“Met death together”: Hundreds mourn military couple in Kiev

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Pictures by Sergei Supinsky, video by Igor Shvydchenko

Hundreds gathered in the bitter cold in Kiev on Friday to mourn military medic Valentyna Nagorna and soldier Daniil Liashkevych, who fell in love a week ago and died together in the war.

“It warms our souls to know that his heart was truly full of love, just like Valentyna’s heart. When the moment came, they met death together,” said grieving Anastasia Vasylchenko, 31.

“But we shouldn’t romanticize war at all. Because war is death and heroes – people – die.”

Vasylchenko was Lyashkevich's ex-wife, but she remained friends with him and, like most in the crowd, attended both ceremonies, which were held back-to-back at the hilltop Baikove crematorium in the Ukrainian capital.

As soldiers carried Nagorna's coffin into the dome-shaped crematorium, her mother's screams grew louder and echoed off the building's concrete walls.

Held by two men, she then slowly entered the building and walked to the coffin on which she laid her head as the crowd filled the room.

Fighting back tears, 60-year-old participant Lyudmyla Levchenko remembered Nagorna teaching her combat medicine.

“I will never forget her words when she said in the early days, 'You realize that not all of us will survive to victory, right?' She has already prepared us,” she said.

Levchenko served as a combat medic for nearly two years before being discharged from the service for reasons of age several months ago.

She laughed that her call sign was Busya – short for Grandma – because she was much older than most of the others in her brigade.

“We have wonderful young people, I admired them, I learned from them and they learned from me… But the best die.”

Nagorna, also known by her call sign Valkyria, joined on the first day of the war, said Olena Tolkachova, who heads the Azov patronage service, which looks after fighters.

Tolkachova described Nagorna, who died aged 28, as a courageous woman who “wanted to help in any way she could”.

She could not suppress her anger at the Ukrainian men who do not join the ranks of the armed forces and have hardly given a break since the start of the Russian invasion, despite repeated requests for new troops.

“Think about whether you even need this land. “Maybe what you’re really saying is that you don’t need Ukrainian citizenship given your ignoble behavior,” she said.

A shared patriotic commitment brought the young couple together, said Lyashkevich's 33-year-old commander, who identified himself only by the call sign Kostyl.

Their story only blossomed when they met a few months ago and served together in the Third Assault Brigade.

“They hadn’t been together long, but they had very similar principles in life,” he said.

“Like him, she desperately wanted to be close to the war rather than sitting somewhere else. She wanted to do her duty and save lives as close to the front lines as possible.”

The couple's story inspired many in the audience.

A 24-year-old soldier with the call sign Dzvinka said she had been following Nagorna on social media for a long time.

She came to pay her respects with a group of her friends, all in their 20s.

“I want people to know that Ukrainian youth is a completely different world. We don’t know or remember what it’s like to live a relatively carefree life,” she said.

“Because people under the age of 30 are dying here and fighting for our future.”