The Guardian joins members of the Black Tulip group as they carry out their grim task in a deserted village
In a deserted village in northern Donetsk, a group of volunteers set about the grim task of extracting two rotted Russian corpses from a cellar next to a destroyed house.
The two Russians, wearing summer uniforms, had been placed in the cellar presumably by their fellow combatants. The village, Krasnopillia, is not far from the city of Izium, which was passed between Ukrainian and Russian hands several times before Ukrainian forces retook it in September. By March, the two bodies had decomposed to such an extent that they barely smelled and were identifiable only through their dog tags.
