When Kateryna Dembovska’s husband went missing in action in May last year, she was told all that was left of him and his unit was one body and two black bags in a Mykolaiv morgue.
According to his brigade, Volodymyr Dembovskyi, a gunner in a motorised infantry company, was burned alive in a Russian artillery strike on a village in southern Ukraine.
Fellow soldiers, including their commander, were unable to save him and six other soldiers as their building was engulfed in flames, relatives were told.
But Dembovska doesn’t believe the 59th Brigade’s leadership or its investigation – and has tried on her own to find out exactly what happened to her husband on 8 May 2022.
“I want to know the truth, even if he died, and I feel in my bones that he did not,” Dembovska, a railway safety engineer, told openDemocracy.
She is one of thousands of people whose relatives serving in the Ukrainian military are considered missing in action. Together with missing civilians, Ukraine’s missing soldiers number around 24,000, according to an official register.
As openDemocracy found, the experience of relatives of missing soldiers can vary from brigade to brigade. In this case, a backstory of conflict revolving around the battalion commander, as well as the brigade’s treatment of relatives, Dembovska says, has led her and other relatives to doubt the official account.
“If he just died as they say – burned – then give me those bones,” Dembovska said.
For months, relatives of the soldiers told openDemocracy, the 59th Brigade would not give the exact number of soldiers who died in the Russian attack, nor conduct an internal investigation, nor communicate with relatives properly.
In some cases, openDemocracy found, the brigade leadership’s behaviour was compounded by rudeness from military officials, who families say treated their grief as a nuisance and their desire to know what happened to their children and husbands as ill-timed. Two families buried what they were told were the remains of their sons without receiving any answers to their concerns.
Faced with confusing, incomplete information from Ukraine’s military bureaucracy, relatives of soldiers at the 59th Brigade have been forced to gather their own information about their loved ones’ reported demise – and found themselves navigating a web of half-truths and missing details.
The 59th Brigade did not respond to requests for comment. But the battalion’s former commander told openDemocracy that the soldiers in question had died, and that the families did not want to believe him.
Piecing together the puzzle
Relatives of missing soldiers often have only fragments of information on the last reported whereabouts of their loved ones – locations received on the rare occasions when they received a phone call or message. For frontline troops, communication is a privilege only for moments of inactivity on the Russian forces’ side.
If the worst happens, sometimes relatives will receive the body of their loved one, and can bury them. Others may find a photo of the soldier in a Russian prisoner of war (POW) camp. If a soldier dies and it’s impossible to retrieve their body, their fellow soldiers will inform the next of kin that they saw them die.
This is what happened to Dembovska, a mother of two, and other relatives of soldiers in her husband’s unit. After the Russian strike on their unit’s position, relatives were told by the unit’s commander, Yan Yatsyshyn, that their sons, husbands and brothers had all died.
As Dembovska recalls, at first she believed the brigade’s claims that the scant remains of the seven soldiers’ bodies were in a morgue in Mykolaiv. DNA tests were to be conducted swiftly in order for relatives to hold funerals.
Still, she expected an official account of her husband’s death.
The Ukrainian military has procedures stating that relatives of missing soldiers must be informed of their deaths, and of what has happened. Each missing soldier’s brigade is then responsible for conducting an internal official investigation into the circumstances of their disappearance – which should take one to two months. (That said, there are conflicting opinions on whether a brigade is obliged to conduct an investigation during wartime.)
When a soldier goes missing while fighting, their relatives must apply to the Ukrainian police to search for them as a “missing person under special circumstances”. The police should, in turn, open a criminal investigation and commission DNA profiling of any suspected remains.
Yet the brigade’s investigation into the attack at the beginning of May 2022 did not materialise for months – and neither did a police investigation.
There were several other things that led Kateryna Dembovska to question what she was told.
As Dembovska recalled, her husband had sent her a video of his position in a destroyed village of three parallel streets, Novohryhorivka – a different building from the one the brigade later claimed he had died in – at the end of April 2022, and said: “Katya, this is so you know where to look for me.”
