The Black Fox of the War in Ukraine

In memory of Igor Burduja, decorated for bravery

in the battles of Sievierodonețk and Bahmut. 

The earth groans under the hail of bullets, while flashes of fire split the air, lighting up the sky with sleepy dawn patches on the horizon. The summer air smells of sweat and danger.

In the distance, machine guns bark intermittently. The dust flies up. The trees are cracking. The weeds bend. Everything around is rustling. Everything seems to be collapsing under the deafening sound of grenades.

It is August 16, 2022. A group of Ukrainian soldiers, deployed near the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, are trying to identify and destroy their enemies.  Russian troops are less than 50 meters away and have taken the Ukrainians by surprise. They are determined to break through the front line near Opitne, a small village on the southern outskirts of Bakhmut.

A sergeant named Igor runs with a half-meter submachine gun in his strong, tattooed hands. Behind him, his small team follows him hunched over, their heads bowed to the ground, guarding their skulls. In front of him, a comrade exhausted from fatigue, who has not slept for 24 hours, leads them through the long, dry trenches, overgrown with weeds and stained with blood. He knows them much better than the newcomers.

Suddenly, the shooting stops and, for a few seconds, there is silence. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians are reloading their weapons and counting their grenades. Then, just as suddenly, all hell breaks loose again.

The rain of bullets rattles mercilessly over the trenches. The shouts of Ukrainian soldiers merge into a single roar:

Guys, we must defend and hold our positions. At any cost! Igor encourages them.

– Where’s the shot coming from?

– How many of us are against how many?

– I don’t know!

– Пи**ец! (Damn it! – from Russian)

– And we’re almost out of ammunition!

Ukrainians charge through the trenches like bulls, driven by insane courage and adrenaline. Igor stops, raises the submachine gun above his head like a trophy, and fires in the direction where he suspects the Russian soldiers are. Then he hugs it to his chest and breaks into a run again.

Bursts and grenades are not just defensive strikes. These are attempts to force the Russians to reveal their positions, numbers, and intentions.

The trenches fork. They always fork. They turn left. They rush past an abandoned shelter, jump over scattered cups, trip over some plastic bowls, but keep running.

– Еб**ь! (F**k me! – from Russian) Igor grumbles as he runs.

They stop when a loud bang shakes the gloomy, black expanses of Bakhmut. Their comrades attack the Russians’ positions with a grenade launcher.

– What a pleasant sound! Igor’s colleague breathes a sigh of relief, squatting down for a few seconds, his face turned toward the rough earth. He takes a deep breath and shows Igor the ditch he should take.

Thick branches, recently riddled with bullets, block their path. Igor hands his weapon to a comrade and grabs the sturdy branches, throwing them over the edge of the trenches. Once the road is clear, they start running again, like madmen.

On their way, they find a wounded soldier. Igor grabs his blood-dripping arm.

– Where’s your medical kit? he asks reproachfully.

– I don’t know, stammers the soldier, turning his head in the direction of the gunshots.

– Give me a medical kit! Igor shouts at the top of his lungs.

– По**й (I don’t care – from Russian), leave it, says the soldier with a tremor in his voice.

– Give me your hand quickly and calm down. What’s your name? Igor tries to defuse the situation.

– Vasile! he stammers, confused.

– Vasilică, hmmm…, Vasilică, my dear, listen to me carefully. I’ll bandage your wound in two minutes and everything will be fine, Igor reassures him in a warm voice.

A few weeks earlier, Igor’s team had come across a wounded soldier in the same trenches in the Bakhmut region. His name was Egor, and they found him thrown aside like a rag by a shell, his body mangled, his face waxen, and a piece of his scalp missing. A piece of shrapnel had severed his temples. His colleagues froze and, their mouths twisted in fear, announced „200,” the code name given to deceased soldiers.

But Igor refused to hand him over to death. Solidarity and camaraderie may be the only powerful and beautiful feeling that war could give birth to. He leaned over him and felt his breath barely flickering. He roared like a beast, rousing his colleagues from their helpless stupor, demanding bandages and someone braver to help him.

