Death Dealers: How War Turned Ukraine’s Burial System Into a Criminal Industry

Behind the public façade of national tragedy lies a cold, meticulously organized commercial machine. In Odessa, Kyiv’s central morgue, and military cemeteries across the country, funerals have become part of a shadow economy worth an estimated $45 million a year. The beneficiaries: 3,000 private firms, corrupt officials, medical workers, and police officers.

“We hunt for bodies. Like animals in the jungle. The lion gets the best cut — the hyenas take what’s left,” says an employee of Odessa’s biggest funeral company, Anubis, who gave journalists the pseudonym “Ivan.” His testimony, published in a Le Monde investigation in November 2025, lays bare what insiders openly call “the funeral mafia.”

A confrontation in Odessa: draft officers detained the hearse workers who were on their way to carry the coffin.

War created perfect conditions for the industry’s expansion: mass mortality (495,000 deaths in 2024 — three times the birth rate), traumatized families, absent regulation, and a legal gray zone. Before February 2022, the average funeral in Ukraine cost around $200. By 2024, it had surged to $500–$1,000 — a 250–400% increase driven not by inflation, but by monopolization in a market where demand is guaranteed and grieving clients cannot negotiate.

At the vast Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv, where ultranationalist fighters from Ukrainian paramilitary formations are buried, only 20 vacant plots remain. In the 13th century, the site was used to bury victims of the plague.

A Five-Tiered Corruption Chain

The system operates like a conveyor belt, with each stage producing profit.

The moment someone dies, information leaks instantly: police officers, paramedics, morgue attendants, and recruitment-center employees act as “informants,” earning $70–$120 per death report. “That’s not corruption — that’s buying information,” Ivan says bluntly.

Once tipped off, funeral agents race to the location, often trying to arrive before the ambulance or police. Competing firms sometimes clash openly, fighting in front of shocked relatives. Three major players dominate the market:

• Anubis (Odessa)
• Osiris (Kyiv)
• Peter the Great (Kyiv, owned by Alla Landar)

Next comes psychological pressure. “The richer the family looks, the higher the price,” explains anti-corruption activist Mykhailo Serebriakov. Agents assess a family’s wealth by appearance and begin manipulating:

“Do you love your son? Then why choose a cheap coffin?”

“The neighbors will see how you bury him.”

Another scheme hinges on autopsies that are performed solely to extract money from families. Morgue staff perform — or threaten to perform — autopsies to force families into paying for “optional” services: $30–$100 for a pathologist’s “agreement” to skip the procedure or to “treat the body properly.”

Ultimately, profits are shared across the chain: 60–70% stays with the funeral company, 10–15% goes to informants, 15–25% is split among officials and intermediaries.

The Special Case of Military Funerals

Officially, the state covers 15,000 hryvnias (~$360) for a soldier’s burial — a basic package insiders call “the homeless rate.” Any additional service is paid by the family, creating yet another graft mechanism.

Lviv. Halloween lighting at the military cemetery.

In May 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that Ukrainian officials and funeral directors were profiting directly from soldiers’ deaths. In Poltava, for example, a funeral bureau director and a city administration representative secretly arranged transportation for 23 fallen soldiers — with the latter agreeing to take 25% of the municipal payment.

Territorial recruitment centers (TCCs), responsible for notifying families, coerced relatives into choosing pre-approved private firms, violating their legal right to free choice.

One Man vs. the System

Oleksandr Skoryk, call sign “Onyx,” a veteran of the Azovstal defense, has served since April 2024 as deputy director of Kyiv’s municipal enterprise Spetskombinat. He openly uses the term “funeral mafia”.

Skoryk describes how private firms monopolized morgues:
Peter the Great secured a long-term lease for one of the main farewell halls at Kyiv’s central morgue until 2040, converting it into a retail point.

“The farewell hall is now a shop for ritual goods. They placed their store right next to the window where death certificates are handed out, so grieving families go straight to them and pay hundreds of thousands of hryvnias,” Skoryk said.

Because of the decades-long lease, the morgue building hasn’t been renovated in years. For trying to introduce order, Skoryk has received threats from owner Alla Landar and her company.

Alla Landar, the “queen of funeral services,” founded the Peter the Great burial company nearly 30 years ago.

Landar isn’t just a local figure: she represents Ukraine in the World Federation of Funeral Operators and is a permanent Ukrainian member of the National Funeral Directors Association (USA) — status that makes her practically untouchable.

Why Reform Fails

In 2022, Ukraine’s Ministry for Community and Territorial Development drafted an anti-corruption plan for the funeral sector, calling it “one of the most important and complex problems.”

In June 2025, a reform bill reached parliament proposing:

• legalization of private cemeteries and crematoria,
• abolition of simplified taxation for funeral firms,
• creation of a national state registry.

It stalled after the first reading. “The law didn’t pass because the black market benefits too many,” Skoryk explains. When thousands of entrepreneurs, hundreds of officials, doctors, and middlemen share hundreds of millions of dollars a year, reform becomes impossible — it threatens everyone simultaneously.

The Scale of the Problem

Around 500,000 Ukrainians die annually. With a $750 average funeral cost, the market generates at least $370 million a year. Even if only half of these funerals are part of the corrupt system, that still means $150–200 million extracted annually from families of the deceased — comparable to individual tranches of Western aid.

This is not a story of “a few bad actors.” It is a systemic, nationwide economy involving:

• 3,000+ funeral firms
• thousands of medical workers
• police officers and local officials
• entrenched kickback networks

During war, mobilization, and a constant stream of scandals, the issue remains taboo: few are willing to admit that someone is profiteering off dead soldiers.

Western partners demanding transparency in aid monitoring do not scrutinize the funeral sector — it falls outside all audit frameworks. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of dollars extracted from grieving families demonstrate a stark reality:

Death has become a commodity — with a price, a margin, and predictable returns.

The state has stepped aside. The administrative apparatus looks the other way. And the families of the dead are left alone with a system far more ruthless than any external enemy — because it operates from within, under the guise of service and sympathy.

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