“The garden bore such a bountiful harvest, as if it were weeping.” In memory of Sergei Grigoriev, who was tortured while in captivity
Source: Novynarnia
Author: Bohdana Sadomska
“Dear Halochka, I’m alive and well. Everything will be fine,” Serhiy Hryhoriev will write in August 2022 in the only letter he sends to his wife from captivity.
The following year, the three women in his life—his wife Galina and daughters Yana and Oksana—will get tattoos of the last phrase they saw written in Serhiy’s own hand.
Serhiy was born in Port Arthur, Russia (Chelyabinsk Oblast). From there, the family moved to Pyriatyn in the Poltava region of Ukraine. He worked as a driver for a deep-drilling oil and gas exploration expedition. He worked as a boiler operator at the Pyriatyn oil depot and later as the deputy director for administrative affairs at the Pyriatyn Lyceum. He was also involved in business.
In 2020, he signed a contract with the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In April 2022, he was captured by enemy forces in Mariupol. On May 20, 2023, according to the Russian side, he died of a stroke. Ukrainian forensic experts, however, confirm that he was tortured—the defender’s spleen was crushed and his skull was fractured.
Read this tribute to learn what Serhiy Hryhoriev was like and how his family is coping now.
“I have 30 fingers, six ears, and three necks, because I have to clothe and shoe my girls”
“We got married a month after we met, on May 14, 1988. We started bringing in materials and building the house—and moved in by the Feast of the Intercession the following year. We lived together, thank God, for 36 years,” says Sergei’s wife, Galina.
We argued only about the household. Before they got married, Serhiy lived with his parents in an apartment, while Galina lived in a private house that required plenty of work.
“My parents ran a farm, and I was used to it. How could you have a yard without a farm? At least some chickens or geese. But Seryozha didn’t like that. He’d say, ‘What’s the point? I earn a living!’”…
Galina recalls that her husband tried to make extra money wherever and however he could. The couple ran a few stores, sold grain bran, and sold groceries from their car in the villages.
Serhiy, his wife says, didn’t know how to cook. And he didn’t like washing dishes—his wife jokes that the only time in his life he did it was when she gave birth to their second daughter.
“I was a month past my due date with Ksyusha. I was walking around and lying in the maternity ward. And he visited every day, standing under the windows in the morning and evening. On the day of the delivery, he was waiting on the stairs,” Galina recalls. “As soon as I gave birth, the doctor placed a huge bag of cherries from him on my stomach: ‘Eat them, because you won’t be able to later.’”
That evening, Serhiy came to see his girls again. He cut all the roses—with buds and leaves—from Galina’s flower bed.
He stood there with a huge armful of flowers that he could barely hold: “I want to see Ksyusha.”
He took a look and said, “A little telescope. Just her eyes.”
Dad never said no to his daughter, Galina recalls:
“One day, Ksyusha wanted red shoes. She was still little, about six years old. I started explaining that she already had a pair, but she turned to Dad and said, ‘I want them.’ Serhiy took his daughter by the hand, they went to the store, and he bought her red shoes. My husband often said, ‘I have 30 fingers, six ears, and three necks, because I have to dress and shoe my girls.’”
There’s a four-year age difference between the daughters, Yana and Oksana. The older one, Yana, takes after her mother, even though she looks like her father. The younger one, Oksana, takes after her father, even though she looks like her mother. Galina recalls: When they were little, Yana would ride her bike, and Oksana would run after her, begging for a ride. “Why won’t your daughter let mine ride with her?” Serhiy would jokingly ask his wife.
“He loved the girls very much. In the ’90s, he worked as a driver for a cooperative. He’d leave in the evening and come back in the morning. And without fail—even though times were tough—he’d bring us our favorite sweets,” Galina says. “He also made sure to please his grandchildren, Yana’s sons Paolo and George. Half our garage is filled with bikes for the boys. He bought and built everything for them.”
