Yuri Fenenko stoically recounted the statistics, flipping through pages of handwritten notes about the hundreds of corpses that arrived at the Chernihiv regional morgue since the start of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Then it broke. When the medical examiner’s tears finally came, they came in waves. “It’s usually okay, we smile, we laugh and we even enjoy. “But then we start to remember,” he said. Bodies, like bad memories, keep coming. More than two weeks after Russian forces withdrew from the area around Chernihiv after a 39-day siege, this area of northern Ukraine – located on the main highway between the Belarusian border and the Ukrainian capital Kiev – remains with horror. left behind. Eighteen more bodies arrived at the regional morgue over the weekend, bringing the total to 509 killed by the Russian army in and around Chernihiv to 509. Of these, 229 were civilians, while the rest were soldiers or members of the Ukrainian Reserve Territorial Defense Force. These numbers, which will continue to rise as more casualties are found, include only those who died violently outside the hospital during the fighting here. At the city’s No. 2 Hospital, which received a mix of violent and non-violent cases, more than 800 others have died since the start of the war on February 24 – surpassing the total usually seen in the hospital’s pathological department in one year. Eighteen more bodies arrived at Mr Fenenko’s morgue over the weekend, bringing the death toll from the Russian army in and around Chernihiv to 509. Those who died non-violent death outside the hospital are transferred to a third morgue. There was almost certainly a significant increase in deaths from pneumonia, heart attack and starvation during the siege, in which this pre-war city of 285,000 remained for weeks without heating or running water and only sporadic electricity as food. and drugs are scarce. Mr. Fenenko, the 45-year-old deputy director of the regional morgue, has been a medical examiner for 22 years. He said the regional morgue was 10 times busier during the siege than at the height of the pandemic. The worst day of his career was March 3, when airstrikes hit an apartment building and a pharmacy just a few hundred meters away, rattling through the windows of his office. By the end of the day, 34 bodies had arrived at a morgue that had nowhere to put them. Even before the March 3 attack, the relentless Russian bombing of the city had made it impossible to transport bodies to a cemetery. The morgue refrigerator was full, as were three refrigerated trucks parked outside. Workers, some of whom lived in the morgue throughout the siege, were forced to stack corpses on top of each other on stretchers and examination tables. Three of the dead on March 3 were children, including five-year-old twins, a brother and sister and a 12-year-old girl. “It simply came to our notice then. “A few dozen,” Fenenko said, browsing an online list of victims. Above, one of the three refrigerated trucks used to store the bodies of the victims, as the flooded morgue ran out of space. Below, rows of wooden coffins are stacked in the backyard of the morgue. The morgue is flooded and with a lack of staff after some workers left the city, Mr. Fenenko’s 18-year-old son, Nazar, a chemistry student, came in. the tears that keep coming. During the siege, most of the victims delivered to the morgue had died from gunshot wounds as a result of seemingly indiscriminate artillery bombardment and airstrikes that pounded the city. After the Russians withdrew from northern Ukraine – troops were redeployed to the east of the country, which is now the main front of the war – the morgue began accepting corpses dug from the rubble of destroyed buildings around the city. In recent days, almost all the corpses that arrived were men, most of whom were shot in the back of the head. All were apparently executed in the smaller settlements around Russian-occupied Chernihiv. Mr Fenenko said about 20 per cent of the victims of the executions had their hands tied. Many were first shot in the leg before being killed by a bullet in the brain. “The headquarters of the occupation was the village of Yahide,” he said, referring to a village 20 kilometers south of Chernihiv on the main highway to Kyiv. “That’s why so many people were shot in the back of the head there.” On Saturday, the morgue received four new victims. They were all men who had been shot in execution style. The Chernihiv forensic team placed the bullets from the bodies in transparent plastic bags, hoping that one day they would be used as evidence in a war crimes trial. “There will be trials, but how do we find the people who are guilty?” said Mr. Fenenko. A morgue room is full of clothes and existing war victims. According to Amnesty International, shooting someone with their hands tied is a war crime. Opposite the square from the morgue is the Chernihiv Regional Children’s Hospital. During the siege, the hospital came to symbolize the suffering of the city as sick children and their parents begged for evacuation in videos taken at the underground bomb shelter. While some of the sickest children, including many young cancer patients, were evacuated during the siege by an escort of volunteers, others remained throughout the siege. The Russian withdrawal eventually allowed most of the remaining patients to leave the city. The hospital is now used primarily as a hub for food and medicine donations – including a stack of boxes sent by the Atlantic Ukrainian Association, a non-profit organization based in Nova Scotia – in a city where departed residents are starting to drip. back to. “People are coming back. It seems to me that it is too early because we still hear it periodically [air raid] alarm. “We fired rockets at the area the day before yesterday,” said Zoya Pushkar, a neonatal doctor who continued to work throughout the siege. Many in the city, he said, believe the Russian army could still return to Chernihiv. “People are afraid it could happen again.” One of the few remaining patients at the children’s hospital is 13-year-old Bohdan Parasyuk, who was injured in a March 16 airstrike that killed at least 10 people lined up for bread in the city center. Bohdan Parasyuk, 13, broke both his legs in several places when a Russian shell hit a nearby bread line. His father, Vadym, died rescuing him. Bohdan and his father, Vadym, were crossing the bread line – as they were walking to a friend’s house that still had electricity to charge their cell phones – when the crowd was hit by a Russian shell. Bohdan, whose legs were broken in several places and whose face and hands have been scarred, is alive today only because his father fell on him to protect his son. Vadim was killed instantly. Bohdan, who hopes to leave the hospital early this week and then travel with his mother to Austria where a hospital offered to continue his rehabilitation for free, said he was angry with only one person: Russian President Vladimir Putin. The computer fanatic said he would have no quarrel with any ordinary Russian he met on the internet. “It’s not their fault. They feed them with propaganda. “They are also hostages to this situation.” But if he did meet with Putin, “I would swear at him like a three-story building.” The Globe in Ukraine Butsa residents face consequences of massacre, fearing return of Russian forces Ukrainian prosecutors try to gather evidence of war crimes in Butsa Amid the chaos of the war, a Ukrainian couple in Lviv get married in protest against Russia