"My girls could have ten Uncle Kolyas, but they only have one mother," Maryna Aleksyuk told Mykola Ivanchenko in February 2022. She was defending Mariupol's Azovstal steelworks from the Russian siege. He was at home in occupied Berdiansk, with a rifle and grenades to hand. Three months later, Mykola had to tell the girls that their mother wasn't coming back.
In an apartment in Brovary, Kyiv Oblast, hints of a past military life linger. Mykola, wearing a khaki-green 'Angels of Azov' memorial T-shirt, has just finished playing combat games on his computer. He lives here with his late partner's teenage daughters, Olena and Oleksandra, and a cat named Rusya.
Mykola, 43, was born in the port city of Berdiansk, by the Sea of Azov. Throughout his childhood and up until 2014, the south-eastern region was under the influence of Russification. When the Maidan Revolution of 2013-2014 began, Mykola protested against Russian influence and corruption, and supported Ukraine's sovereignty.
In May 2014, after Russian-backed separatists initiated the War in Donbas, the Azov Battalion formed in Mykola's hometown. He volunteered to join. From February 2015, he fought in the Pavlopil-Shyrokyne operation, defending the strategic city of Mariupol and nearby towns following its liberation.
"I have memories of war that are like scary bedtime stories – but not the kind you should tell children," he says. He quickly realised that "war is not a game".
Love forged in the Azov Regiment
A month later, Mykola left the Azov Battalion and joined the 54th Brigade in Bakhmut. In 2018, he returned to Azov – by then a regiment in the National Guard – in Mariupol, where a woman in his unit caught his eye.
They fell in love and became a family. Maryna Aleksyuk had two young daughters, Olena and Oleksandra. Mykola had one, Milana.
Maryna had joined Azov in 2015. She was a quartermaster, responsible for logistics, supplies and paperwork. She had never fired a shot and was determined to learn combat skills.
"I understood then, and I understand now, that war is not a woman's business," Mykola says. "I tried to separate her from it."
He couldn't protect her from war, but he could help her learn how to defend herself. The couple went to a training ground, where Mykola trained Maryna in weapons handling, aiming, shooting and manoeuvring. "It brought us closer together and reassured me that she would be able to fight back," he says.
After his three-year Azov contract ended in 2021, Mykola transferred to the Marine Corps, and the family moved from Mariupol to Berdiansk. Maryna had signed a five-year contract with Azov, so Mykola stayed with the children, while she worked at base and came home at weekends.
Silence during the Siege of Mariupol: "I love you, take care of the children"
On 24 February 2022, Russia's full-scale invasion began. Maryna's unit was deployed to the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works in Mariupol.
Mykola told her to come home. "I will send you somewhere far away, and I'll go there myself," he pleaded. "No," she replied. "You know that I have to be here."
Three days later, Berdiansk was occupied. On 6 March, their phone connection broke down for the first time. Maryna's last words were "I love you, take care of the children."
Mykola fell to his knees, crying. "I prayed that God would take part of my life, just to save her life," he says.
He considered going to Azovstal, but friends warned him that others had been shot at checkpoints on rescue missions.
Mykola sent the girls outside the city to live with his ex-wife and their daughter. People had been targeted and killed when the Russians came across documents revealing combatants' addresses. "Family ties – especially children – are a very big hook," he says. "If they catch you, you become a puppet."
In his apartment, Mykola sat on the sofa with weapons at hand, ready to resist if Russians entered. All the while, he ruminated on his growing certainty that Maryna was dead or in danger. "My first thought was a barrel in the mouth and a bullet in the head," he says.
Lyrics from the rock opera 'Orpheus and Eurydice' entered his mind: "I do not need the remainder of my days without her. Everything has lost its colours, turned into ice."
Mykola likened the trauma to his experience of concussion after combat missions in 2016. "You're sitting there, dazed, and you don't care if something is burning or not," he says. "Who's there? And then you return to life."
One question brought him to his senses: "If I took my own life, what would happen to the children?" The girls had no contact with their biological father, and would be left without either a mother or a father figure.
"You are emotionally stronger," Maryna had told him from Azovstal. "If anything happens to me, you'll be able to endure it."
A gruelling escape from occupation
Time stopped for Mykola. He had remembered his grandmother's wisdom and stockpiled bread and grains, but he was so stressed that he struggled to eat. On 9 March, he fled Berdiansk on foot in drizzling rain, weak from hunger and at risk of being shot at every step.
But the Russian soldiers at checkpoints were indifferent. One Buryat soldier asked Mykola: "You have paved roads and gas everywhere. Nice houses. Where do you work that you earn so much?"
Mykola carried a tactical backpack that "went through Crimea and Rome" – an idiom for a tough time – with him. Finally, he reached a safe house. He couldn't remember what day it was. He was white as a sheet, "like a corpse" his friends said. In tears, he told them about Maryna.
The next day, Mykola found shaky WiFi at a nearby church with around fifty others. A message popped up:
"Everything's fine, I'm alive. They just bombed all the mobile phone masts."
Mykola sat and cried in relief. "It was like being told that you're terminally ill, then three days later they say they mixed up the surnames," he says. "Hello, life!"
Last stand at Azovstal: "We'll be here until the end"
Mykola told Maryna that she would be exchanged soon. "Don't tell me lies," she said. "No one's going to exchange us. We'll be here until the end."
