Alla Krotkikh and her son Savely Krotkikh, at his father’s grave. /
Alla Krotkikh reflects the drama of the thousands of mothers and wives of deceased and wounded Ukrainian soldiers, who struggle to raise a family with hardly any
Savely Krotkikh turns ten years old this Thursday and has asked for a very special gift: to visit the grave of his father, Igor Krotkikh, a soldier who died exactly a month ago in the bloody battle of Irpin. His mother, Alla Krotkikh, has granted his wish, and the two bring flowers to the cemetery in this satellite town of the Ukrainian capital, kyiv. From the horizon comes the roar of the bulldozers that are eating up space in the hill so that the gravediggers can continue digging graves. His activity is one of the few that does not stop in Ukraine.
The rows of burials since the Russian invasion began, on February 24, far exceed those dedicated to a decade in peacetime. Not in vain, the authorities affirm that 269 corpses have already been removed in this town of some 69,000 inhabitants. And there are still missing. One of them is, precisely, Igor’s father. “We last saw him on March 20, when we went to prepare food for him. He is an elderly person, he was born in 1939, and he resisted evacuating the city. He continued to live in my house, which has been partially destroyed. But we have not found him there », Alla tells with compelling integrity, because Savely does not stop crying and needs the strength of his mother.
The body of Igor, born in 1975, does not rest with that of civilians. He shares with other soldiers fallen in combat a space delimited by national flags. The tombstones show that the first died in 2014, during the Russian annexation of Crimea. Several more died fighting in the eight-year-old war in Donbas, the Russian-speaking eastern region where Vladimir Putin’s offensive is currently focused. And their number is now dwarfed by the number of those who have perished in recent weeks. There are already several graves dug for those who will come in the next few days.
THE KEYS:
Drama.
Igor Krotkikh died in the arms of his 21-year-old son Vladislav, who was shot three times while protecting his body.Deceased.
Excavators are eating up the mountain to expand the cemetery in Irpin
“From day one, Igor defended Irpín together with his brother Yurii and my eldest son Vladislav. On March 16 there was a terrible battle that lasted for five days in which they managed to resist while they waited for reinforcements that did not arrive. They never gave up. On the 21st Igor was shot twice in the heart. They were in a trench on the ground and the Russians machine-gunned from high floors, “recalls Alla, whose tragedy goes far beyond being a widow.
“A miracle”
Because Igor died in the arms of his eldest son, Vladislav Krotkikh. And this young man, only 21 years old, was shot three times and suffered shrapnel wounds as he tried to protect his father’s body from him. Igor’s brother Yurii Krotkikh was with them and was also injured by mortar fire. “At first they were taken to Hospital Number 7 and then transferred to the Shalimov Institute Hospital, where they have been for a month now. I didn’t think they were going to save them, but a miracle has happened. Two bullets have been removed from my son’s stomach, but he has pieces of another one lodged in his lung and they cannot remove it because there is a risk that he will die », says Alla.
From the inside pocket of his jacket he takes out a small hermetic plastic bag in which he keeps the two bullets that Vladislav had lodged. One is of caliber 7.62, probably from a Kalashnikov AK-47, and a military expert consulted by this newspaper indicates that the other may be a 22-millimeter pistol bullet. They have become an amulet for her. “The doctor told us that my son was lucky: he could have died because some shrapnel was very close to the artery. He could have bled to death,” she explains. Of course, Vladislav will suffer consequences for life due to the projectile in his lung. His uncle has had better luck, and he hopes to recover in a few weeks.
In any case, Alla is more concerned about the psychological trauma. “My husband and I asked Vladislav not to fight, but it was his decision. »How are we going to live if they destroy our country«, she told me. She had never faced something so terrible and is still in ‘shock’. He is having a hard time accepting the situation, and I understand because I don’t even want to imagine what it had to be like. At first he refused the assistance of psychologists, but now it seems that he is advancing little by little », she recounts while Savely holds on tightly to his leg.
Vladislav’s physical and mental condition delayed his father’s funeral. “First of all, they were unable to recover Igor’s body until ten days after his death due to the intensity of the fighting. And then they kept it in the morgue because Vladislav was not ready to attend the funeral and we wanted to wait for him. In the end we buried him on April 11 and our oldest son was in a wheelchair. He has lost 20 kilos and still has to go through different operations », says his mother, who now faces another great hurdle: the economic one.
Alla is a police officer. But her salary is not enough to support two children alone. And besides, she can’t live in her house. Because, as happens in much of Irpin, a desolate town, the doors and windows are broken and there are large holes in the walls. “The government has promised us financial aid, but we haven’t received anything yet,” says Alla.
No political ideologies
So for now they all live together in the hospital room where Vladislav is being treated. “I am very grateful because they have welcomed us there. The companions of the Corps have helped me a lot and we have even received the love and help of many strangers. Even in this situation there is something good. We are all united, regardless of political ideology », highlights Alla, who was moved by a coffee that someone sent her with a note: ‘For the mother of a hero’.
Now, the family wants a street in Irpin to bear Igor’s name, or his surname. “The mayor was at the funeral and seemed to accept the idea. Vladislav demands that they award him a medal of merit, and I also want it to be given to my son and Yurii as a sign of respect”, declares the mother, who does not hide her pride: “We want to thank him for having sacrificed himself to save the town. Thanks to men like my husband we are still alive.
But, as happens to thousands of women across the country, and also to the victims of many other war conflicts, now Alla will have to support the family with limited resources. She has the advantage that she provides a job, but, in a patriarchal society like the Ukrainian one, she recognizes that it will not be easy. In spite of everything, she shrugs her shoulders with an increasingly extended resignation for a devastated country that, yes, fully trusts in the victory of David against Goliath and fully rejects a capitulation that could save tens of thousands of lives.
Odyssey in search of dialysis
Nadia Mazun, a 34-year-old wealthy clerk, would have fled kyiv when a war began that she never thought possible, but her mother’s illness prevented her from doing so. Her kidneys are not working and she has to undergo dialysis three times a week. “We planned to go to Spain and we consulted the possibilities of continuing the treatment in Alicante or Bilbao, but we saw that it was not feasible to make such a long trip in the middle of the war and we feared that the bureaucracy would delay his access to dialysis,” she recalls.
He lived the first three weeks of the invasion with his parents in a town near Bucha and Irpin, destroyed by the fighting. “We hid in the neighbors’ basement, because our house doesn’t have one,” she says. But the situation became critical for her mother and she had to move to a town in the south of her, near Hungary, to connect her to the machine that keeps her alive.
Nadia has spent much of her savings on renting an apartment there, but she has achieved her goal: although her health has deteriorated, her mother is still alive thanks to European humanitarian aid that supplied hospitals in the south. “People have taken advantage and raised rental prices in safe areas from $300 to $1,000. She is a disgrace », she recriminates.
The family has already returned to kyiv because the dialysis program has been resumed. But this is not the case in other hospitals in the rest of the country. “Many chronic patients can die due to lack of care,” says Nadia. And a doctor who prefers to remain anonymous confirms it. “We have more and more medicines, but many things are still missing. Logistics are complicated », she says. As happened with covid, the lack of assistance will add many deaths to the war in Ukraine.