In the middle of the forest, where the unit was stationed, he set up a shower and placed beehives
Serhiy could do just about anything. If there was something he didn’t know how to do, he’d learn. He’d watch YouTube and build things.
“Dad even built a snowblower and a wood splitter himself. He also repaired washing machines. He’d come home from work and head straight to the garage to tinker with his equipment. It wasn’t about making money. It was more of a hobby,” says Oksana.
She adds that she and Yana, having watched their father’s skill many times, have now learned to tinker themselves: “Thanks to Dad, we’re skilled at handling household tasks.”
Even during his military service, Serhiy made life more comfortable—he built a shower in the middle of the forest where his unit was stationed. He also built beehives and caught a swarm of bees.
His family says he always put his family first and worried about them above all else.
In early February 2022, Oksana recalls, her dad came home for a day to transfer ownership of the car to her mom.
“If he hadn’t done that, it would have been incredibly difficult for us to transfer the title. Unless it were now, after we received the inheritance…” his daughter muses.
The car wasn’t new; it had been in the family for over 10 years, so the girls knew it would be hard for them to maintain it. That’s why, after Serhiy’s funeral, they sold the car. “Dad was gone, and with him went his favorite car.”
“He was happy with it”
In February 2020, Serhiy began his contract military service at military unit A1499. After his first deployment to the Joint Forces Operation zone, the girls asked him to stay home. Next came training in Lviv.
“He was learning to drive a ‘Kozak’ armored vehicle. He called, sounding so happy: ‘There are as many buttons here as in an airplane!’” recalls Oksana.
Serhiy signed a contract and began his service at military unit A1499
And on New Year’s Eve 2022, he told his family that he was leaving on January 4: “They’re taking me on as a driver.” He assured them it wouldn’t be for long—just until the new recruits were trained.
Serhiy never complained; he always stayed calm himself and reassured others. On the front lines, he also often joked: “The main thing is to stay close to the kitchen”; “I take bagels and feed the mice.”
Now Galina often asks the girls: if she had asked her husband not to join the military, would he have listened? Oksana replies, “Mom, he was happy doing that.”
In 2021, during a deployment to the Joint Forces Operation zone, Serhiy was awarded the “Cossack Cross” of the Third Degree
To his comrades-in-arms, most of whom were much younger, Serhiy—whose call sign was “Yuriyovych”—was like a father. Oksana recalls how, even during his first deployment to the combat zone, her father became friends with a soldier named Yarik. Later, Yarik visited the Hryhorievs’ home on more than one occasion. When Yarik fell ill after returning from the front and was referred to a hospital in Kyiv, he asked Yuriyovych for a ride.
“He came out of the hospital and said, ‘Yuriyovych, they need my parents’ information here.’ The boy was an orphan. He asked if he could list Serhiy as his father. That’s how much they trusted him,” his family recounts.
“It wasn’t until later that we found out that soup in Mariupol was made from pigeons.”
“How are you?” Galina dialed her husband’s number when full-scale war broke out.
– “Everything’s fine,” he replied as usual.
“There are explosions in Kyiv!”—her daughter, who lives in the capital, had just called her.
“Okay,” he said, and hung up.
Until early March 2022, Serhiy called once or twice a day. Just for a moment. “How are you? I’m fine. Go ahead.”
Three “Cossacks”—each manned by a driver and two Javelin operators—headed out under their commander’s leadership to a position near Mariupol.
When the Russians overran them, all ten were rescued by marines from the 36th Brigade named after Rear Admiral Bilinsky. A freed prisoner of war who had been with that group at the Illich Plant in Mariupol told Oksana about this.
There was no contact with Serhiy for three days. Eventually, he called: “I’m fine. How are you?”
…And then another few days of uncertainty. That’s when Oksana found their commander’s mother, Larisa, on Facebook (they’ve stayed in touch with her ever since). Her son hadn’t called her either.
Then Svitlana, whose husband served alongside Serhiy, called Halyna. The couple is also from Pyriatyn. Kostyantchik, as Yuriyovych called him, connected to Starlink and reported: everything was fine with them.