She described constant bombing and the impossibility of sleep. The limited food supply was causing divisions due to selfishness. Men were fainting from hunger. Soldiers were making jokes about losing weight to boost morale.
She was always trying to prove something to someone, Mykola remembers: "I can do it, I am strong, I will endure everything." He asked her why she felt the need. "To prove to myself that I can," she replied.
One day, Maryna messaged: "Thank you for your lessons. I hit [the target], and they didn't." During one Russian assault, women had joined the fight. Mykola devised plans for Maryna to escape, but she maintained that they weren't feasible.
In April, Mykola evacuated the girls to Zaporizhzhia. 9 May was his birthday, but he wasn't in the mood to celebrate. He had last heard from Maryna the day before, when she asked him to send songs to distract her. The connection had often been patchy, but after his birthday passed without any contact and more messages were left unread over the following week, he had a gut feeling that something was badly wrong.
On 16 May, the last Azovstal defenders were ordered to surrender after an 86-day siege and were taken captive by the Russians. Mariupol fell to Russian control.
At 10:00, the support service Angels of Azov called Mykola, explaining that Maryna had died in a fire on 8 May after a three-tonne Russian bomb hit, killing 60 people. She was 43.
The agony of acceptance and telling the girls
The news hit Mykola hard, but his mistaken belief in March that Maryna had died had, in some way, prepared him.
"I already knew what loss was," he says. "I had already lived through it, and it was easier for me to accept it."
According to the official records, she died at 14:50. However, his last message to her – a song link – was marked as read at 16:12.
Mykola describes his trauma in a matter-of-fact manner. He accepts that Ukraine is engaged in a deadly war and that Maryna died fighting in it. "It preserves our sanity – this cynicism, this attitude toward life and death," he says.
The most painful part was deciding how to tell the girls. He briefly considered continuing to message them through a second Telegram account that he had created for Maryna in April, when she had wiped her phone ahead of an aborted exit. But then he imagined a future prisoner exchange, picturing the girls waiting expectantly for a mother who would never arrive. He couldn't lie to them.
Until then, the war had been an abstract, distant idea to the girls. "They reacted the way I had on 6 March," Mykola says.
Becoming guardian of two children, but father to three
The next step was to become the legal guardian of Maryna's girls – raising them with his daughter Milana, now 12. It was her last request, and Mykola kept his promise. "They are my children, biological or not," he says. "Taking care of them is not a duty, it speaks for itself – as a father, as a guardian, as a man. I didn't only love them alongside their mother."
Shortly after Maryna's death, a stray cat entered their apartment and leapt onto Mykola's shoulder, purring above his tattoo of her. "Your beloved just came to you," his friend said. They rescued the cat and named her Rusya, after a mermaid (rusalka) character called Marina in a cartoon.
On 6 March 2023 – a year to the day he first thought Maryna had died – Mykola resigned from the military on the grounds that he was caring for two or more minors. The family has since moved to Brovary.
Maryna's older daughter Olena, now 16, accepted her mother's death and has adapted well. Oleksandra, 13, struggled with the lack of closure and remains in denial. "She says 'Since there is no body, I don't believe my mum is dead, I want to go to her, she will definitely return,'" he says.
Children of Heroes: supporting families through loss and trauma
Only around half of the approximately 2,500 captured Azovstal defenders have been released. An estimated 850 Azov Regiment soldiers remain in captivity. Mykola is waiting for a comrade to return. He went to the area where Maryna died and saw the impact of the fire. "I want him to tell me first-hand what happened," he says. "I have hope that she died instantly."
Mykola recognises that his situation is the reverse of a typical military family in Ukraine, where countless women have lost boyfriends or husbands to war. He describes having connected with "a mystical, closed circle" of men in the same situation.
His friend Viktoria is now a key female figure in the girls' lives. Every few months, she takes the girls shopping and chats with them. "She and the girls support me," he says.
The Ukrainian NGO Children of Heroes has assisted with mental health support, gifts and rehabilitation camps for the girls. Mykola finds it difficult to show weakness or accept help, however. While grateful, he sometimes redirects support to families "in greater need".
Time does not heal, he says, but compresses bad memories. He sometimes struggles and feels lonely. "For the girls I am constantly positive, full of life and energy," he says. "I will deal with myself later, alone."
He puts others first, too. He volunteers with Veteran Hub, helping people to adapt to civilian life and deal with trauma and loss. He hopes that fallen soldiers like Maryna will be honoured by the state and society – "like veterans are honoured in the United States"– as heroes, as "daredevils who, despite the overwhelming numbers of Russians, still found the courage to defend Ukraine," he says.
An Angel of Azov
In the living room, the tactical backpack that Mykola carried as he fled Berdiansk now bears a patch reading "My angel's name is Maryna" with a portrait of her in military uniform.
Mykola hopes that Maryna would be as proud of how he's raising her daughters as he is of her sacrifice.
"They are rays of light from the sun that I no longer have," he says.
Author: Natalie Berry
Translation: Liubov Sholudko
Editing: Teresa Pearce
This reporting was supported by the International Women's Media Foundation's Women on the Ground: Reporting from Ukraine's Unseen Frontlines Initiative in partnership with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. Liubov Sholudko provided interpreting and translation.