The Corpse of a Russian Soldier, and the Cold but Human Urge to Look

HUSARIVKA, Ukraine – There’s a dead man in there.

It’s charred black, almost like it was welded into the Russian military vehicle when it exploded.

How long has this Russian soldier been on display? Long enough to become a memorial in this tiny village in eastern Ukraine, Husarivka, where some people walked by in the cold spring rain and knew they were passing a grave.

At this point in April, the Russians had been out of the area for about two weeks, with evidence of their withdrawal strewn across the roads and fields – mixed with bullet-riddled civilian vehicles and hastily dug backyard graves.

The two weeks were just long enough for the approximately 400 remaining residents to take stock of exactly what had happened to them since the end of February: the war, the occupation, the struggle to recapture their village, their own losses and much more that happened in corpse left behind by the destroyed armored vehicle.

He was so badly burned I couldn’t tell how old he was, but I figured he must be young because he was sitting in the troops compartment: the back of the armored personnel carrier, where a half-dozen or so guys usually crouch with their rifles , and waited for a senior officer to tell them to disembark and attack or defend.

Maybe he’d been sitting there listening to the shots fired outside the thin armor of his vehicle known as the BMP, which moments later did precisely nothing to stop the projectile spreading the whole thing open like a can.

But two weeks later he’s still sitting there, his last thoughts gone from his skull, cracked up and wet from the rain.

If he had been a general, his troops might have tried to grab him, drag him from the burning wreckage.

The Russians have left the bodies of many of their troops behind, a startling practice that defies a common code among combatants. Does it signal disorder? Low morale? Or was it something more personal in this case?

If he had been popular on the train, the guy who picked you up from the bar at 4am with no questions asked, they might have fought to put out the flames. Or at least to get his body to bury under a familiar sky.

Or maybe it was so disastrous that when the survivors got it to safety and they looked around and realized, my god, he’s missing, they knew there was nothing they could do. He was still in there. Caught.

I look at him, thinking about all this, trying to figure out if that’s his chest, listening to the artillery in the distance and wondering if it’s coming closer or farther away.

Husarivka was a speed bump in a Russian advance that failed, leaving the village, with its dairy farms and little else, briefly occupied by Russian soldiers – and saturated with Ukrainian artillery fire in response – until the Ukrainians advanced in late March.

Presumably, the BMP was destroyed at this point. Now the front line was only miles away, and we were doing what the residents of Husarivka were doing: taking stock of the debris and casualties.

As has become a depressing attribute in modern wars, much of this one talks statistically about casualties and killings, as if the violence had so quickly become routine and mechanical enough for the number of dead and wounded to be scrutinized over like sports scores.

For the people of Russia and Ukraine, these faceless numbers, which the rest of the world only glances at, are mothers, sons, friends. Their empty rooms need to be repainted and redecorated, or left undisturbed in anticipation of a return that will never come.

And for those who actually witness all that destruction and killing, once the shooting has stopped and the air raid sirens have stopped, the debris of battle has its own appeal. Inevitably, the burned remains of wrecked tanks and other vehicles are surrounded by voyeurs who wonder at the fate of these doomed crews; trying to piece those final moments together or staring in awe at what humans are capable of doing to one another.

This urge to stare at the unspoken parts of the war reminded me of my second deployment as a Marine in southern Afghanistan in 2010, where there were many deaths and deaths, but not on a scale comparable to Ukraine.

A wounded Taliban fighter – or a man the platoon said was a Taliban fighter – had been taken to our outpost with about 50 people to be evacuated for treatment. The Talib was shot rather badly, bandaged but alive.

Everyone in the outpost wanted to see him. They stopped what they were doing, huddled around the stretcher and watched this man slowly die. Just to see it, to experience it. They walked beside him after the helicopters landed, said goodbye to him, and then returned to their work.

Why?

Maybe it was a kind of consolation, the ultimate reminder: He was on that stretcher and she wasn’t at that moment.

In Ukraine, the twisted wrecks of wrecked tanks and other Russian military vehicles on display in the capital, Kyiv, have drawn crowds. Young and old alike are probably drawn there for the same reasons my comrades were drawn there in Afghanistan more than a decade ago, although Ukrainians have the added justification that comes with standing up to an occupier — and moral detachment from participating in the violence themselves.

This war, looking for rubble, wounded and even dead, feels almost inevitable, something you have to do to make sure it all really happened. But I’m in no position to judge.

There I was a few weeks ago, staring at this dead Russian soldier in eastern Ukraine, peering into his grave of tangled metal and shell casings and what was left of his burned body, summoned by a simple statement.

There’s a dead man in there.