In Ukraine, funeral for activist killed and mourned in war

KYIV, Ukraine — Poppies, the blood-red flowers that cover the battlefields of Europe’s two world wars, were lain in mourning Saturday on the coffin of yet another dead soldier, this one killed in yet another European war, in Ukraine.

The hundreds of mourners for Roman Ratushnyi, 24, included friends who had protested with him during months of demonstrations that toppled Ukraine’s pro-Russia leader in 2014 and who, like him, took up arms when Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of its neighbor this February.

The arc of his shortened life symbolized that of Ukraine’s post-independence generations that are sacrificing their best years in the cause of freedom. First, with defiance and dozens of lives against brutal riot police during Ukraine’s Maidan protests of 2013-2014 and now with weapons and even more lives against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s troops.

“Heroes never die!” friends, family and admirers shouted in Ukrainian as Ratushnyi’s coffin was loaded aboard a hearse on a square in the Ukrainian capital now decorated with destroyed Russian tanks and vehicles. Their charred hulks contrasted with the shiny gold domes of an adjacent cathedral where priests had earlier sung prayers for Ratushnyi, who was well-known in Kyiv for his civic and environmental activism.

From the square, the mourners then walked in a long silent column behind his coffin to Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square. The vast plaza in central Kyiv gave its name to the three months of protests that overthrew then President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 and which helped fuel the political and patriotic awakening of Ukrainians born after independence in 1991.

Ratushnyi had “a heart full of love for Ukraine,” said Misha Reva, who traveled overnight in his soldier’s uniform from front lines in the east to say goodbye to the friend he met for the first time on Maidan, in the midst of the protests. Ratushnyi was then just 16; Reva was in his early 20s. It was Ratushnyi who introduced Reva to the woman who is now his wife, also on the square.

While the funeral was underway in central Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a trip south to visit troops and hospital workers.

Among the troops he met were many women, dressed in camouflage and bulletproof vests. At a hospital in Odesa, he awarded the rank of major general to the woman who commands the Ukrainian army’s medical forces.

“War is on the front line where our soldiers are, our army. But you also are on the front line, protecting our lives, helping wounded soldiers, helping the civilians who turn to you every day,” Zelenskyy told the medical staff. “We are proud that we have such doctors in our country.”