“I’m going to the Donetsk region tomorrow. So that you’ll give birth to my son today.” In memory of Yevhen Hladiy, a Marine who died in captivity
Source: Novynarnia
Author: Bohdana Sadomska
“Zhenya, I don’t know what to tell you… Look at all the wheat around here—it needs to be harvested.” “But there’s no one to do it,” says Mykola Protsenko, former head of the Kotlyarevskyi Village Council in the Mykolaiv region, addressing Yevhen Hladiy. Today is Hladiy’s funeral. Nearly the entire community of his native village is seeing the fallen soldier off on his final journey.
In Kotlyareve, Yevhen Hladiy worked as a tractor driver and combine operator. During the war, he served as a rifleman. In 2022, he defended Mariupol, where he was taken prisoner by the Russians.
He died in captivity in 2023. The forensic pathologists’ report will state that the cause of death was tuberculosis and exhaustion. “But no one said a word about the fact that he had been driven to the point of exhaustion,” says the soldier’s sister, Natalia. “He was a skeleton covered in skin. From 90–100 kilograms, he had dropped to about 40–50, and he was 1.90 meters tall.”
This article was prepared by UCU student Bohdana Sadomska in collaboration with the Memorial remembrance platform, specifically for “Novynarnia.” This is the first article in a series about soldiers whose lives were cut short while held captive by the enemy.
His First Time at War
In 2014, when the Russian-Ukrainian war began, Yevhen went to the military registration and enlistment office, even though he had been exempted from military service due to health reasons. He wanted to join the artillery, just as his grandfather, a World War II veteran, had done. But he was assigned to the 36th Marine Brigade, which later received the honorary designation of Rear Admiral Mykhailo Bilynskyi. He never once regretted it and proudly wore the uniform of a Ukrainian Navy Marine.
His wife, Lena—with whom he was already raising their daughter Dasha—was pregnant with a boy at the time.
“I’m going to the Donetsk region tomorrow. So you’d better give birth to our son today,” Zhenya joked when he arrived at the maternity ward to see his wife after returning from exercises in Shyrlan.
And she gave birth that very night. They named the boy Pavlo—after his grandfather, Yevhen’s father.
Hladi saw his son and left that same day for Shyrokyne, east of Mariupol. He was a machine-gunner.
The next time he saw Pavel was when the boy was almost a year old. By then, his dad had returned home from the war.
Shnek
Zhenya loved his village from an early age. He loved to walk around, exploring what grew there and how things worked.
On his street, full of kids his age, it was noisy all day long. In winter, the gang would race past the houses on sleds; in warmer weather, on bicycles. While Zhenya pedaled his bike, his little dog Jessik rode behind him on the back rack.
At age 12, Yevgeny was already asking to tag along with experienced tractor drivers and combine operators. He wanted to see how a combine was built, how it was started, and how grain was grown. They would tell him: “Zheka, ‘techies’ will never be out of a job. A machine operator is the central figure in the village!” recalls Yevgeny’s older friend, colleague, and teacher, Mykola Protsenko.
At age 15, Zhenya was already trying to drive a tractor and a combine on his own, and a year or two later, he was tilling the fields.
“He became fascinated by it and couldn’t imagine himself doing anything else,” says his older sister, Natalia Ryabinina.
The young man worked his way up from being a combine operator’s assistant on an old “Niva” to operating a modern “John Deere,” fully mastering the new technologies.
Zhenya, Mykola says, remains one of his best students.
When Yevgeniy and his friends first arrived in the frontline city of Mariupol in 2014—as Natalia recalls from what her brother once told her—the commander lined them up and asked who had done what before the war. When Zhenya said “combine operator,” the commander replied, “You’ll be ‘Schneck.’”
That’s how his call sign came to be.
A “snail” is a mechanism that unloads grain from a combine harvester’s hopper into a truck.
And the second time—just like the first—without a doubt
: “I trust you. I know you’ll keep an eye on them,” Zhenya told his sister Natalia about his family on the first day of the full-scale invasion, in February 2022.
Natalia, along with his wife Lena and their four children—his two daughters, his son, and his brother’s daughter—were temporarily forced to leave their home.
To his parents, who stayed behind to tend to the farm, Yevgen instructed: “I beg you, give them whatever they take. Don’t hold on to anything. I beg you, just stay alive.”
