No place to rest: Ukraine’s burial crisis
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Siege of Mariupol
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Yevhen was killed during the evacuation from Mariupol in 2022, and the article references his service with Azov there. Understanding the brutal 82-day siege provides essential context for the scale of casualties and why body identification took two years.
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Lychakiv Cemetery
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The article specifically mentions this famous Lviv cemetery running out of burial plots. Its history as a major cultural and military memorial site dating to 1786 provides context for why its capacity crisis is nationally significant.
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Cremation
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The article discusses how cremation remains contentious for some Ukrainian Christians and quotes a priest on theological debates about resurrection. Understanding the historical and doctrinal context illuminates why this cultural shift is significant.
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“The hardest thing is to imagine that his body was there the whole time, in a refrigerator, alone,” Dmytro said.
He paused. “That’s what I hate the most.”
His brother, Yevhen, was killed in 2022 when Russians shot down the medical helicopter that was evacuating him over occupied Mariupol. It took two years to identify the body. By that time, according to Dmytro, there was nothing left to bury. So Dmytro decided to cremate his remains.
Yevhen’s family belongs to the growing number of Ukrainians choosing cremation in place of traditional burials. In 2020, only 8 percent of people in Ukraine were cremated. Today, this number is significantly higher: Oleksandr Babin, who works at Relikvia, a funeral home in Kyiv, estimated that around 80 percent of his clients now opt for cremation over a traditional burial.
As Russia and Ukraine battle over Pokrovsk, one of the last key cities of the Donetsk Region still held by Ukraine, the war threatens a surge of casualties. Before the full-scale invasion, space in Ukraine’s cemeteries was already strained, the war has deeply exacerbated Ukraine’s shortage of burial plots. This crisis is a direct reflection of the vast scale and brutality of this war.
Poll: Which option is more common in your area: burial or cremation? Share your thoughts in the comments!
“I was the quieter one, Yevhen wasn’t like that… he was the one always falling off his motorcycle or having some kind of adventure. It was always like that with him,” Dmytro said.
Although they were different, Dmytro and Yevhen were best friends who spoke on the phone almost every day.
It was Dmytro that joined the military first in 2015 after Russia occupied his hometown in the Luhansk Region in 2014.
A year later, Yevhen joined the Azov brigade, fighting without official registration until Dmytro took him into his sniper platoon.
“I
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