Later, one night, Oksana recalls, her dad’s number appeared on WhatsApp, followed by a “+” sign.
“Daughter, just text me—don’t wait for me to read it. I’ll read it when I get a signal,” Oksana quotes her dad as saying.
And she wrote, telling him everything—what they’d bought, what they’d cooked. She kept his mind off things with stories from home.
“We asked if he’d eaten. Once he replied, ‘soup.’ Only later did we find out that nothing was working in Mariupol at the time—there were no communications—and that the soup had been made from pigeons.”
“They beat everyone. It didn’t matter if you were young or old.”
On April 12, 2022, Serhiy Hryhoriev was taken prisoner by the Russians. Three days later, the military registration and enlistment office notified his family, and in May, the International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed it.
In August, Serhiy’s daughters received a letter through the National Information Bureau: “Dear Halochka, I’m alive and well. Everything will be fine.” Oksana wrote more than one letter to her dad; however, according to those released from captivity, he never received any of them.
The young woman reached out to various Russian Telegram channels, searching for information about her father. In November, she managed to find a video featuring him. From it, she learned that her dad was in Kamyshen, in the Volgograd region. That he no longer had any teeth—even though he’d had all of them before. That he’d lost a lot of weight. That his eyesight was poor.
Galina then told her daughter: “If only he’d come home. I’ll be his eyes; I’ll take care of him.” Now she quietly adds, “It wasn’t meant to be…”
Serhiy Hryhoriev participated twice in the Joint Forces Operation in eastern Ukraine
Serhiy Hryhoriev fought in Afghanistan, so the girls understood: he was mentally strong. And they hoped: if only he could hold up physically.
“At the end of that video, Dad said, ‘I hope I’ll see you again.’
But now it seems to me that even then he knew he wouldn’t see us again. He understood where it was all heading.”
Oksana is truly grateful that this video exists, because it allowed her to see her father one last time.
In August 2023, the Red Cross called the soldier’s family a second time and said, “His condition is satisfactory.”
“We clung to hope, but he was no longer among the living….” By that time, his family had learned from a fellow prisoner who had been released that Serhiy was being held in Kamensk-Shakhtinsky, in the Rostov region.
On January 3, 2024, a large-scale prisoner exchange took place. Oksana messaged one of the released prisoners when he appeared in the chat group for relatives of captives who are or had been in Kamensk-Shakhtinsky.
“I sent him photos and videos. He read them but didn’t reply. For two days, I stared at the message and thought: Why aren’t you answering me? You read it. Some people wrote: ‘No, I didn’t see it’; ‘No, I don’t know.’ But here—nothing. I already had a bad feeling.”
At 5 a.m. on January 7, Oksana received a reply from him: “Yuriyovych has died.”
A forensic examination would later reveal: Serhiy had been tortured to death. They crushed his spleen. They fractured his skull.
Oksana will call the young man again—the one who, in the summer of 2023, told her where her father was. He’ll say: “They beat them badly. It didn’t matter if you were old or young. They beat everyone.”
After learning of her father’s death, Oksana got a tattoo with the words “Everything will be okay”—from that letter. The only one from captivity and the last one from her father. After the funeral, identical tattoos appeared on Yana’s and Galina’s arms.
Serhiy’s commander, like Kostyantchik, remains in captivity. Serhiy’s family is waiting for their return.
The girls got tattoos of the last phrase
Serhiy wrote
Serhiy Hryhoriev’s date of death was May 20, 2023; the location was Kamensk-Shakhtinsk. He was 59 years old. His body was identified via a DNA test in May 2024. The soldier was buried in Pyriatyn.
“I received a message from the ‘Search for POWs’ project, launched by human rights activists, lawyers, and volunteers: according to an official letter from the Russian side, the body was returned in 2023, immediately after his death.
