I drive body bags away from the front line – this is the worst thing I’ve faced’

The smell is the first sign this van is not carrying ordinary cargo.

Driving through Ukrainian wasteland, Mark Zydga’s truck is not ferrying supplies or weapons, but dead bodies.

The 27-year-old and his crew must contend with Russian ‘kill zones’ and blown-up body parts as they pick up hundreds of fallen soldiers and bring them home in a moving refrigerator.

Mark has spoken for the first time about the horrors his team of volunteers face as they give their countrymen – including many friends – an honourable send-off.

Mark told Metro: ‘I have to open the body bag and read how the person died.

‘When I bring the bodies back home to their mums and dads, you see a big man crying, weeping and screaming over the body.

‘You cannot really erase these moments out of your mind.’

When Russian troops and tanks poured into Ukraine over four years ago, Mark and his friends from the local baptist Church launched into action.

Despite living in the very west of the country, right on the border with Poland, they took to the road on an evacuation mission, bringing civilians from the East away from Putin’s advance.

But as the war spiraled into high-tech trench warfare and more Ukrainian men died on the front, there was one problem.

Their bodies weren’t coming home. And the ones that did were decomposing.

Mark said ‘One of my classmates died during the battle. His mum will not calm down before she buries his son.

‘Lots of soldiers were dying and the process for bringing bodies back home was not established yet.

‘Other bodies were being transported in a very horrible way. They didn’t have special cars or refrigerators.’

‘People in our town knew that we were going to the east part of Ukraine, so they started asking us to bring the dead bodies back home instead.’

Determined to give their friends and neighbours one ‘last glory’, the Church clubbed together and purchased a refrigerator van for Mark and his team to carry the bodies back.

Since then, the crew – called On The Shield – have set off on countless 1900 mile (3000km) round trips across Ukraine to collect the corpses.

Every time they get to the front, they’ll find their bodies in a different place.

Mark, who owns a small business for his day job, explained: ‘We are picking up the bodies after they have been transported from the battlefield.

‘There are sometimes special morgues where the bodies are kept.

‘It can also just be a random house or a car where we go and load from one car to another one.

‘Sometimes we have to pack the bodies as well, while other times they are already packed in zipped-up bags.’

He continued: ‘The hardest thing in this job are the light packages.

‘Because when the package is light, it is just a part of the body, like someone’s hand.

‘Or it is a young guy who is just 18 years old.’

Word soon spread about the work Mark was doing and more families and local authorities asked his team to pick up their men, too.

His crew now brings dead soldiers home to three western regions in Ukraine: Luts’k, Rivne and Zhytomyr.

Mark went from collecting just a few body bags per trip, to dozens.

He won’t say how many corpses he’s handled, which is tactical information for the enemy, only saying it’s over 1,000 bodies.

The regular confrontation with death and grief has traumatised the volunteer and his friends.

He recalled: ‘On one occasion we delivered home the body of a woman who had been next to her husband in a trench.

‘When the missile hit the woman and killed her, he carried her for 8km so her body could be delivered home.

‘He then drove next to our van for 600km. He was deeply crying and deeply broken about her death.

‘You cannot really erase these moments out of your mind. It has had a great impact on me and my psychological state.’

Mark said he has now become reserved and closed off because of the horrors he has witnessed.

Despite this, he admits to still feeling a rush of adrenaline and adventure when he drives along the Ukraine front.

‘We have the kill zone, which can be like for 40 kilometres because you never know how far the drone can fly and where it can kick you.’

‘We’ve also decided not to get any fuel in the East because the Russian Army is trying to blow up the gas stations with their drones.’

Drones can explode and ‘tear’ people ‘into pieces’, he explains, but sometimes the killer blow is far more subtle.

Mark added: ‘There was a time i was picking up a man and I could not understand how he died, as he looked well.

‘But then it was written that under his heart there was a small hole, and that was the one injury he got.’

The brutal reality of his work has also showed Mark the best of the human spirit.

‘Those families we bring the bodies to are extremely thankful. We become quite close friends after.

‘People often say that these experiences can make you aggressive or uncaring.

‘But I would say that it makes you softer because you start to appreciate the time that you have.

‘You start to appreciate the life that you have.’

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