Kiev refuses to bring home its dead soldiers. Where is Ukraine’s Antigone?
On 2 June 2025, during talks in Istanbul, Russia and Ukraine agreed to exchange prisoners of war and the bodies of fallen soldiers in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, whose Article 17 stipulates that belligerents must ensure that the bodies of enemies are “honorably interred” and that their graves are “properly maintained and marked so that they may always be found.”
Ukraine’s Defense Minister Rustem Umerov and Vladimir Medinsky, the head of the Russian delegation, confirmed that the two sides had reached a consensus on this humanitarian measure.
On 6 June, Russia sent the first batch of 1,212 frozen bodies to the designated exchange point on the Ukrainian border. But as Vladimir Medinsky explained, “The Ukrainian side unexpectedly postponed for an indefinite period, both the acceptance of the bodies and the exchange of prisoners of war.” 1
The Russian side offered to fulfil this obligation on Trinity Saturday, the day Orthodox Christians commemorate the departed and pray for all dead, regardless of whether they are family, friends or strangers. The Ukrainian side did not show up and did not offer an explanation.
There are several reasons why Kiev would rather forget about these bodies.
The regime is caught in a bind: both choices, repatriating them or refusing to, are laden with risks and could potentially disrupt the status quo.
The financial burden associated with compensating families is certainly a factor, as each fallen soldier’s compensation is estimated at 15 million hryvnia (approximately US$362,000.) But it may not be a decisive factor, since Ukrainian authorities have long learned how to evade reponsibility and figured out ways to delay or avoid paying compensation.
Former deputy of the Verkhovna Rada, Spiridon Kilinkarov, told Rossiya 24 TV channel that the government would need to allocate more than US$2 billion just to compensate the families of 6,000 fallen soldiers. Ukraine lacks the funds and Western countries haven’t shown any intention of assuming financial responsibility for these deaths, let alone for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers who have already perished.
He explained that applying for the compensation promised by the regime is extremely complicated. It requires official recognition that the soldier was performing his duties at the time of death, which needs to be corroborated by witnesses and then the application undergoes a lengthy verification. 2
Since the procedure seems to have been deliberately designed to ensure that very few claimants would be successful, receiving an extra few thousand applications won’t make a big difference.
It’s therefore worthwhile considering other possible explanations for Kiev’s reluctance to accept these bodies.
Their repatriation could bring the issue of human losses to the forefront of public discourse and thus expose the regime’s immoral and fraudulent handling and classification of military casualties, such as deliberately mislabeling soldiers’ remains as ‘unidentified’ or ‘civilian’ to avoid compensation.
It may also increase skepticism at the figures provided by Kiev and draw unwanted attention to the massive losses suffered during the disastrous invasion and occupation of part of the Kursk region.
Although Ukrainian media are controlled by the regime and Western agencies, the risk of losing control of the narrative is not negligible.
The current leadership has a clear interest in avoiding scrutiny, and so do its Western backers, but one can’t completely rule out the possibility that politicians or interest groups viying for power might point out the most glaring inconsistencies in the official narrative and grab some low-hanging fruit without even the need to conduct a thorough investigation.
Although at the time of writing it’s still unclear whether Kiev will eventually meet the terms of the agreement reached in Istanbul and repatriate thousands of bodies, there is no denying that the regime is in a conundrum.
Taking back six thousand frozen corpses means storing, identifying and then burying or cremating them. Unlike abstract numbers, bodies and tombstones have a physical existence which would signal to Ukrainian society the true scale of losses and thus highlight systematic concealment. Their impact on the national morale can hardly be overstated. Which explains why the much touted National Military Memorial Cemetery, whose design is based on the Arlington National Cemetery in the United States has yet to be built.
The refusal to accept these bodies, on the other hand, might trigger a strong backlash and widespread outrage over the regime’s inhumanity and lack of respect for the fallen soldiers.
Burials, funerary traditions and mourning customs tell us a lot about a society. Regardless of any purported raison d’etat, I doubt any Ukrainian would consider Russian refrigerators as a suitable resting place for his or her family members.
Humans have been honouring the dead and performing funeral rites for thousands of years. Not only did Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals bury their dead, some paleoanthropologists believe that even an extinct species known as Homo nadeli, a Stone Age small-brained hominid better adapted to climbing and suspensory behaviour in trees than walking, may have done so.
In a country where militarization has been actively promoted since 2014, and the glorification of fighters is embedded into daily life to boost morale, the refusal to lay to rest the remains of fallen soldiers currently held in Russia offers a strident contrast to Kiev’s narratives, state awards, and public commemoration of acts of heroism.
You can’t sweep the dead under the carpet without violating an ethical principle that is universal. The United Nations recognizes the protection and respect for the dead as a fundamental human value across all cultures and religions. Although burial and funeral practices vary across cultures, burying the dead is regarded as a sacred duty by all religions, and any interference with the burial of human remains is condemned across all cultures and legal systems.
Not only does denying burial to soldiers while publicly hailing them as “heroic defenders of the nation” reveal the leadership’s hypocrisy, it is also an egregious transgression of religious and cultural norms. Such transgressions have very serious implications for both societal cohesion and the survival of any regime.
Just remember the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and their role in undermining the legitimacy of Argentina’s military regime. Starting in 1977, the mothers of the “disappeared” — opponents of the regime seized by the authorities and never heard from again — held regular vigils in the public square in front of the presidential palace in Buenos Aires to demand transparency and accountability regarding their children’s fate. They had little hope of ever seeing them alive again, but by holding these vigils, they laid bare the cruelty and inhumanity of a regime that wouldn’t even let mothers bury their dead.
In ancient societies burial was sanctioned by the gods and its denial was considered a sacrilege, an infringement of divine laws. Retrieving the bodies of slain warriors was such a sacred duty that wars were waged to get them back. Reverence for the dead was not always extended to the enemy.
But even in violent Homeric times, when Achilles drags Hector through the dust to deny him a “beautiful death” Apollo intervenes to protect Hector with his golden shield. A god ensures that Hector may still have the beautiful death worthy of such a warrior and eventually Hector is buried by the Trojans after his father, King Priam, ransoms his body from Achilles.
A few centuries later, around 440 BCE, Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone already emphasized the moral imperative to bury all dead, including the enemy. After a civil war, King Creon decrees that Polynices, who had gathered an army and marched against Thebes, is a traitor and therefore must remain unburied.
When Antigone defies Creon’s edict and buries her brother, she appeals to a higher law, that code of human dignity and familial duty that no state can override. The gods approve and Creon’s violation provokes divine retribution. He loses his son Haemon and wife Eurydice.
Today no one would deny that all dead deserve respect, regardless of their actions, origin and ideology.
Many Ukrainians may disagree with the characterization of their government as an illegitimate, repressive, terrorist, criminal and corrupt regime, but how many of them can justify denying proper burial to Ukrainian soldiers and compensation to their families?
Where is Ukraine’s Antigone? Will widows, mothers and sisters defy this necropolitical regime and demand answers? Only time will tell.
