When Russia invaded their homeland with full force in February, five friends decided to sign up for the Ukrainian military together, said farewell to civilian life by sharing half a bottle of Hennessy cognac and agreed to drink the rest after the war to celebrate victory.
Now two of them are dead, one is missing and two are involved in a remarkable counterattack that is raising Ukraine’s hopes of eventual triumph, while also taking a heavy toll on the people doing the fighting and on those who wait for them to come home.
Maksym Mayevskyi, Oleh Kurskyi, Marian Stefankiv, Volodymyr Lazor and a fifth man who can only be identified by his military callsign “Molot” (Hammer), joined the army in the western city of Lviv, and their friendship revolved around this historic stronghold of Ukrainian culture and identity.
Maksym grew up in Zhmerynka in central Ukraine and then moved to the capital, Kyiv, where he learned English and studied business and economics while working at a bank to fund his tuition.
He was 25 years old when thousands of protesters demanding an end to corruption and pro-Kremlin rule occupied Kyiv’s Maidan square throughout a freezing winter, until police loyal to Ukraine’s then Russian-backed president, Viktor Yanukovich, shot dozens of them dead in February 2014.
As Yanukovich and his cronies fled to Moscow, the Kremlin annexed Crimea from Ukraine and then created, financed and armed militia groups that seized swathes of the country’s eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions and declared their intention to join Russia.
Maksym did not live in the protest camp on Maidan but was one of huge numbers of Ukrainians who joined rallies on the square. He saw his father, Volodymyr, first delivering supplies to the demonstrators and later to the frontline in the east, where Ukraine’s then ragtag army relied on volunteer fighters and helpers to hold back the Russian-led militants.
“In 2017 Maksym told me he wanted to join a volunteer battalion to defend Ukraine,” Volodymyr recalls.
“He’d never been interested in things like that before – though I had a licensed gun he hadn’t even wanted to come to the shooting range – but I didn’t oppose his decision. My wife and I discussed it and said we’d raised our children to be able to make such decisions for themselves. In fact, I was proud of him… and saw his potential to be a good soldier.”
Beer and paintball
Maksym fought for about a year, mostly near the then government-held port of Mariupol on the Azov Sea – a dangerous area even during that smaller-scale phase of the conflict – before the Aratta battalion was withdrawn from the front line and he returned to civilian life, taking a job with an educational software firm and moving to Lviv with his girlfriend.
It was there that the five friends grew close, thirtysomethings who liked to have a beer and play paintball and who were inspired – like many of their peers – by the fight to protect Ukraine’s independence from Russia and make it a fairer and less corrupt place.
“We went to the pub together, hung around with each other a lot, we were friends with each other’s families,” Marian Stefankiv says of the five, who founded a volunteer group called Kolo Chesti or Circle of Honour.
‘Oleh joked that when he saw McDonald’s shut down in Donetsk he knew that it was over – the place was occupied and the civilised world had left’
The NGO took on projects ranging from environmental protection to animal welfare to leading the largest-ever group of blind and partially sighted Ukrainians to the top of their country’s highest mountain, 2,000-metre Hoverla in the Carpathian range south of Lviv.
For Oleh Kurskyi, it was a long way from his birthplace, 1,150km to the east in Donetsk, a mostly Russian-speaking rustbelt city of mines and heavy industry that he fled in 2014 when it was seized by Moscow-armed militia and fell under the Kremlin’s de facto control.
“Oleh joked that when he saw McDonald’s shut down in Donetsk he knew that it was over – the place was occupied and the civilised world had left,” Marian says.
“But his parents stayed behind and never left occupied territory. We talked about them a bit but it was a sensitive topic for him. They had different views but he still felt very close to his mother, as long as they didn’t talk about politics or the war,” he recalls.
“He wanted to go back and rebuild Donetsk, no matter how much destruction there may be during its liberation. He wanted to tell the world about Ukrainian Donetsk, about how people lived there under occupation and about those who left. He had big plans for life after the war.”
