{"id":25766,"date":"2026-08-08T16:06:56","date_gmt":"2026-08-08T16:06:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/25766\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T16:06:56","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T16:06:56","slug":"ukraine-honors-its-collector-of-souls-killed-while-recovering-the-war-dead-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/25766\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine honors its ‘collector of souls’ killed while recovering the war dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) \u2014 Ukraine paid tribute on Saturday to Oleksiy Yukov<\/a>, a volunteer who spent more than two decades recovering the bodies of civilians and soldiers \u2014 many of them Russian \u2014 killed by war. He was 40.<\/p>\n

An Orthodox Christian service was held at the Cathedral of Saint Volodymyr, in central Kyiv, where thousands of people gathered to pay their respects following his death in a landmine explosion during a recovery mission on Aug. 5. Mourners also gathered at Kyiv’s main Maidan Square before the service.<\/p>\n

Yukov founded the Platsdarm (“bridgehead”) organization because he believed all the dead require a proper burial. He became known as a “collector of souls.”<\/p>\n

Yukov, from the war-torn Donbas region<\/a>, was a martial arts instructor, He began recovering the dead as a teenager after encountering the remains of Soviet and Russian soldiers from World War II<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Platsdarm’s volunteers go into fields and forests, among ruins and across territory, where the ground is often mined.<\/p>\n

Yukov’s widow, Evhenyia Kaluhyna, promised to continue his work, sobbing as she spoke at the funeral, wearing an embroidered white dress and standing over her husband’s open casket.<\/p>\n

“The work was difficult and terrifying,” she said. “But I promise you we will continue it because the (dead) deserve it, and you deserve it for everything you did.”<\/p>\n

Yukov had suffered leg injuries and lost an eye in a mine blast in 2022. Still recovering from those injuries, he returned to the front line.<\/p>\n

In a social media post last month, Yukov described the landscape in which he worked.<\/p>\n

“Remote mines, shelling, drones \u2014 everything is against you. But you go and do everything to ensure that every soul returns home,” he said.<\/p>\n

He also addressed those who believed Russian bodies should simply be left behind: “When they say: ‘Let them rot,’ I do not agree. This is how we fight for every soul.”<\/p>\n

Yukov spoke of his work in religious terms, saying a body was a soul waiting to go home.<\/p>\n

“This is action,” he wrote. “Action every day in the fields, in the forest belts, among the ruins, where your life can end at any moment.”<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

Derek Gatopoulos in Athens, Greece, contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"KYIV, Ukraine (AP) \u2014 Ukraine paid tribute on Saturday to Oleksiy Yukov, a volunteer who spent more than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25767,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[9098,9099,9100,26],"class_list":["post-25766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-oleksiy-yukov","tag-orthodox-christian","tag-recovering","tag-ukraine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}