Ukrainians with missing relatives in Borodyanka await word as newly discovered graves are dug up

Ukrainian authorities are still finding people hastily buried in makeshift graves during Russia’s brief but brutal occupation of villages and towns near Kyiv. Almost 200 bodies remain unidentified, while 280 people are listed as missing.

Oleksander Pinchuk’s mother, Halyna, was among the missing. They never found her body in the rubble of her apartment building, which had taken a direct hit from an airstrike a year ago. Pinchuk had walked out of the building just eight hours earlier, and had not seen his mother since, he said.

On Thursday, Pinchuk stood in the cold winter air, his face grim among a small group of mourners gathered for a religious service to mark the anniversary of the airstrike in the town of Borodyanka in northern Ukraine.

There is nothing left of the structure except the lines that are in place. Behind it was another apartment building, black and empty but still standing.

“Look at what the Russians have brought us and what they have done to our beautiful city,” said Dmytro Koshka, the priest who conducted the service. “How can we forget and forgive?”

Pinchuk said rescue crews were only able to enter the building last April, after Ukrainian forces took control of Borodyanka. Crews dug through the wreckage for about two weeks and found the remains of 15 people. But they found no trace of dozens more believed to be inside the 108-apartment building.

“We still have hope for at least some of them, but the rest are just burned alive,” Pinchuk said.

Hope against the odds

Without a body to mourn and bury, the 43-year-old hopes his mother is still alive. He heard rumors that Russian troops had taken more than 100 people from Borodyanka to Belarus. Perhaps he was among them.

“Until the last moment, I would think he was still alive,” he said.

The exhumation of three bodies on Thursday from two makeshift graves on the edge of the Borodyanka cemetery means some families may have a chance to learn what happened to their loved ones.

A passerby found the three in early March 2022, when Russian forces were still in control of the city, and they buried the bodies with the help of others, according to Andrii Nebytov, head of the Kyiv regional police department.

Passersby then fled the area. He only recently returned and told authorities about the funeral, the police chief said.

One of the dead is believed to be a 50-year-old local man who was shot and partially burned in his car, but DNA tests are needed to confirm this. No one knows who the other two are.

It doesn’t take much to identify it. A green pencil is all that is found in one, a pack of cigarettes and key fobs in another. The remains are so badly decomposed that identification and determining exactly how they died will require forensic testing.

The exhumation brings the number of civilian bodies found in previously Russian-held areas of Kyiv region to 1,373, Nebytov said. Of these, 197 have not yet been identified.