His mother, however, asked her son to wait at least a few more days to see how things would unfold. But Yevhen had already made up his mind. He packed his things, joined forces with other fellow villagers who were volunteers, and headed to the TCC.
“Who else but me? Sanya is already there. And what am I going to tell the kids?…”—Yevhen always answered his friends’ and colleagues’ numerous questions about his motivation with determination, recalls Mykola Protsenko.
Oleksandr is Protsenko’s son and Yevhen’s childhood friend. He has been held captive by the Russians for 30 months now.
The Unknown
“Yevgeniy was at the Ilyich Plant in Mariupol. For a while, there was no contact at all, but then, when helicopters broke through to them and brought satellite phones, he finally got in touch with us. We messaged each other for a few weeks,” says Natalia.
His sister recalls her brother’s words: “It’s just horrible when a tank is firing right at you, and you’re digging your hands into the ground beneath you. You’re digging to burrow in just a little. To hide.”
Their supplies ran out very quickly. When there was no water left, the soldiers drained it from the batteries to quench their thirst even a little.
Natalia recalls how she and Zhenya talked for a long time shortly before Easter 2022; that year, the holiday fell on April 24. Her older sister jokingly ordered him then: “Drive out the Russians, because we need to bake Easter cakes.” He laughed.
Starting on April 12, Zhenya stopped communicating.
A week later, his family saw a video showing marines from the 36th Brigade being taken prisoner, while a Russian propagandist filmed sailor Yevgeniy Gladiy being searched and having his documents confiscated.
His sister says she never received a single letter or phone call from her brother while he was in captivity. Only the other prisoners of war who were held in the same cell as Zhenya said after their release that they had seen him.
“I was held captive with your husband. He remains optimistic. He encourages the guys. He assures them that everything will be fine,” said Yevgeny’s comrade-in-arms, who was released from captivity on February 2, 2023, in a phone call to Lena, Yevgeny’s wife.
And in August 2023, Yevgeny’s body will be returned to Ukraine. He will be buried eight months later, after all forensic examinations are complete.
Holding on to hope
Ukrainian forensic experts, says Natalia, believe that Yevgeniy died a month or two before his body was handed over to Ukraine.
The cause of death listed by the Ukrainian authorities is tuberculosis and exhaustion.
“But no one said a word about the fact that he had been reduced to a state of exhaustion. He was just a skeleton covered in skin. He went from 90–100 kilograms to somewhere around 40–50, and he’s 1.90 meters tall,” his sister notes.
“They sent a photo of him to my phone. I recognized him right away. He looks a lot like our father. The ‘VMS’ tattoo helped me be sure,” adds Ryabinina.
However, throughout the entire eight months of the investigation, his sister scrutinized that photo: “Well, look—his eyebrows aren’t the same, and those aren’t his ears”—she was trying to cling to hope.
That hope was dashed time and again. Finally, DNA testing confirmed a 99% match.
No
Compensation “Girls, they tortured him for a year and a half with the Russian language—have some conscience,” Natalia exclaimed indignantly upon seeing Russian-language inscriptions on the towels at the Mykolaiv Municipal Funeral Home. The TCC forwards information about the deceased there, and families are told the budget allocated for purchases—18,000 hryvnias.
“And they say: ‘If you don’t like it, go find someone else.’ We spent about five or six thousand there. Most of the wreaths, towels, and burial expenses—we paid for them out of our own pockets,” says Natalia.
She says neither the parents nor the wife and children receive any compensation payments for the deceased. She doesn’t know if there will be any.
Advice from a Lawyer
To receive a one-time cash payment (OCP) of 15 million hryvnias, the family of the fallen defender must prove that their loved one was taken prisoner while carrying out a combat mission and that his death was caused by his captivity, notes Lyudmyla Kormosh, a legal expert at the “Vesta” Charitable Foundation.
There are four steps in this procedure:
return of the deceased defender’s body and accompanying documents;
conducting a forensic medical examination;
obtaining the forensic medical examiner’s report and a death certificate based on it;
submitting the package of documents to the Territorial Coordination Center and the Special Purpose Unit at the place of residence.
