- Bodies are being piled in refrigerated trailers in Kyiv where the morgue can't keep up with civilian casualties, a coroner says.
- A coroner told the Washington Post that his team has processed 200 bodies in the last seven weeks.
- "These morgues were not designed to handle this amount of bodies," he told The Post.
Bodies are being piled in refrigerated trailers in Kyiv because morgues can't keep up with the number of casualties since the start of the war in Ukraine, one coroner in the city told the Washington Post.
Vlad Perovskyi is a coroner in Kyiv working on a team of five men to process bodies of dead civilians and Ukrainian troops since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. He told The Post they work in a 20-by-20 foot room in the Kyiv Regional Clinical Hospital.
Perovskyi told The Post that the team has processed over 200 bodies in the last seven weeks, and the morgue can't keep up with the influx, so they have been storing bodies in refrigerated trailers nearby.
"These morgues were not designed to handle this amount of bodies," Perovskyi told The Post.
Perovskyi told The Post that by the end of March, bodies were coming in refrigerated tractor-trailers so quickly that the morgue couldn't hold them all.
He told the paper that a typical autopsy would take him about six hours during normal times. Now, he's performing 10 a day and is still barely keeping up, he said.
Even though his pace is expedited, the refrigerated trailers remain parked in the parking lot with bodies stacked three people high in two rows against the walls, The Post reported.
The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported on Tuesday that at least 2,104 civilians in Ukraine had been killed since Russia invaded the eastern European country.
The agency said, however, that it believes the actual death toll to be "considerably higher."
"The receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration," it said.