Stepan Chubenko was a goalkeeper. He played for the youth team of FC Kramatorsk. He dreamed of being a professional footballer. He took care of the children at the local orphanage with his friends, bringing them toys and books and sweets. He had a girlfriend. They had talked about getting married someday.

In the summer of 2014, three russian-backed militants tortured him for a week and shot him three times in the head in a village near Donetsk.

His killers offered to spare his life if he would side with the so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic.”

He refused.

Stepan was born on November 11, 1997, in Kramatorsk, in eastern Ukraine. He was the only child of Viktor and Stalina Chubenko. His mother’s name – Stalina – was given to her by her own parents. She is a russian citizen who had moved to Ukraine in the 1990s. This is a detail that matters, because russia has spent eleven years claiming it invaded Ukraine to protect ethnic russians and russian speakers like Stalina’s family.

The first minor child killed in Putin’s war on Ukraine was the son of a russian woman, in a russian-speaking city, raised in a russian-speaking home. Russia killed him for being Ukrainian.

When the war began in April 2014 and pro-russian forces seized Kramatorsk, Stepan was already an activist. He had been at Maidan with his friends. He had taken part in rallies for Ukraine’s territorial integrity. He brought water and food to Ukrainian soldiers when they arrived in the city. During shelling, he helped the elderly down into the shelters. He carried buckets of water to them when the city’s water supply was cut. He went into the central square and tore down the flag of the “DPR.”

His father drove him across the border to russia to keep him safe.

A month later, Stepan came back. He told his mother he refused to “hide like a rat” in times that were difficult for his country.

In late June 2014, Stepan traveled to Kyiv to see a friend. On July 23, he boarded a train to come home to Kramatorsk. He could have routed through Kharkiv, which was still under Ukrainian control. He went through Donetsk instead. We do not know why.

At the Donetsk train station, men from a russian-backed militia called the “Kerch” battalion stopped him. They saw the blue and yellow ribbon tied to his backpack. They saw the scarf of a Ukrainian football club. They arrested him.

For a week they held him. They beat him. They strangled him with a towel. One of them, even among themselves, said “let’s hurry up so he doesn’t suffer.” They told him they would let him go if he would publicly side with the “DPR” and renounce Ukraine.

He was sixteen years old. He refused.

On July 27, 2014, they took him to the village of Horbachevo-Mykhailivka, on the outskirts of Donetsk. They made him dig. Then they shot him three times in the head.

His mother spent months searching for his body. She forced the leaders of the “Donetsk People’s Republic” to admit what had happened. She forced an investigation. In 2017, a Ukrainian court sentenced all three of his killers – Vadim Pogodin, Yuriy Moskalyov, and Maksym Sukhomlynov – to life in prison, in absentia. They had fled to russia.

Russia has protected them ever since.

In 2024, Vadim Pogodin – the man who shot Stepan three times in the head – joined the russian army and was sent to fight in Ukraine again. He was wounded last summer near Bakhmut.

On October 1, 2025, eleven years after his murder, President Zelenskyy posthumously awarded Stepan Chubenko the title Hero of Ukraine. He is the youngest Hero of Ukraine in the country’s history.

Stepan kept a notebook. He called it Euromaidan With My Eyes. In it, while he was still alive, he wrote a passage that reads now as if he had known what was coming for him:

For you, I will always remain young, because I will live in the short word “memory.” The war will pass, this black smoke will dissipate, but I will no longer be physically with you. I’ll be where the blue sky begins. I will be where the sun is during the day, where the star is at night. Everything in the world is quickly forgotten – but I live as long as someone remembers me.

His mother once said that Stepan believed there were three sacred things in a person’s life: God, parents, and the Motherland. And none of them can be betrayed.

A sixteen-year-old boy. A goalkeeper. A son. A boyfriend. A volunteer for an orphanage. A child who wrote his own elegy before russia murdered him for a blue and yellow ribbon.

He asked only to be remembered.

So we remember him.

Stepan Chubenko was the first child russia killed in this war.

He was not the last.

Glory to Stepan Chubenko.

Glory to all the children russia has taken from us.

Glory to Ukraine.

Heroes of Ukraine is a series profiling the men and women who have given their lives or their freedom to defend Ukraine. Read the others here.

She said: Because they can. Because the world has allowed them to.