“I advise the families of the deceased to gather as many relevant documents as possible that can help establish a link between captivity and death. You should also prepare for the possibility of filing a lawsuit, since only a court can establish certain facts… It is worth noting that even despite considerable efforts, families whose loved ones died in captivity may encounter difficulties in obtaining a death certificate,” says Lyudmyla Kormosh. – The forensic medical examination can drag on for months due to the workload of the relevant authorities… Sometimes it’s impossible to determine the causes and circumstances of death. And this is important for the subsequent processing of documents.”
A Farewell to the Sound of “Ares’ Sword”
Sometimes Natalia comes across cartoons from her childhood on TV, and the memory of Zhenya’s boisterous laughter, echoing through the room and filling every corner of it, comes flooding back. Laughter she didn’t understand, because that’s how her brother reacted to absolutely everything—even cartoons that, on the surface, didn’t seem funny at all. Laughter that her parents loved so much.
“He was the life of the party. I’ve always been a principled person, keeping to myself: don’t bother me, and I won’t bother you. But he wasn’t like that. Everyone was his friend; everyone on the street knew him. When we buried him, almost the entire village gathered—about 200 people. The political officer from the District Committee approached my father and asked:
‘Who was he, that there are so many people here? Was he a deputy?
’
And my father replied, ‘No, just a simple combine operator. He was simply a man with a big heart,
’” – says Natalia.
His sister decided to send him off with his favorite song—“Ares’ Sword” by the band “Shadow of the Sun.” She recalls how Zhenya would play it in the car while Natalia was driving, and sing along at the top of his lungs.
Now that song is set as her cell phone ringtone.
Although Zhenya and Natalia didn’t always get along when they were kids, their bond grew stronger over the years. Every morning before work, her brother would stop by to visit Natalia and her nieces Sofia and Lena, who share his wife’s name. He even served as godfather to the older one, Sofiika.
“Zhenya was like a father to my girls. And for Sofia, he practically took the place of her dad while her husband was working abroad. They adored him,” says Natalia.
Now her husband, Volodymyr, is on the front lines. Fighting for two.
On August 29, 2024, on the eve of the Day of Remembrance for Ukraine’s Fallen Defenders, Natalia Ryabinina, together with nine fellow villagers, established the Walk of Fame in the village.
Now, every Saturday night into Sunday, they light a candle next to each photograph—so that the boys know they haven’t been forgotten.
Author: Bohdana Sadomska
“Zhenya, I don’t know what to tell you… Look at all the wheat around here—it needs to be harvested.” “But there’s no one to do it,” says Mykola Protsenko, former head of the Kotlyarevskyi Village Council in the Mykolaiv region, addressing Yevhen Hladiy. Today is Hladiy’s funeral. Nearly the entire community of his native village is seeing the fallen soldier off on his final journey.
In Kotlyareve, Yevhen Hladiy worked as a tractor driver and combine operator. During the war, he served as a rifleman. In 2022, he defended Mariupol, where he was taken prisoner by the Russians.
He died in captivity in 2023. The forensic pathologists’ report will state that the cause of death was tuberculosis and exhaustion. “But no one said a word about the fact that he had been driven to the point of exhaustion,” says the soldier’s sister, Natalia. “He was a skeleton covered in skin. From 90–100 kilograms, he had dropped to about 40–50, and he was 1.90 meters tall.”
This article was prepared by UCU student Bohdana Sadomska in collaboration with the Memorial remembrance platform, specifically for “Novynarnia.” This is the first article in a series about soldiers whose lives were cut short while held captive by the enemy.
His First Time at War
In 2014, when the Russian-Ukrainian war began, Yevhen went to the military registration and enlistment office, even though he had been exempted from military service due to health reasons. He wanted to join the artillery, just as his grandfather, a World War II veteran, had done. But he was assigned to the 36th Marine Brigade, which later received the honorary designation of Rear Admiral Mykhailo Bilynskyi. He never once regretted it and proudly wore the uniform of a Ukrainian Navy Marine.
His wife, Lena—with whom he was already raising their daughter Dasha—was pregnant with a boy at the time.
“I’m going to the Donetsk region tomorrow. So you’d better give birth to our son today,” Zhenya joked when he arrived at the maternity ward to see his wife after returning from exercises in Shyrlan.
And she gave birth that very night. They named the boy Pavlo—after his grandfather, Yevhen’s father.
Hladi saw his son and left that same day for Shyrokyne, east of Mariupol. He was a machine-gunner.
