A grieving relative with her daughter in the Butscha cemetery
Image: Frank Röth
More than 400 people were murdered during the Russian occupation in the Kiev suburb of Bucha. Many victims are still unidentified. Undertaker Serhiy Matjuk still has to do his job.
DSerhiy Matyuk has already dug the graves. 13 pits in a row, about two meters deep, two meters long, one meter wide, with earth piled into small mounds next to them. Matjuk is the gravedigger of Bucha district. Smoking, he leans against his silver SUV in the cemetery. The midday sun burns the skin, the heat oppresses. Actually, 13 people should have been buried that day.
Matyuk doesn’t know who they are, nobody knows. They are 13 of more than 100 nameless dead in the Bucha morgue. They all died in March when the place was occupied by Russian troops. Now they are waiting to be identified. So far, however, no mother, no wife, no brother has been found. And time is running out. Because the corpses can’t lie in the freezer forever.