Her name is Yuliya Paievska. The world knows her as Taira – her call sign, taken from a character in a video game. She is 57 years old. She is a graphic designer by profession and the president of one of Ukraine’s Aikido federations. In March 2022, she was a volunteer medic in Mariupol. By the time russia was finished with her, she had lost 20 pounds, three months of her life, and the part of herself that still believed the world might intervene to stop what she had seen.

She had been a medic since 2014. She stood with the protesters at the Maidan, treating the wounded. When the war in Donbas began, she went east. Eventually she joined the Armed Forces. By February 2022, when russia launched the full-scale invasion, Taira was in Mariupol with a body camera strapped to her uniform, filming what she did so the world would not be able to say later that it did not know.

She and her team worked in the emergency rooms as the city was erased around them. Medical evacuation vehicles arrived every five to ten minutes, the living and the dead piled on top of each other. Hospitals had no medicine. Surgeons slept three hours a day between operations. A seven-year-old boy died in her arms from a gunshot wound she could not stop.

She filmed it all.

In the last days before russian forces closed the city, Taira gave a memory card to journalists from the Associated Press who were among the last to escape Mariupol. They smuggled it out of Ukraine. The footage was published in May 2022. The world saw what she had seen.

By then she had been in russian captivity for two months.

She was captured on March 16, 2022, at a checkpoint. A russian guard recognized her name and singled her out. She was taken, along with her driver, to the Donetsk Pre-Trial Detention Centre. For 93 days she was held in a cell three meters by six meters, with 21 other women and ten beds.

For five days at the start, she was given no food and almost no water. The beatings, she later said, did not stop for a single minute of the three months. Russian state television aired a propaganda video of her, calling her a member of the Azov battalion – a lie. She was a civilian volunteer medic. She was told she might be executed.

At one point, her captors suggested that she kill herself.

She refused. Not because she had hope. She had none. She refused, she later said, because she wanted to see what would happen tomorrow. She wondered how far they would go in their madness.

One day, a guard called her name through the window. Take your things and go out. That was how she learned she was being exchanged.

She was freed on June 17, 2022.

In September of that year, she went to Washington and testified before the US Helsinki Commission. She described what she had seen in Mariupol. A dead child in his mother’s arms. Cars burning with people inside. Dogs that had once been pets dragging human limbs through the streets. People drinking water from puddles. Pregnant women still imprisoned in russian cells, their families not knowing if they were alive. Prisoners screaming in their cells for weeks before dying from torture.

And then she told the Congress one of her captors had asked her, during her interrogation: Do you know why I do this to you?

She answered: Because you can.

He did not expect that answer. But it was true.

She told the Americans:

They do it because they can. Because their leaders told them they had the right to do so. Because once they were allowed to. Because the world gave them such permission. The world was silent, watching the crimes of the russians in Georgia, in Syria, and so on.

Taira is alive. She is home. She is training for the Invictus Games – swimming and archery – with the body russia tried to break.

But she is not finished. She still speaks, in every capital that will hear her, for the women still in those cells. For the pregnant prisoners whose families do not know if they are alive. For the soldier beaten for three hours and thrown into a basement like a sack. For the dead of Mariupol.

She is here to remind us of what she paid to learn, and what the world still refuses to admit:

They do it because they can. Because the world has allowed them to.

Glory to Yuliya Paievska.

Glory to the heroes.

Glory to Ukraine.

Heroes of Ukraine is a series profiling the men and women who have given their lives or their freedom to defend Ukraine. Read the others here.

Twenty years later to the day, on September 4, 1985, that same poet died on a hunger strike in a Soviet labor camp deep in the russian Urals.

His name was Vasyl Stus. He was 47 years old. He is one of the greatest poets Ukraine has ever produced.

Stus was born on January 6, 1938, in a village in Vinnytsia Oblast. His family soon moved east, to the industrial city of Stalino – the city we now call Donetsk. He grew up there. He went to school there. He studied Ukrainian language and literature at the Donetsk Pedagogical Institute and graduated with honors in 1959.

This is the detail russia would prefer you forget: the poet they killed for being too Ukrainian was from Donetsk.

His mother sang him Ukrainian folk songs when he was small. That was where it began – the language he would spend his life defending, and ultimately die for.

After his protest in the Kyiv cinema in 1965, the state began watching him. He was expelled from his graduate studies. His poetry was banned. In 1972, the KGB arrested him on charges of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” He was sentenced to five years in a strict-regime labor camp and two years of exile in Magadan.

He kept writing. He translated Goethe, Rilke, Kipling, and Baudelaire into Ukrainian – from inside the camp, on whatever scraps he could find. In 1976, the KGB confiscated and destroyed roughly six hundred of his poems and translations in a single act.

