He was killed in combat, while she was pregnant
Watching the young wife grieve at his funeral last week, knowing he would never meet their unborn child, was one of the hardest things I have seen in this war so far.
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A pregnant wife kneels in front of the coffin of her husband who died in the war.
Anastasiia Fedchenko holds her head in her hands, crying for the now-lost future they had dreamed of together.
In a few weeks, Andrii Kuzmenko was supposed to hold his newborn daughter in his arms, but this will never happen. Like tens of thousands of other soldiers, he was killed by Russia.
Ukraine has been very reluctant to disclose the number of people killed in the war. The Economist, relying on leaked intelligence data, official reports, and open-source intelligence, estimated that between 60,000 and 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed during Russia's full-scale invasion. According to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, this number does not exceed 80,000.
It is impossible to estimate how many of them have young children or pregnant wives, but the number is altogether too high.
The war unleashed by Russia against Ukraine has become a tragedy for tens of thousands of families whose lives have been destroyed. This war has taken the lives of both fathers and mothers, leaving children orphaned before they are born or at an early age. The deaths create long-term consequences not only for the affected families, but also for future generations who will grow up with the pain of losing a parent they will never meet.
It’s a relatively warm January in Ukraine, but a cold wind still pierces my body from head to toe. And that's not the only reason for the chill.
The body of Andrii Kuzmenko is expected to arrive any minute.
After the paywall:
Why Ukrainian superstition holds that it was dangerous for a pregnant Anastasiia to attend her husband’s funeral.
Who Andrii was as a husband and a friend.
Why did farewell seem absurd to Myroslava at some point?
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