The next time he saw Pavel was when the boy was almost a year old. By then, his dad had returned home from the war.
Shnek
Zhenya loved his village from an early age. He loved to walk around, exploring what grew there and how things worked.
On his street, full of kids his age, it was noisy all day long. In winter, the gang would race past the houses on sleds; in warmer weather, on bicycles. While Zhenya pedaled his bike, his little dog Jessik rode behind him on the back rack.
At age 12, Yevgeny was already asking to tag along with experienced tractor drivers and combine operators. He wanted to see how a combine was built, how it was started, and how grain was grown. They would tell him: “Zheka, ‘techies’ will never be out of a job. A machine operator is the central figure in the village!” recalls Yevgeny’s older friend, colleague, and teacher, Mykola Protsenko.
At age 15, Zhenya was already trying to drive a tractor and a combine on his own, and a year or two later, he was tilling the fields.
“He became fascinated by it and couldn’t imagine himself doing anything else,” says his older sister, Natalia Ryabinina.
The young man worked his way up from being a combine operator’s assistant on an old “Niva” to operating a modern “John Deere,” fully mastering the new technologies.
Zhenya, Mykola says, remains one of his best students.
When Yevgeniy and his friends first arrived in the frontline city of Mariupol in 2014—as Natalia recalls from what her brother once told her—the commander lined them up and asked who had done what before the war. When Zhenya said “combine operator,” the commander replied, “You’ll be ‘Schneck.’”
That’s how his call sign came to be.
A “snail” is a mechanism that unloads grain from a combine harvester’s hopper into a truck.
And the second time—just like the first—without a doubt
: “I trust you. I know you’ll keep an eye on them,” Zhenya told his sister Natalia about his family on the first day of the full-scale invasion, in February 2022.
Natalia, along with his wife Lena and their four children—his two daughters, his son, and his brother’s daughter—were temporarily forced to leave their home.
To his parents, who stayed behind to tend to the farm, Yevgen instructed: “I beg you, give them whatever they take. Don’t hold on to anything. I beg you, just stay alive.”
His mother, however, asked her son to wait at least a few more days to see how things would unfold. But Yevhen had already made up his mind. He packed his things, joined forces with other fellow villagers who were volunteers, and headed to the TCC.
“Who else but me? Sanya is already there. And what am I going to tell the kids?…”—Yevhen always answered his friends’ and colleagues’ numerous questions about his motivation with determination, recalls Mykola Protsenko.
Oleksandr is Protsenko’s son and Yevhen’s childhood friend. He has been held captive by the Russians for 30 months now.
The Unknown
“Yevgeniy was at the Ilyich Plant in Mariupol. For a while, there was no contact at all, but then, when helicopters broke through to them and brought satellite phones, he finally got in touch with us. We messaged each other for a few weeks,” says Natalia.
His sister recalls her brother’s words: “It’s just horrible when a tank is firing right at you, and you’re digging your hands into the ground beneath you. You’re digging to burrow in just a little. To hide.”
Their supplies ran out very quickly. When there was no water left, the soldiers drained it from the batteries to quench their thirst even a little.
Natalia recalls how she and Zhenya talked for a long time shortly before Easter 2022; that year, the holiday fell on April 24. Her older sister jokingly ordered him then: “Drive out the Russians, because we need to bake Easter cakes.” He laughed.
Starting on April 12, Zhenya stopped communicating.
A week later, his family saw a video showing marines from the 36th Brigade being taken prisoner, while a Russian propagandist filmed sailor Yevgeniy Gladiy being searched and having his documents confiscated.
His sister says she never received a single letter or phone call from her brother while he was in captivity. Only the other prisoners of war who were held in the same cell as Zhenya said after their release that they had seen him.
“I was held captive with your husband. He remains optimistic. He encourages the guys. He assures them that everything will be fine,” said Yevgeny’s comrade-in-arms, who was released from captivity on February 2, 2023, in a phone call to Lena, Yevgeny’s wife.
And in August 2023, Yevgeny’s body will be returned to Ukraine. He will be buried eight months later, after all forensic examinations are complete.
Holding on to hope
Ukrainian forensic experts, says Natalia, believe that Yevgeniy died a month or two before his body was handed over to Ukraine.
The cause of death listed by the Ukrainian authorities is tuberculosis and exhaustion.