Of course, I don’t believe the Russian side. However, I want to find out from the Coordination Headquarters the date my father’s body was returned. At first, I was told verbally, and then in a response to my request, that it had been returned in March 2024. But they did not provide me with the body number, as I have requested.
It’s a big question for me: where was my father’s body for over a year? I’m grateful that my father is buried in his homeland, but I could have at least seen him, even in death—instead, I saw only a coffin. “My sister saw a photo—it was a skeleton,” says Oksana. She is now seeking the truth with the help of two lawyers.
Everything passes, but love remains
Serhiy planted a large orchard with more than 50 fruit trees.
“A neighbor sold a plot of land where he had started building a house. We bought it, cleared it, and planted a huge orchard,” recalls Galina. Back on January 1, 2022, before her husband left for the combat zone for the second time, they pruned the apple trees.
The harvest that year was so bountiful, says Galina, that she didn’t know who else to share the fruit with. “New apples were already ripening, but we still had last year’s left. It was as if the orchard was crying for him,” says his wife.
Now Galina prunes the trees her husband planted herself and plants new ones.
“Maybe it’s getting a little crazy, but when I spend a long time looking for a specific tool, I say, ‘Sergey, help me.’ And I find it.”
In two years, Galina has planted nearly a hundred rose bushes. She transplanted the currants to make more room for the flowers. At first, she planted them for Serhiy, waiting for him to return from captivity…
“I thought he’d come back and be overjoyed. I planted four rows of roses… But he’s not here…”
Galina and her daughters bring the roses to Sergei’s grave. And they recite lines from a poem by Lyudmila Murina:
“And you, plant flowers…
Even if tomorrow is the end of the world.
Plant a garden. Let it grow up to the stars.
Serve the earth. Cherish, love, nurture.
It will reward the children
And to all who wish and know how to live freely.
Plant yellow flowers, blue ones—all kinds,
So that they may carpet all the paths,
Along which our fearsome,
The best soldiers
in the world Home, to their families, and to happiness,
Which we are all praying to God for right now.
Sow bread and flowers—in defiance of adversity.
Sow plenty, so there will be enough for everyone…”
Author: Bohdana Sadomska
“Dear Halochka, I’m alive and well. Everything will be fine,” Serhiy Hryhoriev will write in August 2022 in the only letter he sends to his wife from captivity.
The following year, the three women in his life—his wife Galina and daughters Yana and Oksana—will get tattoos of the last phrase they saw written in Serhiy’s own hand.
Serhiy was born in Port Arthur, Russia (Chelyabinsk Oblast). From there, the family moved to Pyriatyn in the Poltava region of Ukraine. He worked as a driver for a deep-drilling oil and gas exploration expedition. He worked as a boiler operator at the Pyriatyn oil depot and later as the deputy director for administrative affairs at the Pyriatyn Lyceum. He was also involved in business.
In 2020, he signed a contract with the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In April 2022, he was captured by enemy forces in Mariupol. On May 20, 2023, according to the Russian side, he died of a stroke. Ukrainian forensic experts, however, confirm that he was tortured—the defender’s spleen was crushed and his skull was fractured.
Read this tribute to learn what Serhiy Hryhoriev was like and how his family is coping now.
“I have 30 fingers, six ears, and three necks, because I have to clothe and shoe my girls”
“We got married a month after we met, on May 14, 1988. We started bringing in materials and building the house—and moved in by the Feast of the Intercession the following year. We lived together, thank God, for 36 years,” says Sergei’s wife, Galina.
We argued only about the household. Before they got married, Serhiy lived with his parents in an apartment, while Galina lived in a private house that required plenty of work.
“My parents ran a farm, and I was used to it. How could you have a yard without a farm? At least some chickens or geese. But Seryozha didn’t like that. He’d say, ‘What’s the point? I earn a living!’”…
Galina recalls that her husband tried to make extra money wherever and however he could. The couple ran a few stores, sold grain bran, and sold groceries from their car in the villages.