In the days before he went missing, Volodymyr had expressed concern over whether he would survive, saying that nearby Ukrainian artillery was performing poorly. Fighting in the Mykolaiv and Kherson regions was heavy, and he claimed that he and his fellow soldiers were stationed in Novohryhorivka with Russian artillery raining on them. Ukrainian artillery deployed nearby, she said, did not return fire.
As a result, Dembovska began to doubt that the bodies the brigade claimed to have retrieved were the right ones. Concerns about the conduct of her husband’s commander only compounded this doubt.
Delayed investigation
In the end, it took the 59th Brigade almost a year to start the investigation into the circumstances of the seven soldiers’ disappearance.
Only in April 2023, according to a document seen by openDemocracy, did the 59th Brigade conduct its legally-required investigation into the soldiers’ disappearance. Until November 2022, the brigade claimed that they could not commence the probe because Novohryhorivka was in an active combat zone. The entire Mykolaiv region was declared under complete Ukrainian control on 11 November last year.
In the meantime, explanations from the unit’s commander, Yan Yatsyshyn, did not satisfy the soldiers’ relatives, who alleged to openDemocracy that his account of the artillery strike changed over time.
In telephone calls and Signal chats, Yatsyshyn told Dembovska that the soldiers had been burned to death in the basement of the building, that he was “personally at the scene” of the Russian artillery hit, and – in one version of events – that he had “personally extinguished the fire”. Yet Dembovska was told by her husband’s comrades that Yatsyshyn was rarely on the front lines with soldiers.
When contacted, Yatsyshyn did not answer openDemocracy’s questions about the events of 8 May 2022 directly, but repeated the claim that he had been physically at the scene.
Despite explaining what happened several times to Dembovska and relatives, Yatsyshyn says, he and other soldiers from the battalion could not persuade them to believe the truth. He claimed there was drone footage showing the moment the group of soldiers died, but did not share it with openDemocracy. Another soldier, the only officially documented survivor of the Russian artillery fire that day, refused to speak to openDemocracy.
openDemocracy has seen a copy of the brigade’s investigation, eventually produced in April 2023. One evident mismatch between what relatives are saying and the brigade’s investigation is the stated hour of the beginning of the Russian artillery fire.
According to the investigation, the artillery strike started at around 9am on 8 May. A mine hit the group’s position directly 50 minutes later, it said. Yet Dembovska received a phone call and messages from her husband asking her to help him with a bank payment at 11.38am that day. openDemocracy has seen the time stamps of the messages and phone call.
Dembovska herself still has yet to receive a copy of the investigation. She says she has requested the document several times, including via a lawyer.
A military legal adviser who previously served as a lawyer in another brigade told openDemocracy that, in his experience, there are usually good reasons for investigations into missing soldiers to be delayed.
Those reasons might include whether the brigade is fighting on the front line – meaning a lack of resources to conduct an investigation – as officers conducting the official investigation also participate in active operations, the adviser, Oleksandr Horovyi, said.
Unit conflict
Another factor that has sowed doubt for Dembovska over her husband’s fate is the reportedly antagonistic relationship between commander Yatsyshyn and his subordinates.
In the early stages of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Dembovska said, her husband and his fellow soldiers had had “conflicts” with the battalion's leadership after failing to receive their full wages, and over being sent to fight without what they considered necessary equipment and weapons.
Yatsyshyn told openDemocracy that Dembovskyi and other soldiers “had gone on strike” over unpaid salaries in spring 2022, but said that he did not know the reason for it as he had not been physically present during the strike.
In another alleged episode whose details were uncovered by openDemocracy, a soldier accused Yatsyshyn, and a group of up to ten other soldiers, of beating him up.
That soldier, Oleksandr Huryn, showed us images of the bruises he says were caused by the beating, as well as an official medical report describing his injuries as a result of Yatsyshyn’s alleged assault.
