Ukraine, coping with war losses, adds new polish to military funerals
But one woman, overwhelmed with grief, could not. She sat on a bench crying as relatives comforted her. When a military band began playing Ukraine’s national anthem, she wept harder.
“Glory to Ukraine,” an officer called out.
“Glory to the heroes,” mourners responded.
To visit Krasnopilske cemetery during a military funeral is to experience the brutal sweep of Ukraine’s war with Russia and the terrible intimacy of a family’s loss. Twenty-seven soldiers were laid to rest last Friday. Of those, 12 were buried as unknowns in a military section that grows larger almost by the day.
For Povorotny, the small cemetery on the outskirts of Dnipro speaks to the sacrifice his people have paid in blood since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion on Feb. 24. In just three months, the cemetery’s military section has added 293 graves, compared with 175 in the previous eight years, since war broke out with Moscow-backed separatists in the eastern Donbas region in 2014.
“You can see how the war changed. And this is just one cemetery, one of thousands of cemeteries in Ukraine,” said Povorotny, a military chaplain and archpriest in the Orthodox Church of Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region’s diocese.
Povorotny has conducted about 10 mass burials at the cemetery since the war began, he said in an interview following Friday’s ceremony. Every week, he conducts one or two individual funerals, too. He estimated that more than 700 members of the military have been killed in the Dniepropetrovsk region alone.
But when he looks into the faces of the mourners, he said, he’s convinced he can see their faith in ultimate victory, despite their losses and pain.
“Putin called it a special operation. Before that, they called it a civil war,” Povorotny said, holding a hand over the wooden cross hanging from his neck. “For us, it’s a real war of independence.”
The funerals that occur daily around Ukraine are also unfolding with new protocols that have been rewritten to reflect Western customs, such as those followed by the United States, and uniquely Ukrainian traditions, instead of those inherited from Russia and the Soviet Union.
And they come as the nation discusses creating a new national cemetery in Kyiv that would serve Ukraine as Arlington National Cemetery has served the United States. Volodymyr Vyatrovich, a member of the Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, and a former head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, said in a Telegram post last month that parliament had agreed to create a national cemetery somewhere in or around Kyiv.
To develop new military funeral practices, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory looked at the country’s history of funeral rites, from the short-lived Ukrainian National Republic in the early 20th century to the burial practices among Cossacks, the bands of warriors who roamed Ukraine’s steppes hundreds of years ago. The institute also analyzed the modern military funeral rituals of Belgium, Israel, Poland, Turkey and the United States and visited U.S. military cemeteries.
Their work culminated in a 2019 video by the Ministry of Veterans Affairs that shows in detail how a military funeral should be conducted. Some of the rituals would be familiar to anyone who has attended a funeral with military honors at Arlington National Cemetery, including a new practice of draping the casket with the Ukrainian flag before folding and presenting it to the family. The new protocols also stipulate that up to six soldiers may fire three volleys in salute.
At Friday’s services, some of the new rituals were on display, such as the folding of the Ukrainian flag — though perhaps with less spit-and-polish precision than one might find where the custom has been conducted for generations.
The 27 coffins — each draped with a blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag — were laid out before the ceremony in three neat rows with only enough room to walk between them. A wooden cross was laid atop each, with a sign bearing the soldier’s name in ornate script. And on the coffins containing unidentified remains, the sign said, “Here rests an unknown soldier forever to be remembered.”
Many mourners were dressed in black, including several older…
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