‘Wanted to marry’
Ulyana Taras is married to one of the friends, Lazor, but got to know Oleh well as an administrator at Lviv’s Znesinnya park, where he volunteered and then worked as an inspector on patrol for illegal logging and forest fires.
“He had been an accountant in Donetsk but absolutely loved nature and especially the Carpathian mountains. It was more than a job for him,” she says.
“He rented a small house in Lviv and really wanted to marry and have a family with a woman from this region, Halychyna, where he loved the culture and food and traditions. And though he was from Donetsk he spoke perfect Ukrainian – a bookish Ukrainian, without the Polish slang that we use here,” she explains.
“Oleh didn’t have many belongings except for books and he loved to read. He started a project to send books to soldiers in the east and to children living there near the frontline. And Donetsk is called the ‘city of roses’ and so he planted beds of roses here as well, to have a piece of Donetsk in Lviv.”
When Russia attacked in the early hours of February 24th, firing cruise missiles at Ukraine’s main cities and sending troops, tanks and warplanes over the border, the five friends agreed to joined the army’s 24th Mechanised Brigade based at the Yavoriv training ground outside Lviv; only Oleh had no military experience, though he may have led the recruiting officer to believe otherwise.
“I asked Maksym to wait for a few days, so we could talk to people we know in the military and make sure he joined a battalion that we trusted,” says his father Volodymyr, taking time to compose himself as he remembers. “But Maksym said there was no time for that – if we wait then the enemy will come to our door or be in the Carpathian mountains.”
Maksym and “Molot” were trained at Yavoriv to fire the US-supplied Javelin portable anti-tank missiles that Ukraine has used to great effect, and in mid-March they were deployed to Popasna, a town in the eastern Luhansk region where fighting was fierce.
“Maksym sent a message at about midnight on March 19th saying that everything was fine. Then there was no more contact,” Volodymyr recalls.
Russian breakthrough
Later, he found out that Maksym and Molot had volunteered to help try to halt a Russian breakthrough at Novooleksandrivka on the edge of Popasna. Only one soldier returned to base, wounded, from that area, and on April 5th Maksym’s parents were informed that he and Molot were missing in action.
The name Mayevskyi was there and there was a body that resembled Maksym. The face was blurred but I thought it could be him
A fortnight later, Molot’s wife found that a website run by the occupation authorities in Luhansk had published the surnames and photos of several dead Ukrainian soldiers.
“The name Mayevskyi was there and there was a body that resembled Maksym. The face was blurred but I thought it could be him,” Volodymyr says.
It took three more weeks for Ukraine to arrange an exchange of fallen troops with the Russians and their local collaborators in Luhansk, and on May 9th the bodies of 20 soldiers were brought to the city of Dnipro in government-held eastern Ukraine.
More images of one of the bodies all but convinced Volodymyr that it was Maksym; then he remembered that his son’s wisdom teeth had been removed shortly before the war, and after the doctors checked for telltale scars they said it was “100 per cent” him.
Ukraine posthumously awarded Maksym (33) an Order of Bravery medal and he was buried in Lviv’s historic Lychakiv cemetery, where the date of death engraved on his tombstone is March 28th.
‘I dreamt that Maksym came home and was standing in the corridor dressed all in white. I asked him why he hadn’t called, and he said it had been very tough there, but now everything was all right’
“It’s not clear when Maksym was killed. The death certificate said April, but we chose March 28th because my wife and I both dreamt about him that night, when I was in Kyiv and she was in Bukovel in the Carpathian mountains,” Volodymyr explains.
“I dreamt that Maksym came home and was standing in the corridor dressed all in white. I asked him why he hadn’t called, and he said it had been very tough there, but now everything was all right. It was so real that I got out of bed and went into the corridor to check,” he says, holding back tears. “The dream gave me hope that he was still alive.”
Officially missing
Six months on, it is still not known what happened to Molot on the mission that was Maksym’s last. He is still officially missing, and his friends cling to a remote chance that he is in captivity, so they do not want his name to be published here.
