"Grieving father launches group supporting families of volunteers lost in Ukraine"

[The Bread Guy]

Not 'zackly families of CF, but families of folks who've been downrange.

Grieving father launches group supporting families of volunteers lost in Ukraine

OTTAWA — A grieving New Brunswick father has launched an organization to support the families of foreigners who have disappeared, died or been captured while fighting in Ukraine’s foreign legion. “Pain has no nationality. Hope has no border,” Marc Mazerolle said Monday on Parliament Hill...

halifax.citynews.ca

Bit of backstory here.

‘I would have ripped up his passport’: Inside one man’s fight to bring his son’s remains home from front lines

Canadian Marc Mazerolle says he wants to help bring 'peace to families' whose loved ones died on the battlefield as foreign fighters for Ukraine. A father himself, Mazerolle wants to help families through the agonizing process of having their loved ones’ bodies returned and buried close to home.

www.ctvnews.ca

Father searches for remains of son, one of 27 Canadians killed in Ukraine | Globalnews.ca

A New Brunswick father is preparing to travel to war-torn Ukraine to seek answers about his son's death and hopefully bring his remains home one day.

globalnews.ca

New Brunswick family reeling after they say son was killed in Russia-Ukraine war | Globalnews.ca

In late February, 24-year-old Patrick Mazerolle told his parents he had gone to Poland and volunteered to fight with the Ukrainian army in the Russia-Ukraine war.

globalnews.ca

 

[Jarnhamar]

Not 'zackly families of CF, but families of folks who've been downrange.

“(We) talked to the last soldier who was with him when he was alive. So now we know that Patrick died on Sept. 1 between 8:00 and 8.15 in the morning. I got a location within 20 metres where his remain is,” he said.

Are they just leaving bodies where they fall over there?

 

[The Bread Guy]

Are they just leaving bodies where they fall over there?

WAG, if that's the case, it would be a "for now while things are too hot to recover them" basis. Would have to dig for sources.

According to the GoFundMe page, part of the cost seems to include recovering his body "in the grey zone" - this from a mid-November update:

Feels like a term adjacent to "no-man's land" which neither UKR nor USSR 2.0 control, but I stand to be corrected. European farmers still dig up remains of WW1 battlefields more than 100 years after the war ended, so may not be unusual here, too.

And if the UKR military thinks it's not safe enough to recover the dead from these areas, I suspect it wouldn't be cheap or easy to convince others to poke around and get someone back from these zones.

LATE ADD: Dug a bit, and found this - sounds like a fair bit of bureaucracy at the UKR end, as well as the legal/consular/logistical challenge of bringing the remains back to the home country once UKR is done its ID & verification process (also archived here).

Honoring the foreign fallen: Ukraine’s process for returning volunteers’ remains

They came to fight for Ukraine — and they died. For their families, the struggle continues. Until there is an official document confirming death, the person remains legally “alive”: relatives cannot access bank accounts and are forced to pay taxes for the deceased. To return the body to the...

hromadske.ua