The Russian mortars exploded a day and dozens of kilometres apart, and tore into two men who had travelled more than 1,000km from western Ukraine to defend the plains and industrial towns of the eastern Donbas region that are now in Moscow’s crosshairs.
One of the men, who goes by the nom de guerre Lapat, hopes to return to the front in a month once his injuries have healed. The other, Ivan Myno, was buried in a closed coffin this week in the village where he grew up in the Carpathian mountains.
Myno qualified as a dentist last year and planned to marry Yaryna Chuchman this summer, and they had talked about having a family and opening a guest house in the mountains, perhaps with a studio where she and fellow tattoo artists could work.
Now Chuchman says she is a widow at 22 years of age, she is wearing Myno’s thick jacket to feel close to him on a cold spring day in her home city of Lviv, and she has started smoking to soothe her nerves and because it makes her hands smell like his.
“I used to love war movies. My favourite was called Indivisible. It’s about a hero coming back from war and how he has changed psychologically,” Chuchman says.
“But he and his wife coped. We watched it and Ivan liked it a lot, and I said that we would cope too. But these were the two main characters in the film. There were others whose husbands didn’t come back from war, but I never imagined myself being in their place.”
The call-up
Chuchman graduated from business school two days before Russia launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine before dawn on February 24th. A few hours later she was at home in Lviv when a call-up notice arrived for her father Mykhailo, who is an electrician.
He had fought Russian-led separatist militia in Donbas during a war that began in 2014 and “he came back different. I didn’t want him to change more,” she recalls.
“So I hid my dad’s call-up papers. Then I rang Ivan to ask him if I had done the right thing, and he told me that if he was drafted by the army he would go.”
In the end, neither man needed to be summoned to fight in a war which, it immediately became clear, would decide whether Ukraine continued to exist as a sovereign nation or became a vassal of the Kremlin.
Chuchman’s father came home on the first day of the war and, without even receiving his papers, began packing for the front. A few days later, Myno (28) signed up.
After about two weeks at the Yavoriv base near Lviv, he was sent to a location near the southern city of Mykolaiv to complete basic training.
Chuchman says she believed her prayers for Ivan were working: he was moved from Yavoriv two days before a Russian missile strike killed 35 people, and near Mykolaiv there were not enough helmets and flak jackets to go around.
“We joked that they were coming so slowly that they must have been delivering them by bicycle. And I was so happy that it was taking so long because they couldn’t go to the front without flak jackets and helmets. But eventually they came.”
On April 1st, Myno was in the frontline village of Kalynove in Donetsk region. He told Chuchman he was too busy to talk, so they texted instead.
‘Stay safe’
“The air raid siren went off in Lviv so I told him I had made sandwiches and tea and was going to sit in the corridor”, away from windows that could shatter in an explosion.
“He told me to eat and stay safe.”
Lapat, who lives in Khodoriv, a town one hour's drive from Lviv, was now in Popasna about 85km northeast of Myno.
The factory worker, who was mobilised in 2015, went to the army enrolment office on the first morning of Russia’s invasion and within a fortnight was near the frontline.
“I think it was March 8th – I’m not sure, time moves differently there – that I got my ‘war baptism’. The Russians were using everything – artillery, rockets, choppers, everything. When you see that for the first time, your only reaction is to pray. They can take everything from us but our faith.”
By the start of April, Lapat was in Popasna and exchanging gunfire with the Russians.
“You could see their positions. They would fire artillery as preparation and then the infantry would move,” he recalls, sitting on a sunny bench outside a sanatorium in the spa town of Truskavets, where he and other wounded soldiers are recovering.
“We can definitely beat them – the Russians are afraid to fight! On their first attack [on his position] we just shot them up. If their commander had known there were only six of us, there he would have shot himself. We hit them so hard that they scarpered as fast as they could,” he says, grinning between drags on his cigarette.
“We know what we’re fighting for, while they’re just sending people here to kill for no reason.”
Chuchman messaged Ivan on April 2nd with a photo of a client’s tattoo that read: “I love ZSU” – the acronym for the armed forces of Ukraine.
Body on battlefield
“That evening when I was finishing work, I checked my texts again and he still hadn’t seen it. But there was a message from a soldier asking: ‘What’s your relationship to Ivan Myno?’ Then I knew something was wrong.
“I went home and started praying. I prayed that he had just been captured or wounded. But later I received another message: ‘I’m sorry, there was a mortar attack and Ivan is no longer with us.’”
He died close to the industrial city of Avdiivka, in fighting that soldiers described to Chuchman as "hell".
“It was so bad that they could not take his body from the battlefield. But my dad knew where to search and asked soldiers to go there. He was found on April 10th.”
Myno’s remains were returned to Lviv five days later and his brothers identified him.
“I could have done it but I didn’t want to remember him like that,” says Chuchman, looking at pictures of Ivan on her phone that show his appendix scar and birthmark, which could have been used to aid identification.
“Who knew I might have to use these photos for that,” she says.
Myno was buried on Monday in his village of Libokhora, after a service in Lviv's historic garrison church of Saints Peter and Paul, which almost had to be cancelled after four Russian missiles hit the city, killing seven people and injuring a dozen more; Chuchman saw black plumes of smoke from the attack as she drove to the morgue to collect Ivan's body.
“When we were going from Lviv to the village, I got texts from strangers asking me when we would be driving through this or that place,” Chuchman recalls.
“Lots of people knelt on the roadside in the falling snow as we passed. They came out to honour a hero. I was in the car with Ivan, and I looked back and said: ‘My Sunshine, we’re going home to the mountains.’ He was always so happy there, and I felt good wherever I was with him.”
The day after Myno was killed, a Russian mortar exploded close to Lapat in Popasna.
Blast and blood
“There was a blast and when I opened my eyes all I could see was blood. There was a lad there born in 1999, only a couple of years older than my son, who grabbed me by my flak jacket and dragged me into cover. Then they got me into a basement and patched me up.”
Lapat says pieces of shrapnel smashed his nose, passed through his left arm, lodged in his right arm and cheek, and broke fingers in his right hand. He has had several operations to repair the damage and says he hopes to return to the army in a month.
“I need a bit more mumbo-jumbo treatment – ‘rehabilitation’ – and then I’ll get back to fighting the ‘katsapy’,” he says, using a derogatory term for Russians.
“A couple of days after I was evacuated, I heard that all nine men in our unit had been injured. They said the Russians brought up a tank and it was hell.”
Lapat says his three children worry about him, but he “has no choice” except to fight and Ukraine has “nowhere to retreat”.
“It’s up to us. If I don’t do it, then my son will have to fight.”
Chuchman says Myno’s love of Ukraine, its music and mountains, made her much more patriotic, and now inspires her art and tattoo work.
“Every morning when Ivan woke up, he would put Ukrainian music on loud,” she recalls.
“He was a really good singer. On the way to his brother’s wedding, I was lying in his lap and he sang Ukrainian songs to me. He promised he would sing at our wedding too.”
