Husband, son, father, angel: A Ukrainian family mourns its hero

Zhanna Palahniuk never doubted that her husband – a Ukrainian paratrooper whose bulletproof confidence was honed by years of combat – would be in the thick of the battle, or that he would always prevail.

Then, in late April, Russian forces engaging in a major new offensive bore down on 1st Lt. Oleksandr Palahniuk’s Ukrainian Army unit, on the Izyum front in northeastern Ukraine.

In daily video calls, he began telling his wife of serious challenges and morale-sapping shortages, even of vehicles. A born problem-solver, who grated against hierarchy yet found his calling in the military, the deputy company commander said he resorted to evacuating the wounded on his own motorcycle.

What he didn’t tell her was that the fight was becoming overwhelming – and that he had stepped on a landmine. The device clicked but did not detonate, momentarily sparing the experienced fighter from being added to Ukraine’s soaring daily death toll then of 100 to 200 soldiers.

“I could see that something happened, that he was really deep into his thoughts and depressed,” Mrs. Palahniuk recalls, her voice cracking at the memory of the decorated and exhausted paratrooper, called Sasha by all who knew him, who was long overdue for rotation.

“He was disappointed and stressed. He asked me to bring our daughter to the phone, so he could talk to her,” she says of 6-year-old Yulianna. “I made a screenshot of his face and sent it to him. I said, ‘Look at yourself now. You look pale, tired. ... You should look after yourself.’”

If his wife could detect a trace of vulnerability, it was not something he projected in those days to strangers. Dressed for combat, in a brief encounter with this correspondent April 25 in Druzhkivka, Lt. Palahniuk’s handshake was strong and his bearing confident, showing he was no stranger to the front lines.

He offered an “excursion” to the front, then late the next day and again the following messaged that he could not meet because things had escalated dramatically.

On April 28 he was killed when a Russian tank scored a direct hit on his armored vehicle. He was at the village of Kurulky, in Kharkiv Province, carrying orders to front-line troops – not to retreat.

“There was never even one thought that something like this could happen. Never,” says Mrs. Palahniuk, her arms folded protectively around Yulianna, both still reeling from the loss weeks later.

“I was confident in him, that he could find a way out of any hard situation,” she says. “That’s how I coped.”

The weight of sacrifice

Amid the high casualty numbers from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the death of a single soldier may appear barely significant, adding just one statistical notch to the toll as this war enters its seventh month.

But, as in any conflict, behind every number is a human face and a colossal impact on each family, which is left to grapple with loss.

In the case of Ukraine, which is being defended against a more powerful aggressor, the weight of sacrifice is clearly articulated in the tidy farmhouse ringed with rose bushes where Sasha Palahniuk was raised, in the rural western village of Pokutyne, near the border with Moldova.

“We have to keep living, we have to believe in victory, to understand that he didn’t go in vain,” says the paratrooper’s father, Mykhailo Palahniuk, whose work on his 15-acre wheat, barley, and soy farm has left his face sun-kissed and his fingers cracked.

“Sasha died for Ukraine, he died so that something like Bucha would never happen again,” he says, referring to atrocities committed by Russian troops in the northern Kyiv suburb in March.

“We are Ukrainians, and Sasha defended us,” says the farmer. “That’s worth it. Sasha did something good, he meant something. We think he’s a hero.”

Despite the high personal cost, for this family and so many others, “without such a sacrifice” the country would be occupied by Russia, Mr. Palahniuk says, just as the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea was captured in 2014 and then annexed by Moscow.

“We live differently, we just want our country to prosper, to live well. That’s all we want,” he says. Nearby a portrait of his son in military dress uniform sits beside a pillow bedecked with medals.

Preserved in Sasha’s former bedroom are pictures of him in fighting gear with a camouflaged head wrap, and several certificates of training with American and other NATO troops. There is a paratrooper beret, a live large-caliber round, and a pair of fake hand grenades, painted black.

“Sasha’s brothers-in-arms are really missing him, because there are very few people like him left,” he says.

High on the wall is a depiction of the winged Angel Gabriel.

Trying to cope

Less than 100 yards from the house, up a cobblestone road covered with cracked asphalt, is the cemetery on the southeast edge of the village. Ukrainian and battalion flags fly over Sasha’s grave.

It is piled high with flower arrangements, and when his family members visit – this time with flowers in the Ukrainian national colors of blue and yellow – they each silently touch and kiss the wooden cross. The official death announcement notes that the “enemy takes the best sons of Ukraine,” but adds: “Eternal memory, heroes don’t die!”

“It’s very hard for us; we are still trying to find a way to cope with it,” says Larysa Palahniuk, the lieutenant’s mother, her tearful face framed by a black headscarf.

“I can’t believe this happened to my son,” she says. “At the same time, we have part of his blood, we have someone to live for,” she adds, referring to her granddaughter.

The challenge of telling Yulianna the news fell to her mother. Throughout the war, the girl would ask: “Has Papa called?”

When her father failed to call on her birthday in early May – just a week after he was killed – Yulianna asked her mother why.

“Our father is already an angel,” she told her.

Weeks later, when the funeral had passed, Yulianna again asked why her father did not call.

Her mother then asked: “How do people become angels?” The girl replied: “So, was Father killed?”

It was an inevitable, excruciating moment: Yes, she was told.

A commander, not a farmer

Sasha was a “regular boy” who enjoyed fishing and camping, his parents recall. A special love was a 650cc motorcycle that still sits in a shed.

The officer-in-waiting rode the bike often, including to dances in nearby villages. But he detested farm work, dismissing it with a common Ukrainian aphorism, “This is not the business of the Czar.”

Sasha only went to college – where he met his wife – at the insistence of his mother.

“He was a commander,” Zhanna Palahniuk recalls of her husband-to-be. “Even when they lived with the boys in the dorm, he was giving orders and managing people, saying, ‘You will be washing dishes, you will be cleaning up,’ and everyone listened to him.”

He surprised her one day in 2013 when he signed up to join the army.

But he also disliked hierarchy, and would come back from training with callouses on his knuckles – from all the push-ups he did as punishment for not following orders.

He was sent to Crimea, and in the winter of 2014-15 was at the Donetsk Airport for a famous last-stand battle in the face of heavy Russian firepower.

“Sasha is a real warrior, and always was a real warrior,” his wife says.

And while his aversion to what he sometimes considered to be “stupid” orders appears to have slowed his advance to the rank of captain, it helped endear him to men under his command. Indeed, as the war increasingly imposed its will on his unit in April, the lieutenant told his wife he felt he had saved his men’s lives three times by not following all orders.

He told his parents his unit was suffering “very big losses” and had no vehicles; friends even gathered money to donate a car.

Near the end, “Sasha said there was no exit,” says his father. “He said, ‘We have a task, but not the tools to do it.’”

On his last call to his parents, just days before his death, it was “clear something had changed,” recalls his mother. “I saw he wasn’t holding it together, he was down.

“We had an intuition,” she says. “We didn’t sleep all night.”

Neither, in those days, did his wife.

Zhanna Palahniuk today pulls her daughter in tight and kisses her nose, eliciting giggles.

“The child makes me laugh,” she says of her warrior husband’s “beautiful legacy.”

“At least he has a legacy,” she says. “There are many others who don’t.”

Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting for this story.