He kept writing.

In 1978, from exile, he publicly renounced his Soviet citizenship. He wrote that being a Soviet citizen was the same as being a slave.

In 1979 he returned to Kyiv. He took a job in a foundry. Within months, he joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, the human rights organization the KGB considered the most dangerous form of political crime. He knew exactly what would happen. He joined anyway.

In 1980 he was arrested again. His state-assigned lawyer was a young man named Viktor Medvedchuk – the same Medvedchuk who would later become Putin’s closest Ukrainian ally, godfather to Putin’s daughter, and a russian asset traded back to moscow in a 2022 prisoner exchange. Medvedchuk did not defend Stus. He called him guilty.

Stus was sentenced to ten years in a strict-regime labor camp and five years of internal exile. He was sent to Perm-36, the most notorious political prison in the Soviet Union. He worked in solitary confinement for an entire year after a smuggled diary of his was published in the West.

He kept writing. He composed his masterpiece, Palimpsests – five hundred pages of poetry – almost entirely from inside the camp. Friends sewed his tiny, nearly illegible handwriting into the linings of clothing to smuggle his words past the guards. Some poems survived. Most did not.

On September 4, 1985, he declared a hunger strike. He died that night. The camp commandant, Major Zhuravkov, reportedly committed suicide afterward. The Soviets refused to release his body to his family until his sentence was complete. He was buried in a prison cemetery in the russian woods.

Only in 1989, with the Soviet Union collapsing, did his son Dmytro bring him home to Kyiv. He rests today in Baikove Cemetery.

In 2005, President Viktor Yushchenko posthumously awarded Vasyl Stus the title Hero of Ukraine.

In 2015, during the russian occupation of Donetsk, unknown men in the night destroyed the memorial plaque to Stus on the Faculty of Philology building of Donetsk National University – the building where he had studied. The university itself was forced to flee to Vinnytsia.

russia is still trying to erase him. It has not succeeded.

His most famous poem opens with this line, which Ukrainian soldiers now share with each other in the trenches of this war:

How good it is that I do not fear death and do not ask how heavy my cross will be, that I do not bow before judges with pleas in foreboding of any unknown reckoning.

Stus refused to bow. He refused to renounce. He refused to be silent. He refused to be russian.

For that, they killed him.

And in killing him, they made him permanent – the moral conscience of a nation that has not stopped speaking his language, has not stopped reading his poems, and has not stopped fighting the empire that murdered him.

Glory to Vasyl Stus.

Glory to the heroes.

Glory to Ukraine.

Heroes of Ukraine is a series profiling the men and women who have given their lives or their freedom to defend Ukraine. Read the others here.

Vladyslav Stepanchuk is nineteen years old. He is the youngest living Hero of Ukraine – a title President Zelenskyy awarded him this year for leading twenty-one soldiers out of a russian encirclement in the Kursk region during a four-hour firefight.

He has not yet finished his military academy training.

Vladyslav enrolled at the Bohdan Khmelnytskyi National Academy of the State Border Guard Service in July 2023, when he was seventeen years old. In April 2024, at his own request, he joined a newly formed fire support unit – an artillery role assigned to defending Ukraine’s border.

His first day in that unit was his first day under russian fire. During the shelling, the 18-year-old saved a 105mm artillery piece that had come under direct attack. That alone would have made him remarkable. It was, as it turned out, the beginning.

The story that earned him the Order of the Gold Star happened in the Kursk region of russia – the territory Ukraine entered in the summer of 2024 to bring the war home to its enemy.

Vladyslav’s unit was constructing firing positions along the Ukrainian-russian border. A russian reconnaissance drone spotted them. Within an hour, the position was hit by a combined strike – russian artillery and Lancet kamikaze drones.

The unit began withdrawing its artillery piece to a reserve position. During the maneuver, mortar fire caught them. The gun commander and the gunner were both severely wounded by shrapnel.

The eighteen-year-old changed the route. He led his comrades to the nearest tree line. Using tactical medicine he had learned in the academy, he stopped critical bleeding and prepared the wounded for evacuation.

In the tree line, he found soldiers from neighboring units who had been scattered by the strike – disoriented, out of contact with command, out of ammunition. They had nothing. He had a plan.

He partially restored communications. He took command of all the soldiers around him. He assigned each man a sector to watch and a sector to fire on. He organized the withdrawal of everyone – his own crew, the wounded, the scattered men from other units – to safer positions.

