KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A brother and sister make their way through the rows of crosses at a military cemetery in Kyiv, clutching a bouquet of carnations. Every cross in one section carries the same inscription: “unknown defender of Ukraine,” followed by an ID number and a notice that the identification process continues.
One grave is different from the rest. A photograph has since been placed beneath the inscription — the face of Ihor Yalynych, a soldier last seen alive in the Kharkiv region in 2022. After four years of searching, his children, Stanislav and Oleksandra Yalynych, had finally located their father.
The task of identifying Ukraine’s war dead is a burden that will persist for years — one of the most enduring wounds left by Russia’s war. Some graves may never carry a name, leaving families in a state of indefinite waiting.
For much of the conflict, there was no dedicated place to lay the unidentified to rest. Bodies were kept in refrigerated storage while a national military cemetery was still under construction. Even before the facility was finished in January, the first group of unknown soldiers was buried there in August. More than 300 now rest under numbered crosses, and new graves continue to be prepared.
“I was a daddy’s girl, and I took the loss very hard,” said Oleksandra Yalynych, 21. “All these four years, all I wanted was to come and sit with him, to talk. … Now I’m glad we found him. Now I have somewhere to go.”
Ihor Yalynych died in April 2022 in eastern Ukraine. He had been serving in the military since 2015, the year after armed conflict erupted in eastern Ukraine and Russia illegally annexed Crimea.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, he was stationed with a brigade in eastern Ukraine. He came back safely from his first mission and shared photos with his son — but he never returned from the second.
After weeks passed with no word, Stanislav turned to social media to report his father missing. An acquaintance had come across a photo on a Russian Telegram channel showing nine soldiers in Ukrainian uniforms, shot and laid out in a row. The acquaintance recognized Ihor Yalynych in the image. When Stanislav saw it, he knew his father was among them.
Ukraine’s National Police in the Kharkiv region confirmed to AP that investigators are looking into the deaths of a group of Ukrainian servicemen whose bodies were discovered in the region in April 2022, as well as their identification.
Ihor’s body remained in Russian-occupied territory until the area was liberated in September 2022. The family then had to work through multiple layers of bureaucracy — including DNA testing — before they could reclaim his remains. The entire process took four years.
“It could have been faster if the police hadn’t lost the case,” Stanislav said. He explained that the file had been forwarded to police in the Mykolaiv region, where his father was originally from, and went unprocessed for more than two years.
When AP contacted Mykolaiv police in writing, they did not respond to the family’s account of the lost file or the delay. They stated only that no one had initiated criminal proceedings related to Ihor’s identification.
Because the file had gone missing, Stanislav was only allowed to submit a DNA sample for comparison about six months ago. A match came back two months after that.
At Ukrainian military funerals, the flag draped over a coffin is folded and presented to the family. When a soldier is unidentified, there is no family present to receive it. In those cases, the state steps in — accepting the flag and holding it until the soldier can be named, according to Veterans Affairs Minister Natalia Kalmykova.
“Honoring a person who gives their life for their country is, first of all, truly needed by those who remain,” she said. “So we understand the price being paid for independence — in our case, our country’s — for our right to choose our own path and democracy in this country.”
Kalmykova said three of the soldiers from the first group buried as unknown have since been identified.
Part of the reason so many remain unidentified goes back to the early days of the invasion, she said. Soldiers who enlisted in the first years were not required to provide DNA samples, so no database existed at the time. One was built later. About half of Ukraine’s troops have now submitted samples, according to a senior military official who was not authorized to speak publicly.
When no sample exists in the database, identification requires a close relative to come forward — and many cannot, because they live in occupied territory, are abroad, are estranged, have no knowledge of the situation, or are themselves gone.
Since the full-scale invasion began, more than 40,000 samples from unidentified bodies have been entered into the system, said Ruslan Abbasov, deputy director of the State Scientific Research Forensic Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Most have now been cross-referenced against roughly 170,000 samples collected from relatives.
Abbasov noted that identification often extends beyond laboratory work, with investigators finding alternative ways to obtain DNA — such as searching a person’s apartment or personal belongings left behind.
When an unidentified body is buried, a number is placed inside the coffin, marked on the outside, and engraved on the grave’s cross. A registry tracks which number corresponds to which body, so that when a DNA match is made, the correct grave can be found.
Bodies arrive both directly from the battlefield and through exchanges with Russia. Since the invasion began, Ukraine has received back 24,805 bodies, according to the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War.
Personal items like passports, military IDs, or driver’s licenses are sometimes found in pockets. Even so, DNA testing is still required, because documents found on a body may not actually belong to that individual.
Forensic medical examiner Maksym Paziura said that in some cases, the remains of multiple people are combined into a single bag, making even the process of collecting a DNA sample more complicated. The majority of bodies are in advanced stages of decomposition.
His branch in the Kyiv region handles 15 to 20 bodies each day, keeping them in refrigeration until they are identified or ready to be buried. The workload has grown to roughly five times what it was before the war, he said.
“Even if the war ends, we’ll still have a great deal of work,” Paziura said. “Identification is a hard, long process, and it won’t stop when the fighting does.”
For families, identification carries consequences beyond emotional closure. Until a death is officially confirmed, relatives are unable to settle an inheritance, remarry, or receive the financial compensation the government owes to families of fallen soldiers.
Abbasov pointed to the Western Balkans as a reference point, where bodies are still being identified long after the conflicts there concluded. Ukraine, he said, will face the same reality.
When Stanislav Yalynych saw his father’s photograph displayed on the grave, something inside him shifted.
“Now it won’t only be us who know our father lies there,” he said. Since the photo was placed on the grave, strangers have stopped to ask about the man in the picture. To Stanislav, that means his father’s sacrifice was not in vain — and that his memory will endure.
