Extract from ABC News
Ruslana Bronovytska's son Dmytro was killed fighting for Ukraine. (ABC News: Lisa Bukreyeva)
For two years, Ruslana Bronovytska's son Dmytro was missing in action.
He signed up to fight for Ukraine a year after Russia's full-scale invasion. But he didn't tell her, knowing she would try to make him stay.
"I fell into a deep depression that barely allowed me to get out of bed. I would just lie there staring at the ceiling," she told the ABC.
Ruslana Bronovytska did not initially know her son had signed up to fight for his country. (ABC News: Lisa Bukreyeva)
Then in November last year, investigators contacted the family to say they had a DNA match. They were 99.9 per cent sure it was the body of Dmytro.
A month later, his remains were returned and Ruslana was finally able to bury her son.
"When I realised that my son was truly gone, it was an enormous blow to my psyche, my emotions, my inner world. But I understood that I would have to live with this," she said.
"Living in uncertainty is far harder than even receiving the news that you will have to say goodbye to your son."
Ruslana Bronovytska's son Dmytro was killed while fighting for Ukraine. (ABC News: Lisa Bukreyeva)
The war in Ukraine reached a grim milestone this week, grinding into its fifth year.
Since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, it is estimated hundreds of thousands of people — soldiers and civilians — have been killed on both sides.
The front lines have remained largely frozen for about two years. Authorities in Ukraine have categorised 80,000 people as "missing" over the past four years.
Ruslana's family is among a small fraction who have been reunited with their fallen loved one.
"Having a grave to visit is better than not knowing whether he lies buried somewhere under rubble or was tortured in a Russian prison," she said.
Australian forensic anthropologist Soren Blau spends weeks at a time in Ukraine, helping local authorities with the heavy caseload the mortuaries face.
"One of the remarkable things about Ukraine is that they're actively pursuing identification and investigation at the time where we've still got ongoing conflict," she said.
Her extensive CV includes work in challenging environments in East Timor, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uzbekistan.
During her two decades as a forensic anthropologist at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, she has also been faced with identifying victims of the Black Saturday bushfires.
Australian forensic anthropologist Soren Blau spends weeks at a time in Ukraine. (ABC News: Lisa Bukreyeva)
In perhaps her most famous case, she was among a team involved in the examination of Ned Kelly's remains.
The scale of the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine is on a level she's never witnessed before.
"No country can really deal with the numbers that they're currently having to examine and record," she said.
"The [families] are absolutely critical, they are at the heart of this process. The sort of key point in all of this is actually a missing person's report. So, our engagement with families is critical."
Ukraine's identification centres have the difficult job of trying to return the bodies of soldiers to their loved ones. (ABC News: Lisa Bukreyeva)
From a missing person's report, pathologists can gather DNA samples that help laboratories and mortuaries identify bodies, which in many cases are being returned unrecognisable.
"Deceased persons may take some time to be recovered from the battlefield. They may have been kept by Russia for some time until they're repatriated across to Ukraine," she said.
"Sometimes the people are very poorly preserved and that also has an impact on the types of processes that we can use to ultimately try to identify these people."
Soren Blau has been sharing her expertise with colleagues in Ukraine. (ABC News: Lisa Bukreyeva)
Dr Blau is now the head of the Archaeology and Anthropology Division at the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) and works with an identification centre near Kyiv.
She's helping teams on the ground manage the huge amounts of data they are gathering on missing persons and offering specialised training when it comes to identifying difficult cases in which bodies are beyond recognition.
"All of this work is to be able to ideally give families their loved ones back so that they can not just have a funeral, but also as you can imagine all the legal processes if you don't have for example your husband … tax, inheritance, child welfare, the day-to-day implications of not knowing the fate of your loved ones, let alone emotionally, is so critical," she said.
Ruslana Bronovytska has been coming to terms with the death of her son. (ABC News: Lisa Bukreyeva)
'The pain will remain forever'
Vitalii Levchenko is the head of the identification centre Dr Blau has been working with.
He said while a few international pathologists could not physically make a huge dent in their caseload, they bring modern techniques to their laboratories.
"Methodologically they teach us scientific approaches, to get rid of, let's say, the outdated Soviet legacy in forensic medical examination," he said.
"People like Soren, or her other colleagues, open our eyes and make us more receptive to new methodologies, to non-standard responses to challenges."
Vitalyi Levchenko oversees work at the identification centre near Kyiv. (ABC News: Lisa Bukreyeva)
Mr Levchenko reflected on how his work as a forensic medical pathologist had dramatically changed since the war, from trying to find a killer to knowing exactly who it is.
"The primary focus was establishing the cause of death, the time since death, and all surrounding facts," he said.
"Now we all perfectly know who killed our soldiers, so the primary issue is precisely the identification of these bodies."
Ukraine does not release its official casualty numbers, but multiple groups estimate them to be in the hundreds of thousands. (ABC News: Lisa Bukreyeva)
Last year, officials in Moscow and Kyiv met in Istanbul and signed a repatriation deal that would see the bodies of more soldiers returned to their home lands.
Since then, Ukraine has received on average about 1,000 bodies each month for identification.
"We feel our mission, because someone is defending Ukraine in the trenches, and we are also making our contribution to the mission," Mr Levchenko said.
"We are trying to return the fallen to their families."
Repatriating the dead is one thing, identifying the body and returning them to their family is another and in some cases this process can take years.
Identifying Ukraine's casualties can be time-consuming work. (ABC News: Lisa Bukreyeva)
Intergovernmental organisations like the ICMP, which is headquartered in the Netherlands, is providing expertise and funding to help Ukraine establish the framework to carry out such a mammoth task.
"They constitute the highest numbers of missing persons on European soil since World War II. So that's a lot to swallow. It's huge," ICMP director general Kathryne Bomberger told the ABC.
She said it was not just about building the physical infrastructure like more laboratories or mortuaries, but their work was about changing Ukrainian legislation to allow for DNA samples to be processed outside the country.
Ukraine's identification centres have been overwhelmed by the bodies of soldiers. (ABC News: Lisa Bukreyeva)
At the moment, ICMP is processing DNA samples at its laboratory in The Hague, but it is a slow and laborious process with samples only released by court order, one case at a time.
"They were just taking biological reference samples. So … it's just post-mortem samples, a small piece of the bone or other biological data," she said.
"But this also requires a large-scale collection of genetic reference samples, because ultimately what you're doing is you're matching the genetic reference samples of the relatives to the mortal remains that are unidentified."
Containers holding the bodies of dead soldiers at an identification centre near Kyiv, pictured in 2026. (ABC News: Lisa Bukreyeva)
On a recent tour of the facilities in Ukraine, Ms Bomberger knocked on the doors of several foreign embassies, including Australia's, in a bid to drum up financial support for their work.
The Australian government does not currently provide any funding to the ICMP, but Ms Bomberger is hopeful that might change in the future.
For mothers like Ruslana, the pain of losing a child won't ever go away.
Ruslana Bronovytska says the pain of losing her son "will remain forever". (ABC News: Lisa Bukreyeva)
On the day of Dmytro's funeral, Ruslana decided not to look at his corpse, choosing instead to remember him as she knew him.
"No normal person can truly comprehend how it is possible that parents bury their children," she said.
"But sadly, the war has treated us cruelly and unjustly. The pain will remain forever."
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