The firefight lasted four hours. He brought twenty-one Ukrainian soldiers out alive.

He later told reporters what it was like inside those four hours:

We were told that we were surrounded. In those seconds, everything I had been taught flashed through my mind. It was the first real battle of my life. Communication was lost, and we didn’t even know how close the enemy was. Everyone was scared, but someone had to take responsibility. I started acting – positioning the guys, giving instructions, counting the ammunition, assessing our chances. And when my comrades saw that the plan was working, the panic faded away.

It felt like a stone melted inside me. We laughed like children because we were alive. Only two were wounded. The rest got away with just fear.

I didn’t even realize what I had done until the calls and congratulations started pouring in.

They laughed like children because they were alive.

They were children. Vladyslav was eighteen. Most of the men he saved were barely older. This is the generation russia has forced Ukraine to put into uniform and into trenches – kids who, in any normal country, would be in their second year of university, sleeping through 9 a.m. lectures, falling in love for the first time.

Instead, on his first day in his first real battle, an eighteen-year-old Ukrainian saved twenty-one lives.

This is what russia is fighting. This is who they keep underestimating. They imagine an army of conscripts who will break, of teenagers too young and inexperienced to fight, of a nation that will eventually be exhausted into surrender. And then they meet a boy who joined the army on his eighteenth birthday, ran toward gunfire on his first day, and brought everyone home.

Vladyslav will turn twenty soon. He is still serving. He is still studying. He is still, somehow, learning how to do what he has already done.

There are thousands like him in the trenches tonight. Children with rifles, defending their country. Each one of them is the answer to the question russia keeps asking and refusing to hear:

Why won’t you surrender?

Because of him. Because of all of them.

Glory to Vladyslav Stepanchuk.

Glory to the heroes.

Glory to Ukraine.

Heroes of Ukraine is a series profiling the men and women who have given their lives or their freedom to defend Ukraine.

Before the war, he was a grain trader.

He wore suits. He owned vineyards in Zakarpattia. He collected Ukrainian art and funded its exhibition in European museums. He served on the regional council. He was a wealthy, comfortable, middle-aged businessman from Ukraine’s western edge – a city closer to Budapest than to Bakhmut.

Today, Robert Brovdi commands the most feared drone force on earth. According to The Guardian, he is the second-highest assassination target on Vladimir Putin’s list, after only President Zelenskyy. Hungary has banned him from its territory. russia has charged him with 46 separate crimes and sentenced him in absentia to life imprisonment. He works from a bunker whose walls are entirely covered with live battlefield feeds, where his pilots track and kill russian soldiers in twelve-hour shifts.

His call sign is Madyar.

It is the Ukrainian rendering of the Hungarian word Magyar – Hungarian. He is ethnically Hungarian, born in Uzhhorod on August 9, 1975, in the part of Ukraine where the borders and the languages blur. He took the call sign because it was who he was. He kept it because, in a war russia justified by claiming Ukrainians were not really a nation, the man killing the most russians was a Ukrainian Hungarian.

He volunteered on February 7, 2022 – weeks before the full-scale invasion. He went into the Territorial Defense Forces as a conscript with no military background.

His unit fought to stop the russian advance on Kyiv. He took part in the defense of Irpin, Bucha, and Borodyanka. He saw what russia did to those towns. He helped evacuate civilians from streets that would later be remembered as crime scenes.

In April 2022, his unit was sent to Kherson. There, under russian fire, he had an insight that would change the war: the modern battlefield could no longer be understood from a trench. A commander needed eyes in the sky.

He raised the money himself. He bought a fleet of commercial Chinese DJI Mavic drones – the kind hobbyists use to film weddings. He recruited a few dozen pilots. In May 2022 he founded a unit and called it Ptakhy Madyara – Madyar’s Birds.

The Birds did everything. They scouted russian positions. They corrected artillery fire. Then someone realized you could strap a grenade to a $400 drone and drop it down a tank hatch. Then someone realized you could fly the drone into the tank. The first-person-view kamikaze drone – the weapon that has defined this war and will define every war after it – was being invented in real time, in the field, by Madyar and a generation of Ukrainians like him.

His unit grew. From a few dozen pilots to a battalion. From a battalion to a brigade. The 414th Separate Brigade became the world’s first dedicated drone brigade. They fought in Bakhmut, Soledar, Avdiivka, Krynky. By 2025, Madyar’s Birds alone were responsible for roughly 8 percent of all russian armored vehicles destroyed in this war.

