Behold the pinnacle of human achievement: a man in rubber gloves shaking the dust out of a polyester-blend tunic once occupied by a Russian office drone named Andrei. This is Alexei, a member of the Platzdarm search team, acting as the high priest of a liturgy involving mud, maggots, and the logistical nightmare of international corpse-shuffling. The current spectacle in the Ukrainian mud is not a tragedy—tragedy requires a certain level of unexpectedness. This is a farce, a grand, stinking, multi-national comedy where the punchline is a piece of paper found in a dead man’s pocket that says ‘Andrei. Moscow.’

The intellectual giants running things in Kyiv and Moscow have managed to turn the landscape into a charnel house, and now we are expected to applaud the ‘dignity’ of the clean-up crew. Alexei, squatting like a bored gargoyle over a hollow uniform, represents the only honest job left in the region: the janitor of the apocalypse. The jacket and trousers still hold their shape, a cruel reminder that the fabric we manufacture is significantly more durable than the ideals we use to justify wearing it. Inside, there is nothing but air. Andrei from Moscow has evaporated, leaving behind only a phone number and a stains-per-square-inch ratio that would make a dry cleaner weep.

Let’s talk about this ‘common humanity’ nonsense that the Platzdarm team reportedly believes in. It’s a delightful sentiment, isn’t it? It’s the kind of performative altruism that makes the comfortable classes feel a little less oily about their tax dollars being converted into high-explosive ordnance. We are told that every soul deserves a ‘dignified rest,’ as if the dirt in a cemetery in Vladivostok or Poltava has some magical, curative property that negates the fact that these men were liquidated by drones directed by teenagers in air-conditioned trailers. There is no dignity in being a trade-in item. These bodies are essentially being used as human currency in a grotesque game of Pokémon: ‘Gotta catch ‘em all,’ then swap them for your own team’s discarded husks at the border.

The hypocrisy of both sides is, as always, the most pungent scent in the air—even stronger than the decomposing Andrei. On one hand, you have the Kremlin, a regime that treats its youth like disposable lighters, flicking them into the wind until they burn out, yet will undoubtedly use the return of these remains for some staged, somber photo-op about ‘heroism.’ On the other, the Western-backed machinery of the Ukrainian state, which maintains its moral high ground by ensuring that even the enemy’s bone-meal is handled with bureaucratic precision. It’s a masterpiece of optics. We can’t provide these men with a living wage or a world not dictated by the whims of geriatric kleptocrats, but by God, we will ensure their femurs are returned to the correct jurisdiction.

The logistical absurdity is what really grinds the gears of anyone with a functional frontal lobe. The remains pile up after a battle because the living are too busy preparing for the next one. We have reached a point where the ‘body seekers’ are the only ones acknowledging the reality of the situation: that the war is a factory where the raw material is humans and the finished product is silence. The searchers find bodies from both sides, because in the eyes of an artillery shell, everyone is equally flammable. There is no ideology in a trench, only varying degrees of dampness and the eventual transition from ‘soldier’ to ‘inventory.’

Why do we participate in this ritual? To maintain the illusion of civilization. If we didn’t collect the Andreis of the world, we’d have to admit that we are just hairless apes killing each other over dirt. By putting them in bags and shipping them across lines of control, we pretend there’s a rulebook. We pretend that the ‘sanctity of life’ is a real thing, rather than a slogan we use to sell newspapers and electoral campaigns. Alexei’s work is the ultimate cynicism; he is cleaning up the mess made by people who will never have to smell what he smells. He is the physical manifestation of our collective failure, a man tasked with finding ‘souls’ in a landscape that has been systematically stripped of anything resembling spirit. In the end, Andrei from Moscow is just a phone number on a stained scrap of paper, a data point in a war of attrition that will continue until the logistics of burial finally outweigh the politics of the bullet. Until then, the swap meet continues, and the mud gets a little richer with every ‘dignified’ return.