He tilted him slightly to one side so he wouldn’t choke on his own vomit, while desperately searching for a tube to insert into his throat to open the airway directly to his lungs. Meanwhile, Egor vomited, after which he was seized by spasms accompanied by a rasping sound like a rusty saw that made your hair stand on end.

Igor did not appear to be overcome by fear, although his hands and voice were trembling as he tore off bandages, poured solutions over the brown wound, and explained to his colleagues how to hold his head so that they could bandage it.

So Vasilică’s wound is a piece of cake for Igor. As soon as he finishes bandaging his arm, he leaves him there and they start running again through the trenches, which sometimes widen enough for two people to walk arm in arm, then narrow, forcing them to walk like ballerinas, then deep, where they can barely see the gray sky, then high, leaving them exposed up to their navels.

All the while, they shoot, crouch, shoot, bend over, shoot, lean back, shoot… shoot… The earth sizzles, the guns in their hands sizzle, their temples sizzle. Bullets whistle, ears ring, trenches rumble, grenades thunder, the sky roars. Only the clouds look at them gloomily, from beneath their smoky eyebrows.

– Huuuuu, бл**дь (shit – from Russian), Igor exhales slowly, crouching down with his heart pounding, ready to burst out of his chest. Guys, we need reinforcements, he notes, as he fits the last magazine.

The air is torn apart by bullets. Shots go out into all the directions. As if it were a scene of madness with no eye to watch over it and no hand to stop it. As if it were chaos from which God is completely absent. And the gunfire is getting closer, a sign that the Russians are advancing with forces and weapons far beyond the Ukrainians’ capacity to respond.

.

***

On the morning of August 16, 2022, Igor was a few kilometers behind the front line, where a glimmer of peace still lingered, unbroken by bullets, shells, and grenades. And he had received orders to head to the front line to support his comrades, exhausted after 24 hours of fighting in the trenches where slaughter, terror, and death reigned.

He got into a car with Andriuha, one of his best friends from the war, and a few other soldiers. The Russians had to be stopped at all costs. They were most likely fighting Wagner’s mercenaries, known for their extreme brutality, including the execution of their own soldiers.

– Good morning, my followers! Andriuha, say something, Igor breaks the silence in the car, which leaves tornadoes of dust in its wake, waving his cell phone.

Andrei looks into the camera and just manages a bitter smile. A few kilometers ahead, the cursed front line looms, swirling in wisps of smoke, in a funeral dance of gunfire and explosions, whose echo reverberates like thunder.

Since arriving at the front, Igor, nicknamed Black Fox, a pseudonym also used on some social networks, with the motto: „The fox has no goal, but it has a path…”, has filmed hours of the battles in which he has taken part. He hung his phone on his bulletproof vest, near his shoulder, with the idea that he would one day write a book about the Russian invasion, which he considers the greatest crime against humanity.

And in his few moments of free time, he plays the vlogger. In front of a makeshift shelter or dark barracks dug into the belly of a ditch, with a freshly built swallow’s nest in a corner, which gave the soldiers hope that it was a good sign, he ridicules them with expressions such as „my followers” or „my fans.”

– Andriuha, say hi to my followers, Igor urges him in one such video, chuckling.

Andrei is sitting on a stool in front of a shelter, talking to another comrade. He indulges Igor and responds with a bitter smile.

– Hello, followers!

He seems to want to say something else, but suddenly loses his words.

– Бл**дь (shit – from Russian)! he concludes somewhat dismayed, bowing his head in silence.

Another day, on some empty fields, they were hauling war supplies in a car: full backpacks, grenades, grenade launchers, magazines, and water bottles. The atmosphere was a bit oppressive, but Igor couldn’t leave them in that state. You don’t go into battle with that spirit. He took out his phone and approached his „brother,” as he liked to call his comrades, kicking off the vlogging fun:

– Andriuha, good morning!

He quickly understood that Igor was up to his old movie tricks again and replied with a big grin:

– Good morning!

– Is that all?

– Good morning! Good day and good morning! Andrei chuckles.

– Say hello to our followers, Igor urges him.

– Hello, followers! Hello followers from Odessa!

