The War Came to Us by Christopher Miller

Author:Christopher Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781399406819
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2023-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

The next morning I visited Donetsk’s central morgue, where the new reality was on full ghastly display. Dozens of mangled corpses were carelessly piled as high as my waist. They spilled into the hallway. Some were headless. Most of the others were missing limbs. They had been ripped, shredded, crushed, twisted, broken, and filleted. The sight and smell were unbearable, even for the morgue workers, who gagged on the stench of death and fled outside to vomit. One worker offered some menthol rub to put under my nose and I obliged.

There were 33 bodies in all. And according to a stack of passports that I quickly rifled through before police officers came to remove me and several other journalists, almost all were Russian nationals. Some were from Moscow Oblast. Others from Chechnya and North Ossetia. I snapped several photographs of their bodies under examination before being scolded by one of the police officers, who was clearly on the side of the DNR.

“You’re not going to tell the world the truth!” he shouted. “You’re going to show lies!”

Outside, Sergei Khokholya, a police investigator, said the corpses were undergoing autopsies and then would be returned to their families.

“Where are their families?” I asked.

“Here,” he said.

“But I saw they are almost all from Russia?” I asked.

“No, we haven’t identified them yet because they have no documents,” he said.

“But I saw their documents inside,” I countered.

“No, no. It’s impossible,” he insisted.

I waited around for a couple of hours to see whether anyone would come by to claim the bodies. Just one family did. The dead man was a local Ukrainian. His head had been completely collapsed and then rebuilt by the mortician. They loaded him up in a black van and I watched his wife, mother, and another woman weep over the top of his open casket.

The rest of the bodies were later put into bright-red coffins that had been stacked near the morgue building and taken to an ice-cream factory, where they were refrigerated. That night, they were moved into a white truck marked Gruz 200 – a tag that came from the Soviet war in Afghanistan, signifying soldiers who had been killed in the line of duty – and driven under cover of darkness to the border with Russia, where they were repatriated.

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