On May 8, 2025, President Zelenskyy awarded Robert Brovdi the title Hero of Ukraine.

On June 3, 2025, Zelenskyy appointed him commander of the newly created Unmanned Systems Forces – making Ukraine the first nation in history to establish a dedicated drone branch of its armed forces, equivalent to the Ground Forces, the Navy, or the Air Force.

The drones did what years of sanctions could not. Last month, Madyar’s drones hit the Black Sea oil terminal at Tuapse four times in two weeks. Practically everything there has burned, Madyar told The Guardian. There were similar strikes on the Baltic ports of Primorsk and Ust-Luga. Drones reached the Urals, hitting an oil refinery in Perm and fighter jets in Chelyabinsk – more than a thousand miles from the front line.

Madyar’s math is simple. Putin spends 40 percent of his $530 billion annual budget on his military. Roughly 100 million tons of russian oil, worth $100 billion, is exported every year from ports within range of Ukrainian drones. Burning ports, Madyar says, are the road to victory. They will collapse russia’s economy so it can no longer finance this expensive war.

In April, russia lost more territory than it captured for the first time since 2024. For the fifth month in a row, the Kremlin is losing more soldiers than it can recruit – 30,000 to 34,000 a month. Ukraine’s drone forces make up 2 percent of its military personnel and inflict roughly one-third of all russian casualties.

On May 9, for the first time in nearly twenty years, no tanks or missiles were rolled across Red Square at Putin’s Victory Day parade. The Kremlin was afraid. The man who frightened them into canceling it works in a bunker in Dnipro.

Madyar could strike Red Square. He has chosen not to. Why waste drones on the great wall? he told The Guardian. If you hit the energy sector or the military – that’s the best strike, on the periphery.

He has no illusions. Asked when the war might end, he was direct: I have no illusion that an end to the war is possible any time soon. If we are to speak at all, it will only be about a pause – tied to some agreement or geopolitical circumstance. That pause will only give Putin a chance to regroup. He is sick with the incurable disease of power and the desire to build a dictatorship.

Putin can be stopped only with strength. And that is why the grain trader became a soldier. The soldier became a commander. The commander became the architect of a new kind of army.

That is what Ukraine does to people. It does not produce supermen. It produces neighbors, fathers, businessmen, who, when their country is invaded, become something the invader could not have imagined.

Glory to Robert Brovdi.

Glory to the Birds of Madyar.

Glory to Ukraine.

Heroes of Ukraine is a series profiling the men and women who have given their lives or their freedom to defend Ukraine. Read the others here.

Not as a name in a news report. Not as a face on a memorial. As a friend.

Vladyslav Seniuk was killed on September 25, 2025, in Donetsk Oblast, when a russian kamikaze drone struck his armored vehicle. He was 31 years old. He left behind his wife, two young daughters, and his mother Iryna.

He wasn’t supposed to be in that vehicle. As his comrades remember it, he had volunteered to go – to help someone else. That was who he was. That is also how he was killed.

Vlad came from a family that had already paid the ultimate price. His father, Vitaliy Seniuk, was an officer in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. He was killed in 2017, defending the country in the east. Vlad’s uncle was killed defending Ukraine after that. And now Vlad.

Three men. One family. One war.

When his father died in 2017, Vlad was 23 years old. He turned to his mother and said: “Mama, you have me.”

He kept that promise for eight years.

In the first days of the full-scale invasion, he joined the territorial defense in Ivano-Frankivsk. From there his path moved – the French Foreign Legion, the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and finally the Security Service of Ukraine’s Center for Special Operations “A,” the SBU’s elite unit. He came in without combat experience and rose to lead his own group. His comrades say he became the equal of the most experienced fighters faster than anyone they had seen.

The work he did in his last year is staggering. Under his command, his group destroyed six tanks, around twenty artillery systems, more than fifty pieces of enemy equipment, and electronic warfare systems. They eliminated more than 230 occupiers. He worked deep behind enemy lines and on the line of contact, under continuous fire. He took part in the Kursk operation. He exposed russian intelligence networks. He helped capture collaborators.

His sister Yulia later told reporters: “He didn’t even hesitate. He said: who if not me?”

That sentence is the whole story.

Vlad was a Christian. He was raised in the faith, and he lived it – not as performance, not as decoration, but as the quiet ground beneath everything he did. His funeral in Ivano-Frankivsk was held at the church where he was a member. In Kyiv, where the ceremony was closed, witnesses said “half of Kyiv came to say goodbye.”