“There is only a faint hope that Molot is alive,” Volodymyr explains, “because they agreed when they went into combat that they wouldn’t be taken prisoner, and they each rigged a hand grenade so that even if they were wounded they could detonate it.”
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When Maksym was killed and Molot went missing, Russia’s troops were still in the suburbs of Kyiv, the nation’s second city of Kharkiv was under direct threat and fears remained of an assault by land or sea on the major Black Sea port of Odesa.
Through spring and summer, however, the invaders were driven back from Kyiv and Kharkiv, made little progress at high cost in Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and saw key supply lines in the south smashed by modern artillery supplied by Ukraine’s western allies.
By September, the Russians were on the run from Kharkiv region, abandoning strategic towns such as Izyum, leaving behind scores of armoured vehicles and huge stores of ammunition during a chaotic retreat, as Ukraine retook an area as big as Cyprus in just a few weeks.
It was important to him to fight for our independence, and he was glad he could do it… And I’m glad he got to hear about the success of our counteroffensive in Kharkiv
In the south, a slower Ukrainian counteroffensive was liberating villages in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Mykolaiv regions, but the fighting was harder against Russian units that were better trained and equipped than their hapless comrades in Kharkiv.
“Oleh and I fought in Popasna, Lysychansk, Severodonetsk and villages around there,” Marian says, listing places in Luhansk that were devasted by some of the fiercest battles of the war. “And later we were in Kherson region and Mykolaiv a bit.
“He always said he was a bad soldier because he had no experience, but I can tell you Oleh was a great soldier. He never refused a task or failed to complete it,” Marian recalls.
“It was important to him to fight for our independence, and he was glad he could do it… And I’m glad he got to hear about the success of our counteroffensive in Kharkiv.”
‘Died instantly’
Shortly after midday on September 12th, while using a drone to help Ukrainian artillery target enemy positions in Kherson region, Oleh was killed when a Russian 152mm shell landed a few metres from him.
‘It might seem weird to a civilian but we used to joke about war and death, about where we’d be buried or what flowers people would bring. It’s a way of coping’
“There was no way to save him,” says Marian, who was in Kyiv for training that day. “The only positive thing I can say – because he’s not the first friend I’ve lost – is that he died instantly, without suffering.”
Oleh (35) was buried a week later in the same Lviv cemetery as Maksym, after a funeral at the same garrison church in the historic heart of the city, which happens to be just around the corner from a pub that was the five friends’ favourite place to drink.
“It might seem weird to a civilian but we used to joke about war and death, about where we’d be buried or what flowers people would bring. It’s a way of coping, and the only thing you really worry about is what will happen to your relatives if you die,” Marian says.
“But we weren’t ready for Maksym’s death and I wasn’t ready for Oleh’s death.”
Despite the pain and the losses, it’s much worse to live with millions of your people under occupation
Kyiv and Moscow claim to have killed tens of thousands of each other’s troops, but neither discloses credible figures for their own losses. It is clear, however, that just as Russia’s disastrous invasion has cost it a huge amount in blood and treasure, so the victories of Ukraine’s defence and current counterattack have come at a huge human price.
“It’s very hard,” says Ulyana, whose husband Volodymyr, like his friend Marian, is still fighting with the 24th Mechanised Brigade.
“History shows that the losses in a counteroffensive are very high – that’s the price of liberated land. But despite the pain and the losses, it’s much worse to live with millions of your people under occupation, when we see how they are being mistreated and tortured and killed. We have an obligation to free our citizens from this.”
‘Price of freedom’
At 26, Marian was the youngest of the five friends, and he spoke to The Irish Times as he prepared to return to the front after training with a new type of drone.
“Oleh was my best friend. If I needed something, I would call him and he would call me, so this is a very big loss for me. Unfortunately, this blood is the price of our freedom,” he explains.
“I’m sorry he couldn’t invite me to Donetsk like he wanted. But I hope I’ll live long enough to put Ukraine’s flag above his house and Oleh will see that Donetsk is ours.”
