Ukraine Dispatch: Hamlet, Kharkiv

After months in the war zone, with death all around, life becomes Shakespearean.

By Zarina Zabrisky

As we stand over the dead body—or whatever is left of the body, as it is missing arms and, I think, legs—Anton puts down his spade and says, “It’s simple: Life and death. Friends and enemies. Good and evil. Life is black and white. We make up the nuances.”

Pale, with a Band-Aid across his cheek and nose, in military uniform, Anton is all fleshy-and-grayish-green—except for bright lilac-blue rubber gloves. Everything else around us is earth tones, gray-green-brown: the soil, the dry grass, the faded food bags with Army of Russia written all over them. I watch the bright gloves move, making a bright arc through the heavy air. Anton is joined by two other men, also in gloves. They crouch next to the body of a fallen Ukrainian soldier—a chevron with a blue-and-yellow flag was in the pocket—and stay silent for a long minute. Then, Anton pulls up the pants over what looks like a tree trunk, and they lift, carry and place it into a black zipper bag. Anton brings a yellowish skull from the dirt pit behind him and rolls it in the bag. They layer the bag into another bag, then another. Like a Russian nesting doll. The bag, fat and swollen, is now behind Anton. Cold April wind blows the rotten air into my face.

“People get stuck in the past instead of living in the moment,” he says.

He smooths out the wrinkles on his bright lilac glove, and I think both about The Power of Now that my ex once tried to get me into—I never read past the first two pages—and whether Anton remembers that right now, a dead, dismembered human body is by his feet.

“I am getting the kick out of every moment,” says Anton.

“How are you getting the kick out of this moment?” I ask. “You just pulled a body out of the soil.”

He frowns. “You don’t get it. I don’t enjoy finding a killed Ukrainian soldier or seeing his body. I enjoy the opportunity to return his body to his mom. To tell his family: we found him. So they don’t wait in vain.”

Anna nods. A linguist by education and a female solo biker originally from Kyiv, she was on her third journey around the world when the full-scale war started a year ago. She came back to Ukraine and became a military blogger. I met her a day before, as we drove together to report from the front. Our GPS lost connection, and we ended up a couple of miles away from the Russian border, just north of Kharkiv, on an empty road. Anna just laughed, and we turned around. Another former linguist, Dmytro, is standing on the other side of the black bag. He’s now a fixer—the word he didn’t know before the war. Basically, a producer in a war zone. He brought Portuguese CNN journalists here; they are taking some extra footage in a mined forest behind us.

Before the war, Anna, Dmytro, and I might have crossed paths in Kyiv or San Francisco, say, in a bookstore. We speak English to each other. Here, we just walk through the forest, rummaging through the piles of Russian garbage. Boots, matches, a big box that says Billionaire.

“Bananas,” says Anna. “Billionaire is a banana brand.”

“Look, syringes. And a belt.”

“Orcs getting high,” says Dmytro.

Orcs are Russians. Dirty, scary, and murderous, the Russian soldiers could easily be from Mordor. I was born in Mordor.

A book, You Can Live in Heaven on Earth, in Russian, next to a tiny dead field mouse. The smell of death is not coming from the mouse, though, but from the rotting bodies of soldiers killed in combat. They are everywhere, all around the forest and the fields. This is why we are here. To investigate what happened to the dead bodies.

Anton and his teammates work on finding bodies, de-mining them—if they are mined, the retreating Russian army mined them in September 2022—and delivering the remains to the morgue where their DNA is taken. The bodies are then identified. Ukrainian soldiers’ bodies are returned to their relatives. Russian remains go into the exchange fund, but, “Things are not straightforward.”

The Russian military leaves its “200s” (slang for the killed) and “300s” (injured) because they don’t want to pay compensation to the families and do not want to reveal the losses, says Anton—and not just Anton. I have heard this time and again throughout the year, so now I am working on an article about dead bodies. The harvest of war—would that be a title? I can’t think of a title. Dead bodies. Bodies of Kadyrovtsy, Chechens fighting for the Russian army, overflowing the morgues in Belarus, mobile crematoriums working away. The bodies of Russian soldiers all over the mined fields near the Southern port of Mykolaiv.

