Ukraine honors 'collector of souls' Oleksiy Yukov, killed by landmine while recovering war dead

A life spent recovering the dead

Oleksiy Yukov, a 40-year-old Ukrainian volunteer known as the "collector of souls," was killed on August 5 when he stepped on a landmine during a mission to exhume a body in the eastern Donetsk region. He had spent more than two decades recovering the remains of soldiers and civilians, Ukrainian and Russian alike, from battlefields across the country. His friend Serhiy Hnezdilov announced the death in a social media post, writing:

This is a great loss for me personally and for the people close to me. He gave names back to the dead.

Yukov's path began as a teenager, when he stumbled upon the skeletons of World War II soldiers in Ukraine. After the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, he founded the organization Platsdarm ("bridgehead") to systematically recover remains and ensure dignified burials. He was a martial arts instructor from the Donetsk region, and Platsdarm's volunteers ventured into mined fields, forests, and ruins to carry out their work. Ukrainian media reported that his team had recovered thousands of bodies throughout the conflict.

A funeral in Kyiv

On Saturday, August 8, thousands of Ukrainians paid their respects at an Orthodox Christian service at the Cathedral of Saint Volodymyr in central Kyiv. Mourners also gathered in Maidan, the capital's main square. Before the Kyiv ceremony, Yukov had been mourned in his hometown of Sloviansk in Donetsk province. His wife Yevgeniya, dressed in white, and his daughters received mourners beside his open coffin. His six-year-old daughter Yevgenia, her blond hair tied back with a black bow, clung to her mother's skirt as she stared at the priests and her father's coffin.

His adopted daughter Diana told AFP about his final moments:

His face was intact. Mum says that the gods gave us this chance to say goodbye to him. And his last words were, 'I'm leaving.'

Diana also described how Yukov was constantly answering phone calls from mothers of the missing, telling everyone he would bring their loved ones back.

A previous injury and a return to the fields

In 2022, Yukov suffered leg injuries and lost an eye in a mine blast. He returned to his recovery work while still recovering from those injuries. In a social media post last month, he described the dangers of his environment:

Remote mines, shelling, drones -- everything is against you. But you go and do everything to ensure that every soul returns home.

He rejected calls to leave Russian bodies behind, saying:

When they say: 'Let them rot,' I do not agree. This is how we fight for every soul.

In a 2024 interview with AFP, Yukov spoke of his work in religious terms:

I never perceive the bodies of the dead as just corpses. There is a soul. It is right there beside them. You realise that until this body is buried, the soul will remain next to it.

A promise to continue

At the funeral, Yukov's widow Yevgeniya, sobbing, vowed to carry on his mission:

The work was difficult and terrifying. But I promise you we will continue it because they deserve it, and you deserve it for everything you did.

Yukov's team once drove from the east to Kyiv to return the bodies of a young family killed in the capital, where they had sought refuge from the Russian advance only to be killed by an aerial attack. AFP journalists had encountered Yukov the week before his death as he sent a flower crown floating over a river in memory of an attack on Ukrainian prisoners of war.