One body has been haunting the coroner. She was shot through the face with a high-caliber bullet through a car windshield. Then a Russian armored vehicle ran over the car, crushing her rib cage like a soda can and tearing off what was left of her head. Volunteers peeled her body out, zipped her into a black plastic bag and laid her in the trailer of a refrigerated 18-wheeler. She rode an hour through capital-city suburbs before being removed carefully from the bag and laid on coroner Vlad Perovskyi’s metal autopsy table. The gunshot that killed her disturbs him less than the way her body was treated later. “I’m used to seeing horrible things done to bodies,” Perovskyi says. “But I was very shocked to see such horrible treatment of the deceased by the Russians. How can someone shoot a person and then run over the body? Or throw them into ditches. How can someone put a bullet into a dead man’s head?” Citizens of this country of 44 million being invaded by its neighbor are fond of saying each Ukrainian has their own front line. This is Perovskyi’s. In a 20-by-20-foot room in a building on the campus of Kyiv Regional Clinical Hospital, Perovskyi and a team of five men have processed more than 200 dead civilians and Ukrainian soldiers in the past seven weeks. With prolonged power outages in many suburbs, Kyiv’s morgues have become a bottleneck for the dead. (…) There are bodies filled with bullet fragments and bodies with pea-size entry wounds and golf-ball-size exit wounds, civilian clothes stained in blood and pocked with glass and wood shards; bodies with twisted metal lodged in throats and torsos; bodies with chest cavities and skulls delicately carved open by the coroner, slowly dripping blood on metal tables; bodies that have been lying for weeks in spring rains, or buried a few feet deep in mass graves of damp silt, making them impossible to clean, for fear their rotting flesh will fall apart. To combat the smell, Perovskyi burns church incense.
via washingtonpost: One body at a time, a Kyiv coroner documents Ukraine’s death toll