In Kherson, also in the South, endless stories about the Russians burning the bodies of their killed soldiers at the city dump. A blue-eyed Victoria who was in the resistance during the Russian occupation told me about the unbearable stench of burned skin and hair enveloping Kherson in the summer 2022. You couldn’t breathe, she said. I drove to the Kherson dump three times, and each time I told myself I would never use a plastic bag again. Or just never use anything again. Mountains of junk, pink-and-blue transparent plastic soaring over it, like a pretty morning mist, mournful seagull calls, into the void. In Kyiv, right around the time of the anniversary of the full-scale invasion—can you really call it an anniversary?—I got COVID. In my delirium, I saw all the garbage from Kherson dump flying around me. My feverish mind came up with an Elon Musk-worthy solution: compact cubes of garbage orbiting the Earth. Departing to the far-away galaxies. Seagulls scream, penetrating the infinity. If—if!—the Universe is infinite.

Or is it the dead country that I want to pack and launch into infinity, and hide, galaxies away? Is that the ultimate dead body I’m looking for? To bury it. Forever. To run an aspen stake through its ribcage and never remember it again.

Back in Kharkiv forest, I don’t want to start the infinity debate with Anton. I am afraid the smell of decay might saturate my bulletproof jacket and all my clothes, the way it did during the mass grave exhumation in Izium. Although, one dead body doesn’t smell as bad as 477—that’s what I found out. Is that what I really found out?! How am I even writing this?

Another thing to investigate: this particular body is missing arms, legs, and head. Russian Wagner mercenaries, usually recruited from prisons and named after Hitler’s favorite composer and nicknamed “musicians,” have a habit of dismembering the prisoners of war. I need to start asking questions about that. How?

“There is no God,” says Anton.

I look at the black bag behind him. Next to the Ukrainian flag in the pants’ pocket, there was a crucifix.

I don’t believe in God, either. The decaying flesh smell hangs over us. Anna, Dmytro, and I listen to Anton. He enjoys the attention—getting a kick of this moment, just as out of any other.

“How do you deal with mortality?” I ask. “Doing this every day?”

“Dying is just going from one place to another.”

The garbage universe comes to mind again.

“Nothing will be left of us when we go,” says Anton. “Believe me. We each have our own self, and that’s it. Every night, you fall asleep—by yourself. Every morning you wake up—by yourself. Alone. All we will have left are memories. Look, my grandma had dementia. She couldn’t remember much, but she did have shattered memories. So, there. Memories.”

Will the memory of this day, so dull and devoid of color, haunt me? The sawdust texture of the body. The waft of death.

“And, we each have our own path. We are on it, like it or not. The main thing is not to be afraid to get started. Then, things will follow. Fated to be hanged won’t drown, they say. Or what do they say? Destined to burn will not drown.”

An octogenarian squatter from Chornobyl told me last summer how she almost drowned as a child, fleeing the Nazis in 1942, but her mom pulled her out by the hair—and said, “Destined to burn will not drown.” And then, boom, Chornobyl explosion, and all around her burned, but the grandma is still around. Destiny? I think of the Russian soldiers I saw burned near Izium. Their charred bones, to be precise. Were they destined to burn? I don’t believe so.

Who is this Ukrainian soldier in the bag? Did he also believe that he just needed to get started? Was he destined to die here, in this horrid forest, among Russian vodka bottles? Why? Who would design such a destiny? What kind of deity? No one decent, that’s for sure.

No. They all die because out there, in Mordor, an old, sick man craves immortality. This dying man wants to stay in history. He wants to be remembered as Alexander the Great. Napoleon. And he sends all these young men to die here, and they turn into nameless, headless, faceless bodies—so he could stay in memories forever.

Destiny, my ass.

Wait—didn’t Putin himself say, “Fated to be hanged won’t drown?” Yes, he did. In an interview with Oliver Stone. All right, then.

“What’s the meaning of life?” I ask Anton.

“The meaning of life is in its meaninglessness.”

Anna, Dmytro, and I stare at him, then at each other. He pauses so we all can let it sink in.

“You know what they say? Samsara. Life is a hamster’s wheel. We throw rocks around—” he swipes his arm through the air, accidentally pointing at the black bag. “Then, we are trying to overcome all the obstacles, and we just can’t.”

Anton scratches his nose with the pinkie; his lilac-blue glove looks like a tropical fish out of the water.

“You know—how do I put it? We all are afraid of death, right? There are no fearless people.”

Not going to argue with Anton, but I’m not afraid of death. Many soldiers said, “Only an idiot is not afraid.” I am that idiot. I mean, I love living. I don’t necessarily enjoy it at all times, but I do love it. I’d love to live long. So many things I want to see, to do, people I love… I don’t want to leave them. But afraid? No.

