Story of a Ukrainian woman looking for her family
2022.12.08 07:49
Story of a Ukrainian woman looking for her family
Budrigannews.com – In November, more than seven months after she claimed that her son had been killed by shelling in their village in eastern Ukraine, Nina Melenets finally laid him to rest.
Serhiy, the 62-year-old woman’s husband, has been missing since the end of March. Her surviving son has provided forensic experts with DNA samples to compare to the bodies exhumed from a nearby mass grave in the city of Izium.
Melenets told Reuters in Izium, where she had rented a small house for a few days, that “if they match the DNA, it will be easier for our hearts.”
She continued, holding her hand close to a gas flame on her cooker for warmth, “We will know where he lies.” We were together for 44 years. We were together our entire lives.”
Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, thousands of civilians have been killed, and thousands more are missing as fighting rages in the east and south and frontlines shift.
Trying to locate missing people and identifying the dead are both difficult tasks.
More than 15,000 people, including detainees, those separated from loved ones, and those killed and buried in makeshift graves, are thought to have gone missing throughout Ukraine during the war, according to the International Commission on Missing Persons, an intergovernmental organization based in Hague.
The journey has been long and difficult for Melenets, and it is not over.
She recently traveled to the east of Ukraine to plan the funeral of her older son, Oleksandr. Oleksandr, who was 44 years old at the time, was killed in fighting in their home village of Kamyanka at the beginning of the conflict.
She and her 37-year-old son Mykola do not believe they will ever return for good, despite the fact that Ukraine now controls the area and Russian forces have been driven out of the area.
We were able to return home, but there is now nothing there. Our entire village has been destroyed.”
Melenets has been attempting to piece together the events surrounding her older son and husband.
She has relied in part on testimony from friends and neighbors who remained in Kamyanka, and Reuters was unable to independently verify her account.
A request for clarification regarding the missing cases mentioned in this article or missing Ukrainians as a whole did not receive an immediate response from the Russian defense ministry.
Melenets said that on March 21, when the Russians took control and let them leave, she and Mykola and other residents left her home village. Oleksandr and Serhiy made the decision to remain in order to safeguard their homes and assist others in escaping.
A shell landed close to her son Oleksandr’s single-story house a few days later, killing him.
After asking the locals who he was, the Russian soldiers who found him wrapped his body in a tarpaulin. They informed his mother that villagers later buried him there. Around the same time, 65-year-old Serhiy went missing and has not been found.
Oleksandr’s body was exhumed and transported to the recaptured city of Izium, where it was stored, in October, when Ukrainian forces marched back into Kamyanka following a counter-offensive.
A mobile laboratory for DNA testing was set up at a local police station by the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office at the beginning of November to assist loved ones in identifying them.
In Izium, people waited in the cold in a line to climb the stairs to an office where they could have their documents processed. Officials had a hard time keeping up with the volume of paperwork and the number of visitors.
After being registered, relatives, including Mykola, went to the mobile DNA lab to have saliva swabs compared to the bodies that had been recovered.
Anna Ozerianska is also looking for her husband in the village of Levkivka, which is about 11 miles (18 kilometers) from Izium. She claims that pro-Russian forces took him away on April 12 and he hasn’t been heard from since.
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The 61-year-old has displayed him on posters all over Izium in the hope that someone has learned something about Oleksandr, her husband, who she refers to as Sasha.
“In some cases I get up promptly in the first part of the day, I need to get up, yet I don’t have any idea where to begin,” she told Reuters. ” I consider my options as I bury my head in my pillow.
Ozerianska keeps her phone at the home of her friend Lena, where there is a mobile signal, in case the missing persons administration office calls her about Sasha.
The day after Mykola visited the DNA lab, his sibling Oleksandr’s casket was taken from a funeral home in Izium to the graveyard in Kamyanka to be covered within the sight of few family members and neighbors.
The group walked slowly through the overgrown grass and scrub on a damp, misty morning with a flat grey sky, taking care not to step on “butterfly” mines that were scattered all over the ground and were difficult to tell apart from autumnal leaves.
Crosses were pointing in the opposite direction of the impact, and craters left by earlier fighting marked the cemetery.
Over the embroidered cloth-covered coffin, Melenets wept. It was possible to hear distant explosions’ thud. As Oleksandr was lowered into the earth, the mourners cried. Mykola was close to his mother.
People said their goodbyes outside the cemetery. Another van with a coffin arrived as they were leaving. It was quickly removed to be buried this time because there was no one to greet it.
Before returning west, the Melenets went to their home village, which is close to the Carpathian Mountains, where they have settled.
Nina and Serhiy’s house had collapsed to rubble like many others in Kamyanka, with only a few walls still standing.
A burned-out armored vehicle lay on its side, the letter “Z” used by Russian forces painted in white on cars, fences, tanks, and houses, and wooden ammunition boxes were scattered along a dirt track.
