Olga and Dmytro wanted a child. ” We were happy, breathes the 22-year-old woman, her gaze extinguished. But the war destroyed everything. » Dmytro Kovalov was the same age as her. It was ” gasoline “ of his life. Engaged in the army in 2018, he was killed in May 2022 in the explosion of a mine with seven other soldiers from his unit, while they were trying to recover the body of one of their companions, who died on the battlefield, in the Kharkiv region. This June 23, in an aid center for the armed forces in downtown Chernivtsi, in the westernmost part of Ukraine, the portrait of Dmytro is framed on one of the walls.
In addition to supporting the relatives of the soldiers deployed on the front line which ravages the country from east to south, hundreds of kilometers from Chernivtsi, Olga Kovalova spends her days in the central cemetery. If her visits to Dmytro’s grave are in the middle of other funerals, then she stops. When the procession passes “I feel like I have to put my knee on the ground to feel that we are all together, she says. All Ukrainians share this feeling of suffering. And those who have lost someone are no longer afraid of anything. »
The war that has been raging for more than sixteen months has spared no province of Ukraine, according to the latest survey by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), published on Thursday 29 June. According to the conclusions of this study, 78% of Ukrainians have close relatives or friends who have been injured or killed since the start of the Russian invasion, civilians and soldiers alike.
In his office in the pretty Austro-Hungarian center of Chernivtsi, with 260,000 pre-war inhabitants, the deputy head of the regional administration explains that this backward city, where the streets are crowded, can give the impression that its inhabitants live “an almost normal life”. “But let’s be clear, slice Mykhailo Pavliuk, we have soldiers’ funerals every day. »
In the central square, where a statue of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko stands, 100 portraits of soldiers from the region are displayed along a huge wall in the colors of the national flag, blue and yellow. “These are the dead of the Donbass war, explains the assistant. For the dead since February 24, 2022, we plan to display their portraits all over the wall. » Difficult to estimate the losses of the Ukrainian army, which remain a taboo subject. But, for the Chernivtsi region, about 890,000 inhabitants, the smallest of the country’s twenty-four provinces, the media suspended lists at least 645 soldiers killed in sixteen months based on condolences and funeral announcements on social networks.
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