The fascination with forensic science that has taken Limerick-born Niamh Smith from Scotland Yard to Ukraine via the Middle East and Africa began with the sound of breaking glass late one night more than 30 years ago.
Smith was about 17 and her family was living above a bar run by her father in London, where they had settled after moving over from Ireland a few years earlier. She was studying at about 1am when she heard the fateful crash downstairs.
“I went to have a look and a man I didn’t know appeared at the bottom of the stairs. I roared at him and he ran out. The police were called and I got chatting to the SOCO man – the scene of crimes officer,” she says.
“I became obsessed with forensics. Up to that point, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. From that moment on, I knew.”
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After working for 21 years with London’s Metropolitan Police and then as a forensic adviser in countries including Libya and South Sudan, Smith has been in Ukraine since February 2024 with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
The ICRC is helping Ukraine build up the forensic skills, facilities and equipment that it needs to identify the dead and trace the missing in Europe’s biggest conflict since the second World War.
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Smith and her colleagues train Ukrainian military and police teams on the best methods of recovering bodies from the battlefield and on the advanced DNA-based techniques that maximise the chances of identifying the dead.
They also facilitate perhaps the only work on which Ukraine and Russia now co-operate directly, acting as observers during military exchanges of soldiers’ remains that can sometimes involve thousands of bodies.
“I was on an exchange two weeks ago. It’s a very, very respectful and well organised operation ... That’s probably the biggest honour for me, to take part in those repatriations,” Smith says.
“You would expect some tension, but it is very silent. There’s no chatting in those trucks. They back up the trucks to each other for the transfer, and we are in the trucks when it happens. You’ve got the guys in charge of the [Ukrainian and Russian] teams, counting the numbers, but there’s no conversation,” she adds.
“It’s intense because everyone is aware of the gravity of the moment. You feel responsibility to every one of them ... because each of these men is coming home in a way no one would ever want to come home.”
Smith worked on the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and the July 7th, 2005, suicide bombings in London, but she thinks her first such repatriation of soldiers’ remains “will probably be the moment of my career that I remember with the most clarity”.
“Coming back in convoy from the border area – military vehicles, refrigerated trucks and ICRC vehicles – we had to go through several villages to get to the main road,” she recalls.
“People were kneeling on the side of the road with their flags ... They were throwing flowers. They didn’t personally know the men who were coming back, but they knew they were fallen soldiers. They were crying and paying their respects.”
Neither side releases full casualty figures, but it is clear that hundreds of thousands of soldiers have been killed and injured since Russia launched its all-out invasion of pro-western Ukraine in February 2022.
International humanitarian law obliges warring parties to account for all the prisoners they hold and share that information with the ICRC as a neutral intermediary.
In parallel, the ICRC maintains a register of people who have gone missing during the war, based on requests for information from relatives on both sides of the front line. This list now includes more than 174,000 Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and civilians.
When a Ukrainian soldier’s remains are recovered from the battlefield or returned home in an exchange, state forensic teams take samples and check for a match on a database of DNA taken from people searching for missing relatives.
The ICRC has helped Ukraine with everything from body bags and DNA collection kits to refrigerated trucks and the refurbishment of morgues, but the relentless flow of fatalities still puts severe strain on the state’s resources.
“Ukraine has excellent education, its forensic specialists are experienced and work at a high level, but any country facing something on this scale would need external assistance,” says Smith.
“Another generation or two in Ukraine will be dealing with this,” she adds, noting that an unknown number of bodies remain on the battlefield, and will do so until intense fighting ends and vast areas littered with mines and unexploded ordnance are made safe.
Smith is now preparing for her next ICRC assignment in Beirut, but says she would come back to Ukraine “in a heartbeat”.
“I’ve got unlimited admiration for the Ukrainian people in how they are dealing with this,” she says.
“They are so stoical and practical in dealing with all this heartache and fear. Their lives have become something they never wanted, and they are living with it every day – I can leave, but this is their life.”
