As soon as they had finished burying a veteran colonel killed by Russian shelling, the cemetery workers readied the next hole. Inevitably, given how quickly death is felling Ukrainian troops on the front lines, the empty grave won't stay that way for long.
Col. Oleksandr Makhachek left behind a widow, Elena, and their daughters Olena and Myroslava-Oleksandra.
In the first 100 days of war, his grave was the 40th dug in the military cemetery in Zhytomyr, 140 kilometres west of the capital, Kyiv.
He was killed May 30 in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine where the fighting is raging.
Nearby, the burial notice on the also freshly dug grave of Viacheslav Dvornitskyi says he died May 27.