The bodies are piled up in the morgue of the Ukrainian city of Mikolaiv

In the courtyard of the forensic institute where the morgue of Mikolaiv is located, a Ukrainian city on the shores of the Black Sea, snow falls incessantly on the corpses wrapped in gray plastic bags, waiting to be evacuated.

In one of these chilling images, a corpse lies with its hands together, as if it were praying. He was actually throwing Molotov cocktails when the Russians caught him, explains a morgue employee. His hands were tied and executed, he adds.

In the ruinous forensic premises of this city attacked by the Russians, other bodies lie on the ground due to lack of space. The smell of death, mixed with that of disinfectant, is everywhere.

“I never saw anything like it. We thought that the worst thing that could happen to us here was car accidents,” says Vladimir, one of the employees of the morgue, cigarettes in hand. With his colleagues, he works non-stop.

Among the dead are the victims of war, civilians and soldiers, but also those who died of natural causes.

Doctors perform autopsies in unhygienic conditions. To get to the cold store where the bodies of the victims of a bombardment that took place a few days earlier in Ochakiv, a few kilometers from Mikolaiv, are piled up, you have to pass over several naked bodies.

- “So young” -

Vladimir crosses the courtyard again and opens a door that gives way to a nightmare. About thirty corpses lie on the ground. Two soldiers in military suits, one of them gutted, are stacked on top of each other.

“They are so young, younger than my nephew,” Vladimir regrets. There is also a Russian military man in the back of the premises, he says. “We keep them away,” he says.

An employee carefully removes a chain from the neck of a corpse, which will be used for identification.

Violent Russian fighting and shelling take place in Mikolaiv and its region, but Ukrainians resist and a few days ago, they recovered even the northernmost airport.

The city is strategic because it constitutes the last stage before the big port city of Odessa.

“Since the beginning of the war, we received 120 bodies, including 80 soldiers and 30 civilians,” explains Olga Dierugina, the director of the forensic institute. Among the civilian victims, the youngest was a three-year-old boy and the oldest was a 70-year-old man, he says.

Some bodies are difficult to identify, especially among the 19 bodies that arrived from Ochakov two days ago. To try to learn more about their identities, DNA samples are taken and experts look at both tattoos and jewelry.

The bodies of the soldiers are sent to their home region. “They are all very young, born in 1990, in 2000... “, explains Dierugina. “What do I feel today?” , he asks. “Fear. We all have children”, he reflects after a moment of silence.

The doctor wipes her tears and tries to stay calm. “Here, in Mikolaiv, it's still okay, but my parents are in Chernigov (in the north), they don't manage to be evacuated,” he says.

At the forensic institute, 15 of his colleagues fled west while some 60 are still working, 20 of them in the morgue.

“I can't thank you enough,” says the official. According to her, the situation remains under control in Mikolaiv, but “we are heading directly to a humanitarian disaster if this continues,” she continues.

Outside the morgue, some families wait quietly under the snow.

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