What’s to be afraid of? I think there will be this infinite cosmic darkness. Dark infinity. With Elon Musk’s blocks of glittering garbage rotating slowly amidst stars. Ivan Karamazov’s devil caught a cold in the cosmos, in Dostoevsky’s head. That axe is still orbiting there somewhere—stop. I can’t think of Dostoevsky. Not here, not now. Dostoevsky’s to blame for all of it. Is he?

I’m not going to argue with Anton. I’m not going to think about Dostoevsky. There is a dead body right here, by my feet. There is a dead country out there. My lack of fear must be some kind of defense mechanism. De-realization. Something like this. The rotten smell almost touches my face.

“Fear is a safety valve. A line you are trying not to cross. It doesn’t matter. There’s destiny, the will—someone’s will, somewhere out there.”

“Whose will? If there’s no God?”

“Eeh,” says Anton. “Energies. From some world creation process. You see, God is just a fancy word. Everyone has their own god—or whatever. Religion is just a way to control the masses. Religion is just business. You know that, right?”

“I do.”

The bag sits behind Anton. War is just business, too. Someone out there manufactures and ships these awful black zipper bags. How do you decide: I will do this with my life; my destiny is to make bags for dead people. Eeh?

“Everything material will come and go,” says Anton. “What you need to do is to get your kicks from the real stuff. You need to be with people. Wanting to be a millionaire? What for?”

Billionaire banana box.

The CNN crew is back from the forest. A Portuguese journalist tells a Ukrainian cameraman to get a closeup of Vadim’s hands. Vadim, Anton’s fellow—what? Dead bodies collector? What do you call it?—has a red mustache, one working eye, and a bit of a World War One air about him. He used to do military reconstruction, way before the Russians attacked, and calls himself a “military archeologist.”

“The forest and the fields are still full of World War II mines,” says Vadim. “Layers and layers of mines and dead bodies.”

“Why don’t Russians pick up their bodies?” I ask.

Vadim chokes, turns around and walks away. Was it an insensitive question? I mean, the guy collects bodies; that’s what he does. Anna and I look at each other. There are few places to go—everything around is mined—and Vadim soon returns, his lip twitching underneath the red mustache.

 “I have more Russian blood in me than Ukrainian,” he says. “My wife is an ethnic Russian. We had family there. Now, I lost interest in them. I don’t care about what would happen to Mordor or orcs. They are dead to me.”

I heard that so many times. The betrayal added to the hatred and shock. The sense of broken trust, and treachery, adds more unbearableness to the unbearable grief. The sense of loss hard to pin in words: your kin, your kin, orcs. I understand. I grew up in Mordor. Fuck it. I am here to listen; it’s not about me. And I, thank god, don’t feel any grief. Or any guilt. I don’t feel fear, either. Fuck. Do I even feel anything?

Vadim’s hands are shaking.

“What is the matter with you? Why are you upset?” asks the Portuguese journalist.

“What is the matter with you?” I want to ask her, but I don’t.

Nobody answers.

The cameraman zooms in on Vadims’ hands. How many bodies did Vadim pull out of the soil? Does he wash his hands a lot? Or are these men used to the constant presence of death? Did it become their companion? Like an invisible dog, always there? They transport the body bags in the trunk of their car, next to the spades. Russians belong in the trunk. The baggage no one needs.

“We will carry the Ukrainian fighter on the top of the car,” says Anton. “Although, I didn’t bring a rope. I thought it would be an orc. We’ll take you journos back in the car, get a rope, and come back. Girls, get in.”

We get in the back seat; the cameraman is in the front. No space for Dmytro.

“In the trunk,” says Anton.

Dmytro blinks, steps back, and climbs into the trunk. Where dead bodies are usually transported. I feel like jumping out and pulling him out of there, but he’s already inside, crouching in the back.

Anton tries to make a U-turn on a narrow, muddy road, without sliding into the mined field. The black body bag is in the way. Vadim and another man pull it aside. As the vehicle slowly turns, they drag the body further away, closer to the trees.

“Nice car,” says the Portuguese journalist.

“Mitsubishi,” says Anton.

We drive back by the destroyed cottages, broken trees, piles of garbage, and rusty, overturned military equipment. A cluster munition is stuck in a dead tree—grey sticks, grey metal. It looks like a skeleton of a sick shark. Incoming artillery fire booms over the mined field.

Out there, half an hour's drive from us, is a dismembered country, undead, convulsing in murderous agony. Spades jingling in the trunk, we slowly drive away.

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Zarina Zabrisky is an award-winning American author of five books published internationally, including the novel We, Monsters and three short story collections, and journalist. Currently, she reports on the Russian war in Ukraine.

Photos by Zarina Zabrisky.