When Marta Syntchina was first sent to eastern Ukraine as a nursing sister amid the Russian invasion, she and her father, who were stationed in the same brigade, decided not to tell their mother.
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“Mom didn’t know I was here for a long time,” the young woman told AFP, sitting next to her father Ivan Syntchine on a bench in Druzhkivka, a place where she treats wounded Ukrainian fighters.
“We didn’t say anything at first so she wouldn’t cry,” she says.
But when she found out, the mother was reassured that daughter and father were together.
Marta, 25, turned himself in seven months before the invasion of Ukraine. The east of the country had been plagued by conflicts against pro-Russian separatists led by Russia since 2014, but at the time the casualties were few per month.
Today, she says, she treats countless of them.
Marta followed in her father’s footsteps by following her mother’s example and studying medicine with a degree in midwifery.
“My job used to be to bring life to life, now it’s about saving it,” she explains, reaching into her jacket.
While Ivan and his wife are proud of their daughter, he doesn’t think his wife would accept their 18-year-old son getting involved as well.
“We are already too many in the army,” says the 48-year-old, who has served for more than seven years and whose brother also volunteered to fight after the invasion.
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dead together
Marta notes that she and her father are not the only family in this case, naming a father and son on the front lines, a mother and her two sons who work as drivers, and another nurse, their father and brother belong to a battalion of infantry.
And some die together.
Oleg Khomiouk, 52, and his son Mykyta, 25, joined the army together soon after the invasion. They were both killed in a ditch near the besieged town of Bakhmout.
Oleg covered his son with his body during an attack, but a shell exploded nearby, killing them both, according to Yuri Samson, Oleg’s brother, at their funeral in Kiev.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry tweeted a photo of the two men side by side, armed and in uniform, with the caption, “They died together.”
“Some Peace”
Volodymyr Tchaikovsky, 54, tries not to think about death. He serves in the same brigade as his 25-year-old son, also named Volodymyr.
“Of course I’m worried about my son,” he said, sitting next to her in an abandoned house not far from the front lines, near the town of Lyman.
“But he has experience… And that depends mostly on you and your training, then it’s a matter of military luck. »
Photo Anatolii Stepanov/AFP
With years of service, Volodymyr Tchaikovsky was called up to fight against Moscow-backed separatists on his son’s birthday in 2015. Last year he returned as commander of a tank battalion.
That year, he and his son reunited for his birthday and stepped away from the battlefield for a moment to have coffee.
“It’s not really about celebrating a birthday, the main thing is that you see each other, you haven’t been a soldier for a while, you talk about civil things,” says Volodymyr.
His son feels that being on the same team “adds some peace of mind” because they know where each other is and what the situation is like.
“I don’t know how long (the war) will last,” his father adds. “But we have to put an end to this once and for all so as not to cause problems for my youngest son.”