Serhiy, his wife says, didn’t know how to cook. And he didn’t like washing dishes—his wife jokes that the only time in his life he did it was when she gave birth to their second daughter.
“I was a month past my due date with Ksyusha. I was walking around and lying in the maternity ward. And he visited every day, standing under the windows in the morning and evening. On the day of the delivery, he was waiting on the stairs,” Galina recalls. “As soon as I gave birth, the doctor placed a huge bag of cherries from him on my stomach: ‘Eat them, because you won’t be able to later.’”
That evening, Serhiy came to see his girls again. He cut all the roses—with buds and leaves—from Galina’s flower bed.
He stood there with a huge armful of flowers that he could barely hold: “I want to see Ksyusha.”
He took a look and said, “A little telescope. Just her eyes.”
Dad never said no to his daughter, Galina recalls:
“One day, Ksyusha wanted red shoes. She was still little, about six years old. I started explaining that she already had a pair, but she turned to Dad and said, ‘I want them.’ Serhiy took his daughter by the hand, they went to the store, and he bought her red shoes. My husband often said, ‘I have 30 fingers, six ears, and three necks, because I have to dress and shoe my girls.’”
There’s a four-year age difference between the daughters, Yana and Oksana. The older one, Yana, takes after her mother, even though she looks like her father. The younger one, Oksana, takes after her father, even though she looks like her mother. Galina recalls: When they were little, Yana would ride her bike, and Oksana would run after her, begging for a ride. “Why won’t your daughter let mine ride with her?” Serhiy would jokingly ask his wife.
“He loved the girls very much. In the ’90s, he worked as a driver for a cooperative. He’d leave in the evening and come back in the morning. And without fail—even though times were tough—he’d bring us our favorite sweets,” Galina says. “He also made sure to please his grandchildren, Yana’s sons Paolo and George. Half our garage is filled with bikes for the boys. He bought and built everything for them.”
In the middle of the forest, where the unit was stationed, he set up a shower and placed beehives
Serhiy could do just about anything. If there was something he didn’t know how to do, he’d learn. He’d watch YouTube and build things.
“Dad even built a snowblower and a wood splitter himself. He also repaired washing machines. He’d come home from work and head straight to the garage to tinker with his equipment. It wasn’t about making money. It was more of a hobby,” says Oksana.
She adds that she and Yana, having watched their father’s skill many times, have now learned to tinker themselves: “Thanks to Dad, we’re skilled at handling household tasks.”
Even during his military service, Serhiy made life more comfortable—he built a shower in the middle of the forest where his unit was stationed. He also built beehives and caught a swarm of bees.
His family says he always put his family first and worried about them above all else.
In early February 2022, Oksana recalls, her dad came home for a day to transfer ownership of the car to her mom.
“If he hadn’t done that, it would have been incredibly difficult for us to transfer the title. Unless it were now, after we received the inheritance…” his daughter muses.
The car wasn’t new; it had been in the family for over 10 years, so the girls knew it would be hard for them to maintain it. That’s why, after Serhiy’s funeral, they sold the car. “Dad was gone, and with him went his favorite car.”
“He was happy with it”
In February 2020, Serhiy began his contract military service at military unit A1499. After his first deployment to the Joint Forces Operation zone, the girls asked him to stay home. Next came training in Lviv.
“He was learning to drive a ‘Kozak’ armored vehicle. He called, sounding so happy: ‘There are as many buttons here as in an airplane!’” recalls Oksana.
Serhiy signed a contract and began his service at military unit A1499
And on New Year’s Eve 2022, he told his family that he was leaving on January 4: “They’re taking me on as a driver.” He assured them it wouldn’t be for long—just until the new recruits were trained.
Serhiy never complained; he always stayed calm himself and reassured others. On the front lines, he also often joked: “The main thing is to stay close to the kitchen”; “I take bagels and feed the mice.”
Now Galina often asks the girls: if she had asked her husband not to join the military, would he have listened? Oksana replies, “Mom, he was happy doing that.”
