Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
Digging Up Old Graves to Make Room for Newly Fallen Soldiers
Funerals have taken on a grim routine in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, and as the fighting grows more intense during the counteroffensive, gravediggers say they are bracing for more bodies.
For close to 15 months, the bodies of fallen soldiers have steadily filled up a hillside military cemetery in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Now, the old, unmarked graves of those killed in past wars are being exhumed to make way for the seemingly endless stream of dead since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
On Monday afternoon, half a dozen gravediggers took a break in the shade, waiting for the latest coffin to inter at the cemetery, called Lychakiv. Smoking cigarettes and shielding themselves from the sun, they lamented the devastation that Russia had wrought. And they said they were bracing for more deaths as the fighting grew more intense during Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
Fierce battles are playing out on the front line in the country’s east and south, with Ukraine reporting on Monday that it had recaptured eight settlements over two weeks of “offensive actions.” Hanna Malyar, a deputy defense minister, wrote on the Telegram messaging app that Ukrainian units had advanced about 4.3 miles and retaken an area around 44 square miles in the south. Among the settlements reclaimed, she said, was the village of Piatykhatky, confirming Russian reports over the weekend.
While the recapture of Piatykhatky, in the Zaporizhzhia region, is evidence that Ukraine’s forces continue to advance, it is not a significant military breakthrough. Like the other villages recaptured, this one is small — Piatykhatky translates to “five houses” — and claiming them has come at the cost of Ukrainian lives and advanced Western equipment.
A British defense intelligence report said on Sunday that both
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