is the name of a belt system used to stop heavy bleeding. Here, too, a dog appears. They chase him away and pack up the body.
A town down, in Lyman, they’re looking for a man. And get a tip: “He’s hard to find because he’s usually pretty hacky,” warns a colleague. You are lucky. In front of a house, half of which is missing, a man with a red drunkard’s nose and torn clothes loads his belongings into a trailer. When he sees the soldiers, he rushes over. “I buried him back there, under the tree,” he says. “The Russians executed him and abandoned him. They stole everything from his pocket, I only got his last name.” He leads the men across an overgrown green space. A cross stands under the only tree whose trunk divides into two branches like a tuning fork. On it is written: Melnyk. Müller, in Ukrainian.
“There were people here and I will find them.” Leonid the professional quotes “Charodei” – magician – , Soviet cinema, 1982. They get the body out of the ground. “See how deformed the head is?” Leonid asks his colleagues. “I think the old man was telling the truth. This one was executed.” A dog appears. They chase him away and load the dead soldier on board. “Shall we have a cup of coffee now, or is it just chatter?” Oleg wants to know. In fact, the men have been working without a break since the early hours of the morning. Sascha already has the gas stove to hand, he gets the coffee out of the car.
After a hot drink from the pewter cup, the men continue. They’re looking for six Ukrainian soldiers from a tank battalion in a field. They got the coordinates from the brigade. They find some feet, some clothes. Then they dig up a soldier next to a destroyed track bed and pick up twelve Ukrainian soldiers from the cemetery who were buried there.
In between they collect several dead Russians from the roadside. “If you think you’re really screwed, it’s usually only half of it,” says Leonid. No movie quote, just a figure of speech. At some point, work will be over, at least for that day. “Our work will probably continue for five to ten years after the war,” says Colonel Lamsin.
Margarita, the gravedigger, hobbles down the concrete ramp in the early hours of the morning. She’s holding her back. “I’m shitty,” says Margarita, “42 corpses and only one woman, how is that supposed to work?” Morgues are overflowing all over Ukraine. Here in Sloviansk, in close proximity to the front, they have no means of doing a DNA test. The city is attacked every day, the infrastructure is hopelessly overloaded. Sascha, the looter, is therefore supposed to drive a load of dead people to the city of Dnipro.
Before loading, each sack is opened to avoid confusion. Some soldiers are unrecognizable, others still have a face. A Russian soldier is green and bloated. “Shrek,” Margarita quips. The coordinates of the place of discovery are written on the Ukrainian sacks, if there were any documents, also the name and age. The Russian ones just say “Ork”. “There’s still an orc in the freezer,” says Margarita, “please get him out.”
When everyone is loaded, the always smiling Sascha begins his journey. 260 kilometers. 12 dead in the hold. The sun is shining early this afternoon as two Ukrainian fighter jets zoom over his car. He gets stopped in the middle of nowhere. “What’s the password?” asks a policeman at the checkpoint, probably barely 20 years old. “Password?” Sascha, the father of the family, a seasoned soldier, wants to know: “Are you kidding?” The policeman is silent, he glances briefly at the number on the side of the truck. “Freight 200”, Sascha helps him, “and now let me through!”
Sascha’s anger is only played. He can’t really be evil anymore. Not on a cop who was just a boy. The fighter jets fly across the street again, this time in the opposite direction. Sasha is happy. “They fly back to the base, the mission was a success!” Optimism and joie de vivre, that’s his way of resistance.
“The war is the worst time in life. The very worst,” he says. What will he do when the war is over? “I’ve been fortunate to have met hundreds of incredibly strong, courageous people during this difficult time,” he says. “When the war is over at some point, we’ll all see each other again. And we’ll bang one another really hard!”
The men in his trunk died before the war ended. But even though they are dead, their journey is not over. After Sascha dumps them, the Ukrainians’ families will wait up to five months for the results of the DNA tests. The case of Roman Vyshynsky is a rare exception. His family agrees to trust the details of the cargo 200 and the authenticity of the service card found. And so it is that just one day after the cargo 200 found him in the lavender, he is taken to western Ukraine. Home.
Friday October 7th, 2022: the day when the Vyshynskyi family is reunited. Autumn in Lviv is still mild. Men in uniform bustle about on the square in front of the Jesuit Church of St. Peter and Paul. Burgundy beret, burgundy emblem with white lion.