In 2021, during a deployment to the Joint Forces Operation zone, Serhiy was awarded the “Cossack Cross” of the Third Degree
To his comrades-in-arms, most of whom were much younger, Serhiy—whose call sign was “Yuriyovych”—was like a father. Oksana recalls how, even during his first deployment to the combat zone, her father became friends with a soldier named Yarik. Later, Yarik visited the Hryhorievs’ home on more than one occasion. When Yarik fell ill after returning from the front and was referred to a hospital in Kyiv, he asked Yuriyovych for a ride.
“He came out of the hospital and said, ‘Yuriyovych, they need my parents’ information here.’ The boy was an orphan. He asked if he could list Serhiy as his father. That’s how much they trusted him,” his family recounts.
“It wasn’t until later that we found out that soup in Mariupol was made from pigeons.”
“How are you?” Galina dialed her husband’s number when full-scale war broke out.
– “Everything’s fine,” he replied as usual.
“There are explosions in Kyiv!”—her daughter, who lives in the capital, had just called her.
“Okay,” he said, and hung up.
Until early March 2022, Serhiy called once or twice a day. Just for a moment. “How are you? I’m fine. Go ahead.”
Three “Cossacks”—each manned by a driver and two Javelin operators—headed out under their commander’s leadership to a position near Mariupol.
When the Russians overran them, all ten were rescued by marines from the 36th Brigade named after Rear Admiral Bilinsky. A freed prisoner of war who had been with that group at the Illich Plant in Mariupol told Oksana about this.
There was no contact with Serhiy for three days. Eventually, he called: “I’m fine. How are you?”
…And then another few days of uncertainty. That’s when Oksana found their commander’s mother, Larisa, on Facebook (they’ve stayed in touch with her ever since). Her son hadn’t called her either.
Then Svitlana, whose husband served alongside Serhiy, called Halyna. The couple is also from Pyriatyn. Kostyantchik, as Yuriyovych called him, connected to Starlink and reported: everything was fine with them.
Later, one night, Oksana recalls, her dad’s number appeared on WhatsApp, followed by a “+” sign.
“Daughter, just text me—don’t wait for me to read it. I’ll read it when I get a signal,” Oksana quotes her dad as saying.
And she wrote, telling him everything—what they’d bought, what they’d cooked. She kept his mind off things with stories from home.
“We asked if he’d eaten. Once he replied, ‘soup.’ Only later did we find out that nothing was working in Mariupol at the time—there were no communications—and that the soup had been made from pigeons.”
“They beat everyone. It didn’t matter if you were young or old.”
On April 12, 2022, Serhiy Hryhoriev was taken prisoner by the Russians. Three days later, the military registration and enlistment office notified his family, and in May, the International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed it.
In August, Serhiy’s daughters received a letter through the National Information Bureau: “Dear Halochka, I’m alive and well. Everything will be fine.” Oksana wrote more than one letter to her dad; however, according to those released from captivity, he never received any of them.
The young woman reached out to various Russian Telegram channels, searching for information about her father. In November, she managed to find a video featuring him. From it, she learned that her dad was in Kamyshen, in the Volgograd region. That he no longer had any teeth—even though he’d had all of them before. That he’d lost a lot of weight. That his eyesight was poor.
Galina then told her daughter: “If only he’d come home. I’ll be his eyes; I’ll take care of him.” Now she quietly adds, “It wasn’t meant to be…”
Serhiy Hryhoriev participated twice in the Joint Forces Operation in eastern Ukraine
Serhiy Hryhoriev fought in Afghanistan, so the girls understood: he was mentally strong. And they hoped: if only he could hold up physically.
“At the end of that video, Dad said, ‘I hope I’ll see you again.’
But now it seems to me that even then he knew he wouldn’t see us again. He understood where it was all heading.”
Oksana is truly grateful that this video exists, because it allowed her to see her father one last time.
In August 2023, the Red Cross called the soldier’s family a second time and said, “His condition is satisfactory.”
