Katya Zulynska, 24, says she is still madly in love with her husband and only wishes he would be there to hug her and cuddle their daughter. Serhiy Zulynskyi was killed one year ago in Donetsk Airport leaving his young wife and a 6-month-old daughter.
When the long siege of Donetsk Airport by Russian-separatist forces ended in January of 2015 with Ukrainians’ defeat, Zulynska didn’t believe her husband was killed.
She spent two months looking for him, watching videos from the airport and trying to contact someone on the other side of the conflict hoping he was held captive. She kept searching until one day she found Serhiy in a morgue.
So did the widows of Ukrainian soldiers Yuriy Osaulko and Dmytro Franyshyn. Like Zulynska’s husband, Franyshyn and Osaulko were killed in the last battle for Donetsk Airport.
The outnumbered Ukrainian soldiers defended the airport, a key object in the Russian war in eastern Ukraine, for 240 days. In the last battle in the end of January of 2015, the airport was ruined by two massive explosions that killed the Ukrainian soldiers who remained inside.
After the first explosion, Zulynskyi, Franyshyn and a few other soldiers volunteered to go inside the half-ruined airport to evacuate the injured and the dead.
They never made it to the airport. The Russian-separatist fighters shelled their car, killing everyone.
Osaulko was among the soldiers who were killed inside the airport.
It was for their courage and superhuman endurance that the separatists called the airport’s defenders “cyborgs.” However, they were real people and had families who are grieving them ever since.
Zulynska says she called her husband’s number on the night of Jan. 20, someone picked up the phone and said: “He won’t come back,” but she didn’t believe.
“I thought it was an evil prank, I didn’t want to believe,” the woman says.
Oksana Franyshyna, 26, says she went through the same agony when looking for her husband and could not find him dead or alive. She believed her husband’s dream.
“He had a dream that he and his friends would come back alive and I was holding up to that dream like crazy,” the woman says.
The dream wasn’t prophetic. Franyshyna found her husband’s body two months after his death.
Oksana Franyshyna, 26, and her daughter Karolina, 8. Their husband and father Dmytro Franyshyn was killed in the battle for Donetsk Airport in January of 2015. (Photo by Daryna Shevchenko)
The woman says that after her husband’s death her whole life became a battle with bureaucracy.
“Now the state needs a proof that he really had an underage daughter. No one asked that when he was summoned to war,” Franyshsyna says bitterly.
Her 8-year-old daughter Karolina is old enough to understand what happened, her mother says, though the girl prefers to believe that “her dad is a star in the sky.”
The 4-year-old Snizhana, the youngest one of the two daughters of Yuriy Osaulko, is not sure where her father is.
“Sometimes she says he is in the cemetery because that’s where we go to visit him, but mostly she says that he is at war and is coming back soon,” says her mother Alyona Osaulko, 33.
She also looked for her husband for several months and had to submit her daughter’s DNA for identifying his body. When it finally matched one of the bodies dug out from under the airport ruins, they had to bury him in a closed casket.
Alyona Osaulko says she lost the balance of life when her husband died.
“He was my protection,” she says. “You know how they say ‘Behind a man like behind a wall’ – that’s how I felt with him.”
Osaulko says her husband was “a true patriot” and she had never heard even a trace of fear in his voice. Before being called up to the war, he was a member of the protesters’ self-defense squad at EuroMaidan.
“He never volunteered to go to war, but when he was finally called to go it was as if he was waiting for it,” she recalls with a bitter smile.
She tried to persuade him to stay at home, but couldn’t.
So did Zulynska with her husband. The only real fight they had in their marriage was when she suggested that he dodged the draft.
“He told me to stop even thinking about that, because if I didn’t we would stop talking at all,” she recalls.
She remembers him as a great father, who would wake up to their daughter’s cries at night and was the one to change her first diaper.
Zulynska laughs a lot, so does her little daughter Zlata and so did her husband. Even his memorial photo next to a candle pictures him with a broad smile and merry eyes.
“I often see him in my dreams. Most of the times he holds our daughter and smiles,” Zulynska says.
Most of all she is sorry that their daughter, who is now 18-month-old, won’t remember her father. When the time comes, she plans to tell Zlata about the war and the sacrifice that her father made for the country.
Katya Zulynska, 24, and her 18-month-old daughter Zlata, photographed at their home next to the portrait of their late husband and father Serhiy Zulynskyi, who was killed in the battle for Donetsk Airport in January of 2015. (Photo by Daryna Shevchenko)
“That couldn’t have been for nothing,” Zulynska says, as her daughter tugs her hair still tied with a black mourning ribbon. “He and his comrades didn’t die for nothing. They were protecting what was ours and we shouldn’t give that away.”
