Filed by The Economist under "March of the dead" 🧐
To bury its dead, Ukraine is having to dig up victims of past wars
In exhuming the bodies, the country also brings its past to the surface
https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/08/10/to-bury-its-dead-ukraine-is-having-to-dig-up-victims-of-past-wars
The numbers of war dead are a secret in Ukraine, but it is possible to get an impression of the scale by visiting the rapidly expanding military cemeteries that feature in every town and city. At the Lychakiv cemetery, says Oleksandr Dmytriv, its director, Mr Chekovksy was the 507th to be buried since the invasion began on February 24th, 2022. At first the dead were buried in another part of the cemetery, but space quickly ran out, so the cemetery turned instead to a grassy slope where a war memorial had been built in the 1970s, while Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union. As the rows of graves marched up the hill, the gravediggers unexpectedly found skeletons.
History marches ever on and, sighs Inna Zolotar, a tour guide in Lviv, “it is also a weapon.” As for Lychakiv, she says it “reflects our complicated memory” including the things “we don’t know how to talk about.”
