Vera Kryvoshenko knelt on the ground near the front door and shook hands in prayer: do not take my son.

Valeria was just very unlucky that he arrived at the same time as the “evil spirits”, as she called them. He was in Makarov because he brought her and her neighbors food and medicine – elderly people who could not or did not want to run away from the Russians.

Faith looked up. Russian soldiers were a few meters away from her, putting “V” symbols on her car to avoid friendly fire when riding on it. One of them – still a boy, thought Vera, my grandson’s age – got a walkie-talkie.

“Poplar, poplar, it’s a tramp,” he said. “A car is coming soon, don’t shoot.”

Faith stood up on a cane and said her prayer aloud. “Please don’t take my son.” In fact, Valery Kuksa was her son-in-law, but she called him her son. The Russians took her son. The young man raised his rifle in half. “Go home, Grandma,” he said. “He’ll just help us push the car out of the yard.”

But they pushed him into the driver’s seat of her car and pointed a gun at him, Vera said. She wanted Valery to look at her, but he looked straight ahead and walked away from home and her life.

Stop in any village west of Kyiv, where the Russian army has been terrorizing civilians for a month, and you are sure to hear the story of the missing. A brother who went to get gas from a friend and never came. A father who left home on business and did not return. The son, who drove away under the muzzle and did not look back.

Before the war, Maria Saenko constantly saw her father Mykola – he lived behind several houses in the village of Gurivshchyna and visited her newborn child almost every day. Then one day at the beginning of the Russian occupation he disappeared.

“He left home and never came back,” Maria said. “And no one saw him anywhere.”

A neighbor said that he thought that Mykola had gone to a nearby village on business, but he did not remember for sure. His house looked as if he had just gone to the store. Maria filed a complaint with the police through an automated online service and began to wait. Maria only knows that her father, Mykola Medvid, a 56-year-old part-time car mechanic, left home on March 18-19 and has not come since.

“We went to the nearest villages and the next ones,” Maria said.

A few kilometers further down the road, in the village of Shpytky, Yulia Zhilko is sitting in her car and looking at a photo of her brother Yakov on the phone. According to her, they were as close as a brother and sister can be, and had only a year difference in age – 36 and 37 years. They still live with their parents.

On March 11, a friend of Jacob’s from the village called and said he needed gas.

“My brother is so kind. He said, ‘I’ll take the fuel to him and come back!'” Yulia recalls.

Not everyone in Yulia’s situation would talk about her family now, but she never hesitated – although the Ukrainian military found Yakov’s car on the side of the road, covered with bullet holes. When Julia was able to approach the car after the Russians left, she was burned. But there were no traces of the body.

“We called everywhere, all the reports were compiled,” said Julia. “They took all the information – shoe size, eye color, blood type, scars, everything.”

Jacob did not have tattoos, which their mother was proud of, so the report said that he “has no distinctive marks on the skin.” Julia filed a complaint with the police and was on a long list of people waiting for news.

In Makarov, Valery Kuksa’s family is looking forward to the news. There is no electricity in the town yet, and Vera is sitting in the dark, by the fire, with her daughter Olena and grandson Danylo. They reported her disappearance to the local police, but Olena was worried that she had not been properly registered, that they had done something wrong to find her husband. She wanted to go to Bucha, the district center, to ask the police in person, but the windshield of her car was hit by bullets.

Elena nervously walked around the house looking for the latest photos of Valery. It was dark in the house, there were bullet holes in the walls, and broken glass on the floor. A mortar shell went through the roof, and two more exploded in the garden and shattered the house. The only thing Elena found were passport photos. She put them in a folder with Valery’s passport and took them to Bucha.

The police station is still reporting missing at least 10 a day. Relatives of the missing person fill out a standard police report. Every night, the police deliver reports to the city, process them and upload them to the database. There, the team collects photos of the dead from local morgues and posts them on a public telegram channel with a brief description of the body.

In Bucha, police reassured Olena a little when they said that reports from their Makarov colleagues were in the general system and that Valeria was not on the list of identified victims.

But there were at least 200 unidentified bodies in Bucha, and he could be among them. She was also told to look at photos from the morgue on the telegram channel, but she was not ready for what she saw.

When the car returned to Makarov, Elena was sitting and looking at horrible photos. Then she began to cry.

“My soul aches not only for my husband, but for all these people,” she said. After a while, she tried not to look at the photos, but just read the text, looking for something that could relate to Valery. In the end, she gave up.

“I can’t stand it anymore,” she said.

As the car approached her house, she looked out the window. Storks stood in nests on telegraph poles all the way – in Ukrainian folklore it is a sign that good families live in the houses under them. But these houses were cut by bullet holes or completely destroyed by shells, and families suffered terrible suffering and loss.

Elena heard stories about people who were taken to Belarus, to Russia; about civilians returning during the exchange of prisoners in the south of Ukraine. Everyone who missed someone seemed to hear these stories. She wanted to go to Kyiv to talk to Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk, whose exchange office, but police in Bucha told her not to. All the information about Valeria was in the right places, they say, she can only wait.

Then, three days later, on Thursday last week, Olena’s phone rang and the woman said she was calling from Iryna Vereshchuk’s office. She asked if she was talking to Valery Kuksa’s wife, and Olena felt her heart stop in her chest. “Yes,” she replied.

The woman said that Valeria was recognized alive among the hostages in Russia. Where he was and when Elena could see him again, the woman could not say. But he was alive.

“Everything is fine,” Elena said through her tears. “He will come back to us. I can wait.”

The material was prepared with the participation of Ann and Pantyukhov . Photos of Joel and Hunter.

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