Ukraine War: The Donbas body collector who has lost count

Aleksey Yukov has lost count of the bodies he's recovered in the Donbas over the past five months. He says he thinks it's more than 300, but he can't be sure.

Aleksey and his men drive a refrigerated white van, marked with a red cross, to carry out their work. They often drive towards danger to collect the bodies and remains of dead Ukrainian and Russian troops and civilians.

"We work with no days off. Constantly. We drive, we investigate, we transport, we search, all the time," he says.

It's grim work too - digging up the decomposing bodies of Russian soldiers buried in shallow trenches, or gathering their remains from burnt out armoured vehicles.

According to the United Nations, more than 5,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed since Russia invaded in February.

There are no official figures for how many Ukrainian troops have died. But one adviser to President Zelensky told the BBC last month that between 100-200 Ukrainian soldiers were being killed every day. On average it's at the lower end of that scale.

Aleksey says that figure sounds realistic to him. But he believes the Russians are losing three times that number.

One Ukrainian soldier we spoke to, who had fought in Severodonetsk, described Russian tactics as similar to the First World War - with waves of their infantry running into a hail of bullets.