Huryn, an experienced soldier assigned to Yatsyshyn’s command from Ukraine’s 123rd Brigade, claimed that he received this “punishment” in September 2022 for disobeying an order from Yatsyshyn that he considered unlawful. Specifically, he had protested what he called a poorly planned operation of occupying frontline positions during the Kherson region counteroffensive, alleging that clear orders and communication over several days were lacking.
“[Yatsyshyn] beat me with a police baton on my face, saying: ‘You will learn what happens when you don’t listen to my commands,’” Huryn recalled.
Yatsyshyn did not respond to openDemocracy's request for comment about the alleged assault.
"I have been serving since 2014. I have never seen such a thing [as events in the 59th Brigade],” Huryn recalled, referring for instance to “orders to send people to take up positions when Russians were still there”.
“I couldn’t even imagine that such a thing was possible in our army, in fact.”
Yatsyshyn later became deputy commander of the 59th Brigade, and then commander of a separate brigade – the 56th Brigade. In July this year, president Volodymyr Zelenskyi personally thanked the 56th Brigade for its service in Bakhmut, and former Deputy Minister of Defence Hanna Malar called Yatsyshyna “legendary commander” while personally handing over the document.
The final word
A DNA test is the last word in whether a soldier’s remains are yours to bury, and the Ukrainian interior ministry’s own forensic service conducts these tests for missing soldiers and their relatives.
But though close relatives of the group of soldiers gave DNA samples in order to confirm the remains in the weeks following the attack on 8 May, what followed was months of waiting for a response by Mykolaiv law enforcement.
Eventually, in November 2022, Dembovska was informed by Mykolaiv prosecutors that, at the time, there had been “no match” between the alleged remains of her husband and the DNA of his brother. Mykolaiv regional police did not respond to openDemocracy’s request for comment on these issues but said the investigation into Volodymyr Dembovskyi’s missing in action case remained open.
But Maryna Savel’yeva, a molecular geneticist, told openDemocracy that the negative response in November could simply have meant that the DNA matching process was not yet complete.
The Ukrainian interior ministry’s forensic service is overwhelmed with work due to the number of casualties, creating a long wait for DNA results, Savel’yeva said.
Tetiana Sharko, the mother of another missing soldier from the unit, told openDemocracy she too doubted the version of events she had been given by the 59th Brigade.
Mykolaiv police sent Sharko the results of a DNA test that purported to prove her son’s identity. At openDemocracy’s request, Savel’yeva reviewed the results, which she says indicates a mother-child relationship. But without the raw data, she could not say for sure whether the two DNA samples were conclusively connected. Mykolaiv law enforcement did not give permission for openDemocracy to access the raw data.
Officially registered as a missing soldier rather than a fatality, Volodymyr had remained on the unit’s payroll after the attack in May 2022. When his mother suddenly stopped receiving payments in January 2023, she called the brigade – and some time later in April she was told by the military commissar who came to her house that Volodymyr had officially been proclaimed dead.
Remains alleged to be those of her son were then sent to a local morgue. Sharko says this consisted of a black bag that an investigator from Mykolaiv forbade her from opening.
Nor was she allowed to obtain an independent DNA analysis, she says. Sharko alleges she was told by the local military commissariat who received the remains that the local authority would bury her son as an unidentified soldier without her consent if she continued to insist on independent DNA examination.
Mykolaiv police did not respond to openDemocracy’s request for comment on Sharko’s allegations.
“Even if [I can accept that] my son did die, then I don’t acknowledge that I buried his remains,” said Sharko. “There is a big question about why they didn’t let [that black bag with the remains] be opened. There is some kind of lie here, but it is not clear what this lie is.”
No closure
Seventeen months on from Volodymyr’s disappearance, Dembovska now considers herself lucky: earlier this year, she found a man in an official photograph from a Russian prison colony in occupied Luhansk region who she believes looks like her husband.
This gave Dembovska new hope not to be persuaded to bury the remains until she is certain they belong to her husband.
Yet Dembovska says she is anxious about her husband’s release from Russian captivity. If Volodymyr returns, she fears, he could find himself on the front line once again, or even wind up in prison if he is accused of surrendering voluntarily.
