Nazar Daletskyi was declared dead in May 2023. The DNA match left no room for doubt, authorities told his mother, Nataliia. Nazar, a Ukrainian soldier who volunteered for the front in the first weeks of the war, had become another victim of the Russian invasion.
Nazar’s remains were buried in the cemetery of his hometown. In the months after the funeral, Nataliia visited the grave at least once a week, at first to cry and then to contemplate in silence, remembering her only son.
A few weeks ago, almost three years after the funeral, Nazar was freed from a Russian prison as part of a prisoner exchange. Shortly after getting off the bus and entering Ukrainian territory, he was given a mobile phone.
The moment Nataliia heard her son’s voice again was captured by a village official, in a grainy mobile phone video of raw emotional power. “My God, how long have I waited for you, my precious daughter,” he said, crying with a mixture of surprise and joy. “Do you have arms, legs, is everything in its place?”
The video went viral in Ukraine and the unexpected happy ending struck a chord in a country hungry for good news. But the positive result came after a traumatic journey for both mother and son.
A month after that phone call, Nataliia welcomed the Guardian to her pretty cottage in the village of Velykyi Doroshiv, near the western city of Lviv. The walls were decorated with brightly colored religious paintings; In the living room, a large portrait of Nazar, printed after the funeral, hung in a place of honor. Over cups of cardamom coffee, he told the story from the beginning.
Born in 1979, she said, Nazar was a sweet boy who liked hugs. But the “90s were difficult” and he left school without qualifications. She married and had a daughter, but the relationship did not last and she returned to live with her parents. When Russian proxy forces launched a conflict in the Donbass in 2014, he enlisted to fight and served four rotations in the east over the following years. In the meantime, he did small jobs, construction and renovation work.
In February 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he volunteered in the local military unit. Twice he was rejected, but the third time he was accepted despite some medical problems. On Easter weekend he left Velykyi Doroshiv for the front lines in Donbass.
He called home every day; the conversation usually lasted only a few seconds. “Mom, I’m alive,” he said, without saying where he was. But at the end of the second week, he realized that things were getting complicated. He told her that the incoming fire was so intense that he was trapped in a trench with his comrades, unable to move.
The next day, Sunday, Nazar did not call at the usual time. Nataliia walked around the house, looking at her phone. It finally rang around midnight, but when he answered it was not Nazar who was on the phone.
“Your son has been taken prisoner,” said a voice.
“And who are you?” she asked.
“I’m the guy who took him.”
Then the line went dead.
Nataliia began a grueling circuit that thousands of Ukrainian families have traveled over the past four years, shuttling between government offices and NGOs, filling out forms, answering questions, trying to get some information about where the Russians were holding their son. Nobody had answers.
Finally, in May 2023, he received a call from a Ukrainian official in Kharkiv, who gave him the worst news. Nazar was dead. He had died the previous September, when he turned 44 years old. In a series of phone calls the details came to light: a convoy of cars in the Donetsk region had been attacked; Nazar was one of several Ukrainian soldiers in one of the cars, disguised as civilians.
It was unclear how Nazar had ended up in the convoy, and at first Nataliia told the woman that she did not believe the story. Nazar was supposed to be somewhere in a Russian prison and none of this made sense. But the woman stood her ground, presumably 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 the remains, we can bury him here.”
The thought of her son’s grave being far away led Nataliia down the path of acceptance: “I said, ‘Okay, if it’s really my son, if the DNA really matches, we’ll take him back.’”
The remains arrived at Velykyi Doroshiv in two sacks. In the coffin, they were covered in a military uniform. Nataliia also put some of Nazar’s possessions inside. “I put him in a tracksuit, a smart jacket and some nice shoes… and gave him something to eat. I thought the poor boy was a prisoner, he was probably hungry. I gave him cookies, chocolates, things like that,” she said.
Of the funeral, held in the local cemetery, Nataliia retains only the faintest memories: a crowd of villagers there to pay their respects, eight priests singing prayers, a military band playing a funeral march. Nazar was buried next to his father, who died three years earlier.
Nazar hadn’t liked having his photo taken, but Nataliia found an old portrait from some official documents and enlarged it to place it on the wall next to a painting of the baby Jesus. She gave away her clothes and possessions to friends and family, and kept a single gray sweater as a souvenir. In May 2024, he received a document, signed by the head of the Ukrainian army, Oleksandr Syrksyi, granting Nazar a posthumous military honor.
The loss took an emotional and physical toll on Nataliia. She was exhausted from the conversation, had frequent blood pressure spikes, and ended up in the hospital several times. But little by little he began to accept it. He prayed for Nazar’s soul every Sunday in church and visited the cemetery frequently.
However, one thing that continued to bother her was that she never saw Nazar in her dreams. “In the three years and nine months he was away, I never dreamed of him even once. Can you imagine that? I was crying at the grave, saying, ‘Why don’t you come to me while I 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. Two prisoners of war had returned from Russia, he said, and both said they had seen Nazar alive last year. Nataliia peppered her niece with questions. “I was crying with joy, I was screaming, but I thought that until I hear his voice I won’t believe it,” he said.
Nataliia went to the police, where new DNA samples were taken. They asked her if, perhaps, she had given birth to another child, because there was no other explanation for the DNA match. She told them she had a son and a daughter and that was it. “I think I would remember giving birth to another child… If the DNA match was with the father, then anything could be possible, but it was with me,” she said.
In the new year, Ukraine’s prisoner of war coordination center contacted Nataliia to confirm that Nazar was alive and still detained in Russia. In early February, she was told he was expected to be included in an exchange planned for the next day, but it wasn’t until she was able to speak to him by phone after his release that she was convinced her son was actually still alive.
Nazar had no idea that his family had spent the last three years thinking he was dead, and he didn’t quite understand when the volunteers who met him on the exchange bus tried to explain the situation to him. At first he thought they were trying to tell him that his mother had died while he was in captivity. He wanted to send a message through a fellow prisoner who could arrange phone messages in exchange for money, he told Nataliia, but he couldn’t remember his phone number.
A month later, Nazar is still living in a rehabilitation center in another region of Ukraine and has yet to be reunited with his mother. They make video calls at least once a day, and in those conversations he does not dwell on what happened in prison, although he has alluded to frequent beatings. Most Ukrainian prisoners of war have reported suffering arbitrary violence, humiliation and torture while held captive in Russia.
“His legs hurt a lot and he always hears noises. But he’s fine in the head, I can see it when I talk to him,” Nataliia said.
She can’t wait for him to come home and is preparing a list of things she will cook for his first meals: milk zatirka soup he always liked: stuffed cabbage leaves and potato pancakes. She thinks about the hug he gave her when she was young, when she returned home after two years working abroad in the early 2000s. “I tell him, ‘As soon as you come back, I’m going to hug you as tight as you hugged me then.’”
A mystery remains: whose remains were mistakenly identified as those of Nazar? Perhaps somewhere a family is clinging to hope about the fate of their missing relative and will soon receive bad news. After Nazar’s reappearance, the remains were exhumed and sent to a laboratory for repeat tests. The results will be known in the coming weeks.
At the Velykyi Doroshiv cemetery, the earth where Nazar’s grave once stood still looks freshly turned. Nearby, lying on the ground, is the splintered wooden cross that had been next to the grave, along with a metal board, painted yellow and blue like the Ukrainian flag. It bears a popular motto used for those who have fallen in the war against Russia, which is intended as a testament to the lasting nature of memory: “Heroes do not die.”
