With little help from the military to bring the soldiers' bodies home, two mothers took charge themselves.
By Anastasiya Gribanova, Ivan Yermakov & Claire PressLyudmyla Kupriychuk stood crying in a muddy field. Her ex-husband was wrapping their son's body in a blanket.
Her son Maksym was just 20 years old. He died on the second day of the Russian invasion - 25 February 2022.Nobody had paid much attention to a middle-aged couple arriving in the Russian-held village of Tomaryne. It's about a 90-minute drive from the southern city of Kherson. Then, with his body in the boot, the couple started their 12-hour journey home to Vinnytsia, in central Ukraine.
One of Maksym's colleagues had a photo of the field where he had been killed and said his body was still there. He told her that Maksym had come under shelling, but there was no other information about the circumstances of his death."Every night I was going berserk knowing that my son was lying out there in the freezing cold and there was nothing to cover him," she says.They had no plan - just the photo, the village name and a contact for a local who had volunteered to guide them.
Natalya Karpova, also from Vinnytsia, was searching for her son, Roman. She found a photo of his body on a Russian Telegram channel in April. "They said it was fake and I shouldn't be relying on the aggressor's media for information," she says.Ukraine's military does not comment on missing soldiers as per martial law, which means families often have to wait for the government or volunteers to help return a body.She knew he had gone to the frontline, but not which one.
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