Kyiv Bids Farewell to Oleksiy Yukov, a Searcher for the Missing
Kyiv bid farewell to Oleksiy Yukov, the leader of the “Platsdarm” search team, who was killed on August 5 during a mission to exhume a body in the Donetsk region. According to NPR, citing a post by the deceased’s friend Serhiy Gnezdilov, the 40-year-old Yukov stepped on a landmine.
The funeral service took place at St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral in Kyiv. Prior to the ceremony in the capital, Yukov was also honored in his hometown of Sloviansk, Donetsk Oblast. Thousands of people came to pay their respects. Gnezdilov called Yukov’s death a great loss and noted that he had been restoring the names of the fallen.
Yukov spent decades searching for the remains of military personnel and civilians in combat zones. As a teenager, he began searching for remains at World War II battle sites in Ukraine. After the start of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and Russia’s attempt to illegally annex the temporarily occupied Crimea in 2014, he founded the “Platsdarm” search team.
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Together with volunteers, Yukov searched for the bodies of Ukrainian military personnel, civilians, and Russian soldiers. In 2022, he lost an eye and suffered a leg injury after stepping on a landmine, but returned to work while still recovering.
Yukov explained that before searching for bodies, his team would survey safer areas using drones, checking trenches, craters, and other locations. The volunteers also searched for mines and explosive devices using probes and metal detectors and called in bomb disposal experts to defuse them. A few months after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, he told Radio Free Europe that his team continued to recover the bodies of Russian soldiers.
