Updated November 19, 2024 at 14:17 PM ET
KYIV and LYMAN, Ukraine — A thousand days into Russia's full-scale war on his country, Mykola Ivantsov fights on the eastern front line with a broken back that hasn't healed.
Every morning, he sends a text to his wife, Yaroslava Ivantsova.
"Hello, Sunshine," he writes.
Until she sees that text, she cannot relax.
"I try not to think about the bad," she says. "I tell myself that our guys will win back our territories. I try not to think about him being captured again."
The last thousand days have tested their 32-year marriage. The war has tested Ukraine, too, as the country has gone through a roller coaster of grief, hope, frustration and exhaustion. An estimated 12,000 people in Ukraine have been killed and millions turned to refugees since Russia invaded the country in 2022, according to the United Nations.
Many Ukrainians are worried their main ally, the United States, will abandon them after President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January. There is also fear that European allies may be unable to make up for cuts to U.S. aid. Ukrainians who used to talk about victory are now talking about concessions. It's time to bring the soldiers home, they say.
Soldiers like Ivantsov, though, have a different view.
"I do not separate my family from my country," he says. "It's one and the same. And the war is not yet over."
A love story
Mykola and Yaroslava met in eastern Siberia as the Soviet Union was collapsing. A Ukrainian from the eastern region of Luhansk, Mykola was finishing his compulsory military service. Yaroslava, from Russia's far east, was a college freshman. Both say it was love at first sight. Even now, they always hold hands.
"We've been asked if we're lovers or newlyweds," says Mykola, 52. "And we say, no, we've been married for decades. No one can believe it."
They raised four children and ran small businesses together in the Luhansk region. And then, in 2014, Russia helped pro-Kremlin separatists take over much of eastern Ukraine.
"We had a really nice big house there," he says. "We sold it very quickly for nothing. Rented a van, packed up whatever could fit, took the kids and the cat and left."
Mykola tried to enlist in the military but was told, at 42, that he was too old. Instead, he was directed to a volunteer battalion accepting men his age.
He adopted the military call sign Yar — the first three letters of his wife's name.
The volunteer unit he joined was Azov, which was founded by ultranationalist politician Andriy Biletskyi and initially bankrolled by Ukrainian Jewish oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi. The Kremlin, as well as some researchers of the far right, have called the brigade neo-Nazis. Mykola says the brigade has expelled anyone with such views.
"I condemn Nazis," he says. "They are the same as [Russian President Vladimir] Putin."
Mykola and Yaroslava lived in the southeastern port city of Mariupol when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
Captured after the Mariupol siege
Mykola and two sons-in-law who joined Azov stayed to defend Mariupol, while Yaroslava took their daughters and grandchildren to the central region of Dnipro, which was quickly filling up with displaced Ukrainians from the east. She cut off all contact with her family in Russia.
"After I heard them say they would destroy us, I was shocked," says Yaroslava, who is 51. "If that's what they think of us, then why bother communicating?"
Russian troops destroyed Mariupol, killing thousands of civilians. Mykola and hundreds of other Ukrainian soldiers holed up for weeks in the underground tunnels of Azovstal, a massive steel plant owned by Rinat Ahmetov, Ukraine's richest man. Russians bombed the plant constantly. Mykola called Yaroslava whenever he had a signal.
"I kept telling her, 'we need a miracle,' " Mykola says. "We realized that there would be no liberation here."
Yaroslava and other military spouses pressed the Red Cross and the United Nations to help free the soldiers. She took anti-anxiety pills and prayed that her husband could somehow slip out of Azovstal and outside Mariupol. An amateur coin collector who had navigated Ukraine's forests using old maps and a metal detector, Mykola had compasses in his backpack.
"I had no doubts he could find his way home," she says. "But I also knew he would never abandon his boys."
To Mykola, his fellow Azov soldiers became a second family. Many of them died in the steel plant, and many others were gravely wounded.
As the Russians closed in, Yaroslava listened to his last voice memo, which he recorded on a friend's phone after his own phone was destroyed.
"Everything is burned," he told her. "I barely made it out alive."
Ukraine gave the soldiers orders to surrender. Yaroslava got a call from the Red Cross informing her that her husband was alive and in captivity in a Russian-occupied part of eastern Ukraine.
Torture in captivity
Mykola was taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Olenivka, an occupied village in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region.
He crammed into a small cell with 25 other POWs. It was damp and moldy, infecting open wounds of injured soldiers there. The prison guards brought them food in a bucket.
"We divided it among ourselves," he says. "Porridge that was like dog food, and something that wasn't quite soup, just colored water with a few cabbage leaves."
He lost more than 50 pounds while in prison in Olenivka. He was beaten too, which injured his back and arms. But someone in his cell managed to get hold of a mobile phone. He immediately called Yaroslava.
"I would always tell her, 'don't worry, honey,' " Mykola says. "'We are eating a lot and lying on the beach like seals.' "
Yaroslava says she knew he was joking. "And then he called and said, 'I'm being transferred to another place, so we might lose our connection,' " she recalls.
The next day, on July 28, 2022, a missile hit the prison where Mykola had been held. Many POWs were killed or wounded.
Yaroslava and her daughter, whose husband had also been taken prisoner, tried cold-calling hospitals in occupied territory. Nothing. The Russians circulated a list with the names of those dead and wounded. Her husband's name was not there.
Mykola was not in Olevnika. He had been transferred to another POW jail in the Donetsk region. He says the prison guard showed the prisoners photos from the explosion site.
"Photos of our guys with their arms and legs blown off," he says. "And they told us this was done by Ukrainians, by our own people, using artillery. All lies, to make us lose faith."
Months of silence and fear
The phone Mykola used was destroyed. For months, Yaroslava did not know if he was alive. Mykola says he could sense her sadness and wished he could send her proof of life.
"I remember telling the guys in my cell, 'I am absolutely sure that my wife is doing everything to get me out of here,' " he says. "And that's exactly what happened."
After months of Yaroslava campaigning on his behalf with the government and international organizations, Mykola was released in a prisoner exchange in May 2023. He called her right after the military convoy he was in crossed the border into Ukraine.
"I heard her voice, and I said, 'Honey, it's me!' " he says. "I was trying to hold back my tears, but when she cried, I did too."
Yaroslava brought all the kids and grandkids to meet him at the military hospital in Kyiv, Ukraine's capital, where he was due to arrive.
"It was after curfew, but we didn't even care," she says. "And when the bus he was in pulled up, I saw him right away. The bus was going very slowly, so I ran up to it and put my hand on his window. He placed his hand on the other side. And I jogged with the bus like this until it stopped."
Yaroslava spent months nursing her husband back to health, often with grandchildren in tow. As an injured former POW, Mykola was eligible to continue his service in Kyiv.
"But he said he had to go back to his guys on the front line," she says. "We had these very long arguments. And I used to yell at him. I said that I went through so much to get him home. And now I may have to go through the same thing again. To worry, to stay awake at night."
He says he tried to console her. He told her Ukraine was very short of troops in what has become a war of attrition.
"It's hard for me to sit here while my fellow soldiers are out there," he says. "This is my country, my land. And if I don't defend it, who will?"
Mykola has returned to his brigade, back on the front line, and again outmanned and facing difficult odds.
Only this time, he says, he won't be taken prisoner.
Yaroslava says she knows what that means — but chooses to believe it means he will escape.
She picks up her phone and writes him a message.
Copyright 2024 NPR
