Vira Krivochenko knelt on the floor near the front door of her house and begged, “Please don’t take my son.”
It was perhaps a tragic coincidence of fate that Valeri arrived on the scene at the same time as the “evil spirits”, as she called them. He was in the city of Makhariv delivering food and medicine to Vira and his neighbors — elderly people who couldn’t or didn’t want to run away from the Russians.
Vira looked up. Russian soldiers were a few feet away, spray-painting “V” symbols on their car to avoid friendly fire as they drove away. That’s when one of them — just a boy, says Vira, “about my grandson’s age — took out a walkie-talkie.
“A car is about to arrive, don’t shoot it,” he said. Vira stood up with the help of her cane and begged aloud. “Please don’t take my son.” Actually, Valeri Kuksa was her son-in-law, but she called him her son. The Russians took it away. The young soldier raised his weapon partially. “Go back inside, Granny,” he said. “He’s just going to help us push the car out.”
But Valeri was put in the driver’s seat of her car and had a gun pointed at her head, says Vira. She still expected him to look back. It was the last time she saw him.
In any village west of Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, where the Russian army terrorized the civilian population for a month, you can hear a story about someone who has disappeared. A brother who went to get gas for a friend and never came home. A father who left for work and disappeared. A son who, at gunpoint, has not looked back.
Before the invasion, Maria Saienko saw her father Mikola all the time — he lived a few meters away from her in the village of Hurivschina and came almost every day to see his newborn grandson. Then, one day at the beginning of the Russian occupation, he disappeared. “My father left home and never came back. And nobody saw him anywhere.”
A neighbor said he thought Mikola had gone to the neighboring village on a mission, but he couldn’t remember that for sure. Her house was exactly as he had left it.
Maria filed a police report through an automated online service and waited. All she knows is that her father, Mikola Medvid, a 56-year-old auto mechanic, left home on March 18 or 19 and never came back. “We went to the nearest and farthest villages,” she says. “He wasn’t at a friend’s house, at a checkpoint. Neither dead nor alive. It’s like he disappeared into thin air.”
‘I’ll be back’
A few kilometers away, in the village of Shpitki, Julia Zhilko was sitting in her car in her garage, looking at a photo of her brother Iakiv on her cell phone. They were very close, she says, and just a year and two weeks apart in age — 36 and 37 years, respectively — they were still living with their parents.
On March 11, a friend of Iakiv’s called to say he needed gas. “My brother is very kind. He said, ‘I’ll bring him fuel and I’ll be right back,'” he says. Julia still continues to talk about her brother in the present, despite not knowing what happened to him.
Ukrainian soldiers found Iakiv’s car, on the side of the highway, riddled with bullets. When Julia arrived at the scene, after the Russians had left, the vehicle was already completely burned. But there were no signs of a body.
“We called everywhere, made all the records possible,” he says. “They [as autoridades] got all the information — shoe size, eye color, blood type, scars, everything.”
Iakiv had no tattoos, something his mother was proud of. He was therefore classified as “no distinctive skin markings”. Julia filed the police report and joined the long list of people waiting for news.
In Makhariv, Valeri Kuksa’s family anxiously awaited news. There was still no power in the city, and Vira was sitting in the dark by the fire with her daughter Olena and her grandson Danil.
The family had filed a report with the local police, but Olena was worried that something might be wrong and that because of this, her husband would not be found. She wanted to travel to Butcha City to get information in person with the police, but there were bullet holes in the windshield of her car.
Nervously, Olena walked around the house looking for recent pictures of Valeri. She couldn’t find any prints. The house was dark and there were bullet holes in the walls and shards of glass on the floor. A mortar crashed through the roof and two others detonated in the garden, scattering shrapnel across the house.
All Olena could find were some passport photos. She put them in a folder with Valeri’s passport and got Butcha a ride. At the police station, reports of missing persons were still arriving, at least 10 a day.
Relatives of a missing person file a standard police report. Every night, the documents are taken by the police to a town an hour south, processed and loaded into a database.
There, authorities also collect photos of the dead from local morgues and post them in an open group on the messaging app Telegram, with a brief description of the body.
In Butcha, the police assured Olena that the records of her colleagues in Makhariv were in the general system and that Valeri was not on the list of identified dead. But there were at least 200 unidentified bodies in Butcha, the officers added, and he could be among them. Olena was also advised to check the morgue photos on Telegram.
On the way back to Makhariv, Olena sat silently inspecting the gruesome images. Then she started to cry. “My soul aches, not just for my husband, for all these people,” she says. After a while, she tried not to look at the pictures and just read the text in search of something that might match Valeri. Eventually, she gave up. “This is as much as I can take for now.”
Olena watched through the window as a car approached her house. Along the road, storks were nesting atop telegraph poles — a sign in Ukrainian folklore that good families occupied the houses below. But the same houses were scarred by bullet holes or completely destroyed by grenades, and the families suffered terrible suffering and loss.
She had heard stories about people taken to Belarus, to Russia; of civilians returned in prisoner exchanges in southern Ukraine. Everyone who had a missing relative seemed to have heard the same stories. Olena wanted to travel to Kiev to speak with the country’s deputy prime minister, Irina Vereschuk, who is responsible for the exchanges, but police in Butcha said no. All information about Valeri was in the right place, they said, she just had to wait.
Then, three days later, Olena’s phone rang and the woman said she was calling from Irina Vereschuk’s office. She asked if she was talking to “the wife of Valeri Kuksa”. Olena felt a tightness in her chest and replied, “Yes, it’s her.”
The woman reported that Valeri had been identified alive among the hostages in Russia. Where he was, or when Olena might see him again, she couldn’t say. But he was alive. “It’s okay,” says Olena, through tears. “He’ll come back to us. I can wait.”