The 80th Brigade paratroopers will bury three men today. A press officer, a captain and Vyshynsky. The hearses drive up. A young woman almost collapses, the roses slip out of her hand onto the stone. Roman Vyshynskyj’s sister Galina is close to tears. “Not knowing where he is, what happened to him, that was the greatest torture,” she says. “But now he’s home.”
The family has been waiting for this moment for four months. They fall on their knees in front of the church entrance: Galina, her daughter and Roman’s niece Nina, as does everyone else. Soldiers, families, passers-by. The coffins are carried into the old church. The stone hall is filled to the last row. First there is prayer, then the priest introduces the fallen.
“Roman Wyshynskyj, father of a daughter, was born here in Lviv. He also grew up here, worked in a state heating company after school and started a family. He became a soldier in 2015, survived the first mission and now died in it Year as a hero in defense of his fatherland in Donbass for the 80th assault brigade of paratroopers. Amen.” Meanwhile, people stream to the front, put their hands on the coffin one last time, pray and say goodbye. Vyshynskyj’s family: sister, mother, aunt, uncle stand silently by. Tears flow.
Vyshynskyj’s last leg, the final stretch from lavender to the grave, takes in the many sights that Lviv has to offer. From the church across the street of freedom, past the opera, boutiques, statues and monuments. The war seems far away in this cozy town just before the Polish border.
The streets are packed. Strollers, workers, commuters. But for half an hour it’s back, the war. Thousands, really thousands, pause. Some stand gracefully, others fall to their knees. Children, parents, street cleaners. An old woman in a fur coat is kneeling in front of a café next to a young saleswoman in a colorful apron. Next to them is an old man with dirty trousers, the liquor bottle leaning on the stone next to him. The three of you cry. None of them know who Roman Vyshynskyj was, and yet he was one of them. In the cemetery, the burial seems almost rehearsed. Roman and his comrade get the last greeting, they are shot in the air three times. Their graves have been dug: on the meadow, in front of the gates of the cemetery. Inside there is no more space.
Then it gets quiet. Roman’s uncles are presented with the Ukrainian flag, the flag of the 80th Brigade and a beret. From somewhere in the crowd, a voice rings out: “Glory to Ukraine.” The crowd replies, “Glory to the heroes.” Three times the whole thing. Then the first voice again: “Glory to the nation.” The crowd: “Death to the enemy.”
From the cemetery it goes in the narrowest circle to the restaurant. The table on the sous parterre is lavishly set: vodka, wine, fish, meat and salad. Hearty and good. Roman’s picture adorns the end of the panel. A piece of bread and a small schnapps lie next to the candle on the white linen blanket. The first schnapps is drunk on him. To Roman Vyshynsky and all the other heroes fighting for Ukraine. Then they eat and remember a man who thought he was really lucky, according to Nina, his niece. A man who had always been like a child. A prankster from a young age. “He was older than me, but I always felt like his mother,” she says. They remind you of a man who was a womanizer, according to a childhood friend. Roman Vyshynskyj was married twice.
They drink the second brandy to the sons of Lviv. “They are our strength and our courage,” said his sister. “We salute them for allowing us to walk the peaceful streets of Lviv, breathe the fresh air, see the clear skies and let our children sleep peacefully. Glory to our heroes!”
After that, they remember the long search. To the many organizations, the Telegram channels, through which families from Ukraine and Russia are looking for their loved ones. Nina talks about the hope that was there until the end. That maybe, quite possibly, he’s still alive. Her aunt says: “If his mother were still here, she would say: you couldn’t have saved my novel.” The family remembers a man who volunteered on the very first day of the war.
Then Nina raises her glass again and says a few words about the third schnapps. “I want to remind you what a positive person he was. Full of light. Let’s remember him with gratitude.” You remember further: Roman Wyschynskyj was not born a hero of Ukraine, but as a baby, showered with love from all sides. His mother waited outside the school every day to pick him up and cook for him. For years he almost only ate their Wareniki, the typical dumplings. Plus coffee. The first war, in 2015, tore him out of his comfort zone. From then on only duty and work counted for him. “He grew up,” Nina recalls. “He stopped drinking, he was always there for everyone, overnight he was a new person.”
They drink the fourth schnapps to the fact that the family was allowed to bury him. At least that. It’s a farewell to someone who also had his quirks. For many years, soldier Vyshynskyj had little contact with his daughter, Olena. She is 22, married. At the funeral she seems shy and hardly speaks. A better relationship? A redemption? Roman Vyshynskyj will never have the opportunity to try it.
