June 9, 2022 at 2:00 a.m. EDT
Yaroslava Sushko holds a photo of her son Serhii V. Sushko during a funeral of 27 Ukrainian soldiers who died fighting the Russians in Dnipro, Ukraine, on June 3. (Wojciech Grzedzinski / Per a The Washington Post)
DNIPRO, Ukraine – The mourners arrived long before the military funeral began, with entire families huddled around a single coffin, side by side on a warm, sunny morning with other families and coffins.
Two rows of soldiers, perhaps 100 in all, were alerted when the Rev. Dmitro Povorotny and several other Ukrainian Orthodox priests entered the small cemetery, indicating that the wicked should withdraw from the coffins so that the ceremony could begin.
But a woman, overwhelmed with grief, could not. She sat on a bench crying while her relatives comforted her. When a military band started playing the Ukrainian national anthem, it cried louder.
“Glory to Ukraine,” shouted an official.
“Glory to the heroes,” replied the wicked.
To visit Krasnopilske Cemetery during a military funeral is to experience the brutal devastation of Ukraine’s war with Russia and the terrible intimacy of losing a family. Twenty-seven soldiers were buried last Friday. Of these, 12 were buried as strangers in a military section that is growing almost every day.
For Povorotny, the small cemetery on the outskirts of the Dnipro speaks of the sacrifice his people have paid with blood since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion on February 24. In just three months, the military section of the cemetery has added 293 graves, compared to 175 in the previous eight years. since the outbreak of war with Moscow-backed separatists in the eastern Donbas region in 2014.
“You can see how the war changed. And this is just a cemetery, one of the thousands of cemeteries in Ukraine,” said Povorotny, a military chaplain and archpriest of the Dnipropetrovsk region diocese of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. .
Povorotny has carried out about 10 mass burials in the cemetery since the war began, he said in an interview after Friday’s ceremony. Each week, he also holds one or two individual funerals. He estimated that more than 700 soldiers had died in the Dniepropetrovsk region alone.
But when he looks at the faces of the wicked, he said, he is convinced that he can see his faith in the ultimate victory, despite his losses and his pain.
“Putin called it a special operation. It used to be called a civil war,” Povorotny said, holding a hand over the wooden cross around his neck. “For us, it’s a real war of independence.”
Funerals that take place daily in Ukraine are also being developed with new protocols that have been rewritten to reflect Western customs, such as those followed by the United States, and only Ukrainian traditions, rather than those inherited from Russia and the United States. Soviet Union.
And they arrive when the nation discusses the creation of a new national cemetery in Kyiv that would serve Ukraine, as the Arlington National Cemetery has served the United States. Volodymyr Vyatrovich, a member of the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament and former head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, said in a Telegram publication last month that the parliament had agreed to create a national cemetery somewhere in Kyiv or in the surroundings.
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To develop new military funeral practices, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory analyzed the history of the country’s funeral rites, from the ephemeral National Republic of Ukraine in the early twentieth century to burial practices among Cossacks. gangs of warriors roaming the steppes of Ukraine. hundreds of years ago. The institute also analyzed modern military funeral rituals in Belgium, Israel, Poland, Turkey, and the United States, and visited U.S. military cemeteries.
His work culminated in a 2019 video from the Ministry of Veterans Affairs showing in detail how a military funeral should be held. Some of the rituals would be familiar to anyone who has attended a funeral with military honors at Arlington National Cemetery, including a new practice of draping the ark with the Ukrainian flag before folding it and presenting it to the family. The new protocols also stipulate that up to six soldiers can fire three volleys in salute.
Friday’s services featured some of the new rituals, such as the folding of the Ukrainian flag, though perhaps less accurately than could be found where the custom has been performed for generations.
The 27 coffins, each covered with a blue and yellow Ukrainian flag, were arranged before the ceremony in three rows arranged with enough space to walk between them. A wooden cross was placed on top of each, with a sign bearing the soldier’s name in ornate writing. And on the coffins that contained unidentified remains, the sign read, “Here rests an unknown soldier to remember forever.”
Many bad guys were dressed in black, including several older women wearing handkerchiefs, but others wore T-shirts and shorts. Many wore uniforms, including a young soldier whose green military T-shirt was perfectly folded and fastened to the stump of his missing right arm. Another mourner put his cheek on a coffin, stroking it hand-polished wood in the midst of a silence so deep that the faint flutter of the flags could be heard.
“When I look at the flags, it’s like looking at the souls of angels, and there are many, you know?” said Tetyana Kaikova, 34, who attended the funeral of her cousin Serhii V. Sushko on Friday with relatives across the country. His tank was destroyed on his birthday, May 11, in fighting near the front lines at Donbas.
Although he was removed from the wreckage, he suffered severe burns and died three days later in a Dnipro hospital. Sushko, who lived in Kherson and served in a tank crew in the 57th Motorized Brigade, was 49 years old.
When her cousin was not fishing, Kaikova said, she was often in the kitchen preparing a delicious pot of borscht. Kaikova said she hadn’t seen him in about a year, but they often talked on the phone about gathering in their dacha, or a shelter in the countryside, for food.
“I was always smiling, always,” said Kaikova, who works for an international trading company.
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Sushko’s former and future wife, Angela Pavluk, was also there to rest him. After 18 years of amicable divorce, she and Sushko were making plans to remarry.
Sushko was proud self-sufficient, modest, and patriotic, he said. A firefighter and paramedic, he refused to use a government card that allowed him to travel on free public transportation and enlisted in the military shortly after the outbreak of war with Moscow-backed separatists in 2014. to tell no one about two soldiers. praises he had received since February.
“I wasn’t afraid of anything. He went there from day one,” Pavluk said.
Getting married again was a decision that arose from keeping in touch all these years and sharing the lives of her three children and a granddaughter, Pavluk said.
“He was a good father,” Pavluk said. He even set aside coins and stamps that he would like to add to his beloved collection.
In recent months, Sushko has been so eager to get married that he has offered to renew his vows online, Pavluk said.
“And I said I didn’t want to do that,” he recalled. “We’ve had a wedding before, so I just wanted to have a little family reunion. That’s something we wanted to do, but now, well … we didn’t get it. “
Instead, there would be a big family reunion, but of a different and terrible kind: to cry, not to celebrate.
During the funeral, while Povorotny and the other priests chanted the names of the dead and sang, and the smoke of incense spread through the crowd with the sweet aroma of myrrh and balm, a thunderous sound ran through the ceremony as an anti-aircraft missile fired into the sky somewhere south of the city.
The rocket cut through the sky, leaving behind a plume of white smoke that rose, twisted, and began to dissolve. The priests continued their song, uninterruptedly, while the wicked turned their eyes upward, seeking heaven.
Serhii Korolchuk, Wojciech Grzedzinski, Yevgenia Sivorka and Kostiantyn Tatarkin contributed to this report.