“He’s bringing back the dead, so leave him alone,” barks a Ukrainian soldier at a comrade who came to inspect a truck bearing the dreaded “Cargo 200” sign.

It’s a military abbreviation for a fallen soldier – 200 is the number of kilos a zinc army coffin carrying a body generally weighs.

The scene at a checkpoint in war-ravaged Svyatogirsk takes place in numerous other cities retaken by Ukraine in a blitz counter-offensive on the Eastern Front.

“Cargo 200” dates back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but in Ukraine both sides use the term for the untold thousands who perished in eight months of the worst fighting Europe has seen since World War II arrived.

Within a week, Andriy Chernyavskiy and his Ukrainian special forces had already brought back the bodies of 19 other soldiers from the same sector.

Chernyavskiy rumbles along shell-rutted streets, relying on an interactive map with yellow dots in his grim quest to mark places where retreating Ukrainian soldiers buried themselves or lost their comrades in the early months of the war.

The convoy he is commanding suddenly stopped in front of a remote house in a nearby village called Oleksandrivka.

The garbage and ammunition inside confirmed that the house was occupied by Ukrainian troops before the Russians took it in late April.

“We know that part of the 81st Brigade and border guards have withdrawn from their positions in this house,” Chernyavskiy said.

His search for the remains of a soldier left under fire by the retreating Ukrainians is aided by forensic dogs, which specialize in finding the dead.

“Our dogs go through a different type of training than those involved in basic search and rescue,” said Larysa Borysenko, 51, whose NGO Antares accompanies Chernyavskiy’s Cargo 200 team.

After snooping around for a few minutes, Professor, a young Belgian Shepherd Dog, starts frantically digging under a tree with his front paws.

Two soldiers quickly get their spades. Chernyavskiy is already putting on his white hazmat suit.

Once found half a meter underground, the body is wrapped in a blue sheet, a pillow supports the head.

“We are lucky. The body is in good condition.

“Such a ritual is rarely possible,” said Chernyavskiy, leaning over.

In war, identifying the dead is seldom so easy.

The remains of a soldier were buried with three flak jackets, each with a different name.

“We won’t know who it is until we compare the result of the DNA test,” said Chernyavskiy, who has been doing this work for 20 years.

He started an NGO involved in identifying Soviet and Nazi soldiers killed throughout Ukraine during World War II.

He joined the Ukrainian army in 2014 and offered his expertise during the Russian-backed conflict in the east following the annexation of Crimea, which was a precursor to the current war.

“We must find each of our dead. That’s my motto. Nothing can be missing,” he said.

“Everyone deserves their last respects,” including the Russian soldiers, whose bodies are also being collected “in accordance with international law,” said Chernyavskiy.

Chernyavskiy is now known beyond the front lines and his van is often stopped by soldiers.

In the newly recaptured ghost town of Shandrygolove, one of the soldiers grabs a cable and leads Chernyavskiy to a remote farm.

The cable acts as a lasso to safely drag the corpse a few feet to ensure it is not booby-trapped – a feared practice in retaken territories.

On a carpet of autumn leaves nearby lies the bloated, headless body of a soldier in utter solitude. Next to it is a shell crater.

“What happened here is pretty obvious,” said the unit’s deputy commander, Oleksandr Lovynyuk, 53, unfolding a white body bag.

Nearby lies a soldier’s helmet, bare except for a few strands of hair stuck together.

The team spends the next 30 minutes in deep silence, searching the area for the missing head to no avail.

“Behind every search, every effort, we try to remember that mourning for a loved one depends on us,” Borysenko said.