To bury its dead, Ukraine is having to dig up victims of past wars

SO MANY PEOPLE have been killed in the war that in Lviv, in western Ukraine, the latest victims are displacing the dead from wars past. On August 4th, Vitaly Chekovsky’s family looked on sadly as he was buried with two comrades, in a military section of the city’s historic Lychakiv cemetery. The sandy earth where they buried him was soft and loose. Until only weeks ago his grave had been the resting place of someone else.

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 507^th 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.

The Red Army liberated Lviv from the Nazis in 1944, and then pushed on westwards; but the fighting was not over. Ukrainian nationalist partisans battled troops from the NKVD, the predecessor to the KGB, for years afterwards. Mr Dmytriv believes that the majority of those buried in the newly found graves were NKVD men, and 560 of them have been exhumed since April to make way for the new dead. Eventually the exhumed will be buried somewhere else, and the Soviet memorial, where sand now blows over the names of the fallen, will also be moved. Mr Dmytriv says that, in a gruesome twist,  the vast majority of the skeletons exhumed had had their skulls cut open. Before burial their corpses had been given to students of Lviv’s medical school to dissect.

Hopefully Mr Chekovsky will rest in peace forever, but if the Lychakiv cemetery’s past is any guide there is no guarantee of it. In 1915 the Russians, who were then in brief occupation of Lviv during the first world war, opened a cemetery just beyond where the NKVD men were later buried, for Austro-Hungarian troops. Eventually more than 4,700 were buried there. In the interwar years, the Poles, now in control of the city, began exhuming them. In 1946 the Soviets, who had subsequently seized Lviv from the Poles, began razing the old Austro-Hungarian cemetery, and since then civilians have been buried there.

On the other side of the Lychakiv cemetery lie Poles who died fighting the Ukrainians for control of Lviv in 1919-20, and after that the Red Army. In Soviet times these tombs were partially destroyed, and the cemetery fell into disrepair. When the Poles sponsored its restoration in the 1990s, the Ukrainian authorities decided to build another memorial, this one to those who died fighting those Poles. The Archangel Michael who tops the memorial’s column now looks down on the tombs of Ukrainians who fought the Russians after 2014, as well as those who died fighting the Soviets during and after the second world war.

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.”■