“We clung to hope, but he was no longer among the living….” By that time, his family had learned from a fellow prisoner who had been released that Serhiy was being held in Kamensk-Shakhtinsky, in the Rostov region.
On January 3, 2024, a large-scale prisoner exchange took place. Oksana messaged one of the released prisoners when he appeared in the chat group for relatives of captives who are or had been in Kamensk-Shakhtinsky.
“I sent him photos and videos. He read them but didn’t reply. For two days, I stared at the message and thought: Why aren’t you answering me? You read it. Some people wrote: ‘No, I didn’t see it’; ‘No, I don’t know.’ But here—nothing. I already had a bad feeling.”
At 5 a.m. on January 7, Oksana received a reply from him: “Yuriyovych has died.”
A forensic examination would later reveal: Serhiy had been tortured to death. They crushed his spleen. They fractured his skull.
Oksana will call the young man again—the one who, in the summer of 2023, told her where her father was. He’ll say: “They beat them badly. It didn’t matter if you were old or young. They beat everyone.”
After learning of her father’s death, Oksana got a tattoo with the words “Everything will be okay”—from that letter. The only one from captivity and the last one from her father. After the funeral, identical tattoos appeared on Yana’s and Galina’s arms.
Serhiy’s commander, like Kostyantchik, remains in captivity. Serhiy’s family is waiting for their return.
The girls got tattoos of the last phrase
Serhiy wrote
Serhiy Hryhoriev’s date of death was May 20, 2023; the location was Kamensk-Shakhtinsk. He was 59 years old. His body was identified via a DNA test in May 2024. The soldier was buried in Pyriatyn.
“I received a message from the ‘Search for POWs’ project, launched by human rights activists, lawyers, and volunteers: according to an official letter from the Russian side, the body was returned in 2023, immediately after his death.
Of course, I don’t believe the Russian side. However, I want to find out from the Coordination Headquarters the date my father’s body was returned. At first, I was told verbally, and then in a response to my request, that it had been returned in March 2024. But they did not provide me with the body number, as I have requested.
It’s a big question for me: where was my father’s body for over a year? I’m grateful that my father is buried in his homeland, but I could have at least seen him, even in death—instead, I saw only a coffin. “My sister saw a photo—it was a skeleton,” says Oksana. She is now seeking the truth with the help of two lawyers.
Everything passes, but love remains
Serhiy planted a large orchard with more than 50 fruit trees.
“A neighbor sold a plot of land where he had started building a house. We bought it, cleared it, and planted a huge orchard,” recalls Galina. Back on January 1, 2022, before her husband left for the combat zone for the second time, they pruned the apple trees.
The harvest that year was so bountiful, says Galina, that she didn’t know who else to share the fruit with. “New apples were already ripening, but we still had last year’s left. It was as if the orchard was crying for him,” says his wife.
Now Galina prunes the trees her husband planted herself and plants new ones.
“Maybe it’s getting a little crazy, but when I spend a long time looking for a specific tool, I say, ‘Sergey, help me.’ And I find it.”
In two years, Galina has planted nearly a hundred rose bushes. She transplanted the currants to make more room for the flowers. At first, she planted them for Serhiy, waiting for him to return from captivity…
“I thought he’d come back and be overjoyed. I planted four rows of roses… But he’s not here…”
Galina and her daughters bring the roses to Sergei’s grave. And they recite lines from a poem by Lyudmila Murina:
“And you, plant flowers…
Even if tomorrow is the end of the world.
Plant a garden. Let it grow up to the stars.
Serve the earth. Cherish, love, nurture.
It will reward the children
And to all who wish and know how to live freely.
Plant yellow flowers, blue ones—all kinds,
So that they may carpet all the paths,
Along which our fearsome,
The best soldiers
in the world Home, to their families, and to happiness,
Which we are all praying to God for right now.
Sow bread and flowers—in defiance of adversity.
Sow plenty, so there will be enough for everyone…”
This is an automatic translation generated by DeepL.