“But no one said a word about the fact that he had been reduced to a state of exhaustion. He was just a skeleton covered in skin. He went from 90–100 kilograms to somewhere around 40–50, and he’s 1.90 meters tall,” his sister notes.
“They sent a photo of him to my phone. I recognized him right away. He looks a lot like our father. The ‘VMS’ tattoo helped me be sure,” adds Ryabinina.
However, throughout the entire eight months of the investigation, his sister scrutinized that photo: “Well, look—his eyebrows aren’t the same, and those aren’t his ears”—she was trying to cling to hope.
That hope was dashed time and again. Finally, DNA testing confirmed a 99% match.
No
Compensation “Girls, they tortured him for a year and a half with the Russian language—have some conscience,” Natalia exclaimed indignantly upon seeing Russian-language inscriptions on the towels at the Mykolaiv Municipal Funeral Home. The TCC forwards information about the deceased there, and families are told the budget allocated for purchases—18,000 hryvnias.
“And they say: ‘If you don’t like it, go find someone else.’ We spent about five or six thousand there. Most of the wreaths, towels, and burial expenses—we paid for them out of our own pockets,” says Natalia.
She says neither the parents nor the wife and children receive any compensation payments for the deceased. She doesn’t know if there will be any.
Advice from a Lawyer
To receive a one-time cash payment (OCP) of 15 million hryvnias, the family of the fallen defender must prove that their loved one was taken prisoner while carrying out a combat mission and that his death was caused by his captivity, notes Lyudmyla Kormosh, a legal expert at the “Vesta” Charitable Foundation.
There are four steps in this procedure:
return of the deceased defender’s body and accompanying documents;
conducting a forensic medical examination;
obtaining the forensic medical examiner’s report and a death certificate based on it;
submitting the package of documents to the Territorial Coordination Center and the Special Purpose Unit at the place of residence.
“I advise the families of the deceased to gather as many relevant documents as possible that can help establish a link between captivity and death. You should also prepare for the possibility of filing a lawsuit, since only a court can establish certain facts… It is worth noting that even despite considerable efforts, families whose loved ones died in captivity may encounter difficulties in obtaining a death certificate,” says Lyudmyla Kormosh. – The forensic medical examination can drag on for months due to the workload of the relevant authorities… Sometimes it’s impossible to determine the causes and circumstances of death. And this is important for the subsequent processing of documents.”
A Farewell to the Sound of “Ares’ Sword”
Sometimes Natalia comes across cartoons from her childhood on TV, and the memory of Zhenya’s boisterous laughter, echoing through the room and filling every corner of it, comes flooding back. Laughter she didn’t understand, because that’s how her brother reacted to absolutely everything—even cartoons that, on the surface, didn’t seem funny at all. Laughter that her parents loved so much.
“He was the life of the party. I’ve always been a principled person, keeping to myself: don’t bother me, and I won’t bother you. But he wasn’t like that. Everyone was his friend; everyone on the street knew him. When we buried him, almost the entire village gathered—about 200 people. The political officer from the District Committee approached my father and asked:
‘Who was he, that there are so many people here? Was he a deputy?
’
And my father replied, ‘No, just a simple combine operator. He was simply a man with a big heart,
’” – says Natalia.
His sister decided to send him off with his favorite song—“Ares’ Sword” by the band “Shadow of the Sun.” She recalls how Zhenya would play it in the car while Natalia was driving, and sing along at the top of his lungs.
Now that song is set as her cell phone ringtone.
Although Zhenya and Natalia didn’t always get along when they were kids, their bond grew stronger over the years. Every morning before work, her brother would stop by to visit Natalia and her nieces Sofia and Lena, who share his wife’s name. He even served as godfather to the older one, Sofiika.
“Zhenya was like a father to my girls. And for Sofia, he practically took the place of her dad while her husband was working abroad. They adored him,” says Natalia.
Now her husband, Volodymyr, is on the front lines. Fighting for two.
On August 29, 2024, on the eve of the Day of Remembrance for Ukraine’s Fallen Defenders, Natalia Ryabinina, together with nine fellow villagers, established the Walk of Fame in the village.
Now, every Saturday night into Sunday, they light a candle next to each photograph—so that the boys know they haven’t been forgotten.
This is an automatic translation generated by DeepL.