By Megan Specia, New York Times, 6/20/23

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…

…The magnitude of the losses is being felt in communities like the one in Lviv, starkly visible in the growing number of military graves in cemeteries large and small around the country.

On Monday, two men who died hundreds of miles apart were buried next to each other. Bohdan Didukh, 34, was killed by a mine last week in the Zaporizhzhia region of southern Ukraine, where the first stages of Ukraine’s counteroffensive began. Three days later, Oleh Didukh, 52, died of a heart attack while serving in an air-defense unit in the country’s west.

The men, who shared a last name but never knew each other in life, were united in death. They were honored side by side in a joint funeral in Lviv. Their families were overcome with grief as gravediggers shoveled soil on top of their coffins.

At the funeral service in a Greek Catholic church in central Lviv, incense filled the air. The priest said he had assumed the two were father and son because of their names and ages. Their families were joined by their pain, he said.

After the church ceremony, the coffins were loaded into vans and driven to the central square, where a single trumpeter played. Then the cortege made its way to the graveyard.

Along the route, residents paused to pay their respects. A young girl stood next to her father, a small brown shopping bag in her hand, staring straight ahead as the coffins passed by. Some bystanders fell to their knees.

At the cemetery, Olena Didukh, Bohdan Didukh’s wife, fainted, overwhelmed by grief and the afternoon sun. Her sister steadied her, wrapping her arm around her back. Steps away, Oleh Didukh’s family arranged yellow and blue flowers, the colors of the Ukrainian flag, on his grave.

It has been difficult to pinpoint exact figures of deaths of Ukrainian soldiers since the start of Russia’s invasion in part because of a desire by authorities to keep those figures undisclosed…

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