‘My dear son’: the Ukrainian soldier who came back from the dead | Ukraine

It was announced that Nazar Daletskyi died in May 2023. Authorities told his mother, Nataliia, that the DNA match left no room for suspicion. Ukrainian soldier Nazar, who voluntarily joined the front in the first weeks of the war, became another victim of the Russian occupation.

Nazar’s body was buried in the cemetery of his hometown. In the months after the funeral, Nataliia visited the grave at least once a week; first to cry, and then to silently meditate, remembering his only son.

A few weeks ago, almost three years after the funeral, Nazar was released from a Russian prison as part of a prisoner exchange. Shortly after getting off the bus and stepping onto Ukrainian territory, he was given a mobile phone.

The moment Nataliia heard her son’s voice again was captured by a village official on grainy cellphone video that showed raw emotional power. “God, I’ve been waiting for you for so long, my precious child,” she said, moaning in a mixture of surprise and joy. “Do you have arms, legs, is everything in place?”

The video went viral in Ukraine, and the unexpected happy ending touched a nerve in a country hungry for good news. But the positive outcome came after a traumatic journey for both mother and son.

A month after that phone call, Nataliia welcomed the Guardian to her neat cottage in the village of Velykyi Doroshiv, west of Lviv. The walls were decorated with brightly colored religious paintings; A large passport photo of Nazar, printed after the funeral, hung proudly in the living room. Over cups of cardamom-infused coffee, he told the story from the beginning.

He said Nazar, born in 1979, was a sweet child who loved to hug. But “the 1990s were tough” and he left school before qualifying. She married and had a daughter, but the relationship did not last long and she returned to her family. When Russian proxy forces launched a conflict in Donbas in 2014, he signed up for the fight and served four rotations in the east in the following years. In the meantime, he did odd jobs, construction and renovation works.

Following Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he volunteered in the local military unit. He was turned down twice, but the third time they accepted him despite some health problems. He left Velykyi Doroshiv for the front in Donbas on Easter weekend.

He called home every day; the conversation usually lasted only a few seconds. He would say, “Mom, I’m alive” without saying where he was. But by the end of the second week, he could see things were heating up. He told him that the incoming fire was so intense that he and his comrades were trapped in a trench and unable to move.

The next day, that is, Sunday, Nazar did not call at the usual time. Nataliia was walking around the house looking at her phone. It finally rang around midnight, but when he answered it wasn’t Nazar on the phone.

“Your son has been taken prisoner,” a voice said.

“So who are you?” he asked.

“I’m the one who took him.”

Then the line was cut.

Over the past four years, Nataliia has begun an exhausting cycle in which thousands of Ukrainian families have been shuttling between government offices and NGOs, filling out forms, answering questions, trying to get information about where the Russians are holding their son. Nobody had an answer.

Finally, in May 2023, he received a call from a Ukrainian official in Kharkiv who gave him the worst news. Nazar was dead. He died last September on his 44th birthday. In a series of telephone conversations, details emerged: a convoy of cars came under fire in the Donetsk region; Nazar was one of many Ukrainian soldiers in civilian clothes in one of the cars.

It was unclear how Nazar joined the convoy, and Nataliia at first told the woman she did not believe the story. Nazar was supposed to be in a Russian prison somewhere and none of this made sense. But the woman was determined and was probably tired of dealing with relatives who refused to accept evidence that their loved ones were dead. “The DNA is a clear match,” he told Nataliia. “If you don’t want to take his remains, we can bury him here.”

The thought of her son’s grave being far away led Nataliia to embark on a journey of acceptance: “So I said, ‘Okay, if he’s really my son, if his DNA really matches, we’ll take him back.’”

The remains were brought to Velykyi Doroshiv in two sacks. A military uniform was covered over them in the coffin. Nataliia also put some of Nazar’s belongings inside. “I put a tracksuit, a smart jacket and some nice shoes… and gave him something to eat. I thought the poor boy was being held captive, he was probably hungry. I put biscuits, chocolates, things like that,” he said.

Nataliia remembers only the vaguest memories of the funeral at the local cemetery: a crowd of villagers there to pay their respects, eight priests praying, a military band leading a funeral march. Nazar was buried next to his father, who died three years ago.

Nazar didn’t like having his photo taken, but Nataliia found an old passport photo from some official documents, enlarged it and hung it on the wall next to a painting of the baby Jesus. He distributed his clothes and belongings to friends and relatives, leaving only one gray sweater as a souvenir. In May 2024, he received a document signed by Ukrainian chief of staff Oleksandr Syrksyi granting Nazar a posthumous military honor.

This loss took an emotional and physical toll on Nataliia. He was tired of talking, his blood pressure frequently rose, and he was hospitalized several times. But slowly he started to accept this situation. He prayed for Nazar’s soul in church every Sunday and often visited the cemetery.

However, what bothered him was that he never saw Nazar in his dreams. “During the three years and nine months he was away, I never dreamed of him. Can you imagine? I was crying at the grave: ‘Why don’t you come to me in my sleep?’ But he never came.”

One day last September, Nataliia’s niece came to visit and told her to sit down and prepare for some news. He said that two prisoners of war had returned from Russia and that they had both seen Nazar alive last year. Nataliia peppered her niece with questions. “I was crying and screaming with joy, but I thought I wouldn’t believe it until I heard his voice,” she said.

Nataliia went to the police and got new DNA samples. Maybe they asked if she had given birth to another son because there was no other explanation for the DNA match. He told them he had a son and a daughter and that was it. “I think I would remember giving birth to another child… Anything would have been possible if the father had the DNA match, but I had this one,” she said.

In the new year, Ukraine’s POW coordination center contacted Nataliia to confirm that Nazar was alive and still being held in Russia. In early February she was told that she was expected to be included in an exchange program scheduled for the next day, but it was only when she was able to speak to him on the phone after his release that she became convinced that her son was indeed still alive.

Unaware that his family had spent the last three years thinking he was dead, Nazar misunderstood the volunteers who welcomed him on the exchange bus when they tried to explain the situation. At first he thought they were trying to explain that his mother died while he was in captivity. He said he wanted to send a message to Nataliia through a fellow inmate who could arrange phone messages in exchange for money, but he couldn’t remember her phone number.

A month later, Nazar, who is still living in a rehabilitation center in another region of Ukraine, has not yet been reunited with his mother. They have video calls at least once a day, and although he often implies that he was beaten in these conversations, he does not dwell on what happened in prison. Many Ukrainian POWs reported being subjected to arbitrary violence, humiliation, and torture while in Russian captivity.

“His legs hurt a lot and he keeps hearing noises. But his head is fine, I can see that when I talk to him,” Nataliia said.

She can’t wait for him to come home and prepares a list of things to cook for their first meal: With milk. zatirka her always favorite soup, stuffed cabbage and potato pancakes. He thinks back to the hug she gave him as a young man when he returned home after working abroad for two years in the early 2000s. “I tell him: ‘As soon as I come back, I will hug you as much as you hugged me back then.’”

A mystery still remains: Who are the remains that were mistakenly identified as Nazar’s? Maybe a family somewhere is hopeful about the fate of their missing relative and may soon receive bad news. After the Evil Eye reappeared, the remains were exhumed and sent to a laboratory for retesting. The results will be announced in the coming weeks.

The ground where Nazar’s grave lies in the Velykyi Doroshiv cemetery still looks freshly churned. Nearby, discarded on the ground, is a splintered wooden cross lying next to the grave, and a metal board painted yellow-blue like the Ukrainian flag. It bears a popular motto for those who fell in the war against Russia: “Heroes do not die,” a testament to the enduring nature of memory.