I keep returning to one line of scripture when I think of him:

“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” – John 15:13

Vlad lived by that verse, and he died by it.

On February 24, 2026 – the four-year anniversary of the full-scale invasion – President Zelenskyy posthumously awarded Vladyslav Seniuk the title Hero of Ukraine with the Order of the Gold Star. The nation’s highest honor. His mother received it. The same woman who buried her husband eight years earlier, and now her son.

I do not know how a heart survives that.

But I know what Vlad would say. He said it once already, to his mother, at 23 years old, in the rawest moment of her life:

Mama, you have me.

He cannot say it to her anymore.

So now we have to say it for him. To his mother. To his wife. To his daughters who will grow up with photographs instead of a father. To every Ukrainian family that has buried the people they loved most.

You have us.

We will remember him. We will say his name. We will write him down so that a hundred years from now, when someone asks who fought for Ukraine, who refused to look away, who said who if not me and meant it with his life – they will find Vladyslav Seniuk.

Captain. Husband. Father. Son. Brother. Friend.

Hero of Ukraine.

Glory to Vlad.

Glory to the heroes.

Glory to Ukraine.

Heroes of Ukraine is a series profiling the men and women who have given their lives or their freedom to defend Ukraine. Read the others here.

Slava Ukraini.

Then the gunfire came.

Oleksandr Matsievskyi was born on May 10, 1980, in Chișinău, Moldova. He lived there for 28 years before moving to Nizhyn, a quiet city in Ukraine’s Chernihiv region. He worked an ordinary job. He was a husband to his wife, a son to his mother Paraska, a father to his boy Mykhailo. Nothing about him suggested he would become a name the world would remember.

On the first day of russia’s full-scale invasion, he went to the recruitment office. They turned him away. He came back. On March 11, 2022, he was finally enlisted into the 119th Territorial Defense Brigade. He trained as a sniper. By late autumn he was deployed to Bakhmut, and then to Soledar – the meat grinder where russia was throwing men into Ukrainian fire by the thousand.

On December 30, 2022, Oleksandr and four comrades were caught in a counterattack on the outskirts of Soledar. Mortar and small arms fire pinned down the reinforcements trying to reach them. Contact was lost around noon. There were no witnesses left to tell what happened next – the rest were dead or missing.

Two months later, the video appeared.

His mother recognized him in the first frame. So did his son. So did the men who had served beside him.

What the world saw was a man with nothing left. No weapon. No way out. No chance of rescue. By every measure russia understood, he had already lost.

But Oleksandr did something they could not account for.

He stood up straight. He smoked. He looked them in the eye. And before they pulled the trigger, he gave them his answer – the only one that mattered.

Slava Ukraini.

The voices on the video, in russian, snarl back: Die, bitch.

They thought they were ending his life. They were making him permanent.

Within days, his words were repeated by presidents and prime ministers. Schoolchildren learned his name. Streets in Ukraine were renamed. A statue went up in his hometown. President Zelenskyy gave him the title Hero of Ukraine, posthumously, and his mother Paraska accepted the medal through tears. She told reporters her son had said to her, more than once: Mum, I will never let them capture me. She said it wasn’t a slogan. It was something inside him – a core.

I keep coming back to that word. Core.

Because what Oleksandr showed in that trench wasn’t bravery in the action-movie sense. He wasn’t charging a machine gun nest. He wasn’t saving anyone. He was already lost, and he knew it. What he had left was the question every Ukrainian has been forced to answer since February 2022: who are you, when there’s nothing left to lose?

His answer was two words long.

This is what russia has never understood about us, and what it still doesn’t understand today. They imagine we fight because we are commanded to, or paid to, or tricked into it. They cannot conceive of a people who fight because the alternative – living on their knees, in their world, by their rules – is worse than dying on their feet.

Oleksandr was 42. He had a wife. He had a 17-year-old son. He had every reason in the world to beg, to bargain, to say whatever the men with rifles wanted to hear.

He chose differently.

That choice is the inheritance he left us – every Ukrainian who came after, every soldier in a trench tonight, every child who will grow up in a free Ukraine because men like him refused.

Glory to Oleksandr Matsievskyi.

Glory to the heroes.

Glory to Ukraine.

Heroes of Ukraine is a series profiling the men and women who have given their lives or their freedom to defend Ukraine. Read the others here.