– Say hello to the ones in Kyiv too, man…

– Yes, бл**дь (shit – from Russian)! Hello to the followers in Kyiv, Andriuha growls with a smile.

– Here you go, Igor teases him, and they both burst into hysterical laughter at how absurd it seems to them to record such videos during wartime.

In just half a year, Igor has seen so much war, so much cruelty, so much death, and so many wounded, especially in the battles for the city of Sievierodonetsk, that he wonders if anything can still impress him.  Russia had sent tens of thousands of troops to the region, attacking Sievierodonețk from three sides in an attempt to encircle Ukrainian forces.

Igor fought for that city for 52 days straight. There were 52 days under Russia’s relentless artillery fire. During that period, the city was bombed „200 times an hour,” according to witnesses. „Mom, my gun is melting in my hands. It can’t hold out any longer,” he confessed to her once.

On June 24, Ukrainian forces were ordered to retreat to avoid encirclement. Igor later recounted in an interview the fighting and bombing there, emphasizing that their retreat was not covered by artillery. „Help should have come, reinforcements… We were simply covered with fire, we were wiped off the face of the earth.”

And he admitted to his parents that the 52 days in Sievierodonețk were worse than if he had been in hell. „Mom, you won’t believe that a car can run on three wheels when we broke out of the encirclement. I was holding a 55-year-old soldier in my arms. I couldn’t leave him there.”

After leaving Sievierodonețk, Igor decided to go back home to his village. While waiting for a taxi with two other friends, he watched his surviving comrades preparing to go and defend Bakhmut, located 60 kilometers southwest of Sievierodonetsk. He lit a cigarette and went to say goodbye to the „survivors.” And when he returned five minutes later, he told his two friends, „I can’t go home, I can’t leave them.”

He took a break for a few weeks in Dnipro, and in July, together with Andriuha, they threw themselves into „the most intense urban battle in Europe since World War II” – the fight for Bakhmut.

He told his mother, in a joking and optimistic tone, not to worry anymore, because if he survived Sievierodonețk, it meant that he was born again and that everything would be fine, no matter how merciless the next battles would be, because nothing could be more terrible than the battles there.

But now, sitting in the car that is taking him to the trenches near Bakhmut, he is overcome by incomprehensible worries. In the six months since Russia invaded his country, he has learned that death is always close by and spares no one. But he is not afraid of it. He defied it so many times, even mocking it in front of a Russian sniper.

Now, sitting in the car enveloped in an oppressive silence, he feels he must say something else in the video, encouraging both himself and the rest of his comrades. He sighs deeply:

– It’s scary, бл**дь (shit – from Russian), but what can we do? If not us, then who? he asks rhetorically and swallows hard. I love you all. Manson will start in less than 30 minutes. I hope we’ll do Russian Manson, he concludes with a reference to the musical genre of the American industrial rock singer.

***

The birth of Igor on June 5, 1999, was for the Burduja family in the village of Bazarianca, Odessa region, like a ray of light shining into a house where the windows had long been closed in mourning. They had waited for him not only with hope, but with that thirst for life that comes after a great loss.

Three years had passed since the death of Alexandru, their eldest son, who had passed away at the age of 11. After picking some raspberries, he told his brother Costia that he wanted to lie down. He sat down, and that was it, his heart stopped. It was like a blow to the back of the head for everyone and remained forever a black mark in the family’s history.

Costia, the second boy in the family, who was 9 years old at the time, still remembers those endless days of mourning. For everyone. Black in soul, sad, painful, and drowned in tears. „It was three years of living on the edge of a precipice.”

So the arrival of Igor, the fourth boy in the family, on a hot summer day, was like someone pulling back the black curtains and letting the sun shine in again. With him, the family began to breathe again, to smile, to hope.

„Sasha, my first son, died in ’96, and Igor, my last son, was born in ’99… I considered that God had given him back to me. And God wiped away all our tears,” says Svetlana, their mother.

The woman says that Igor was the child every parent would have wanted: she had an easy pregnancy, gave birth easily, and raised him easily. He just grew up… He was very wise and special. I always said, „Lord, thank you for this boy.”  And because he was the youngest, he was loved madly. By everyone.

He was curious, open-minded, intelligent—a mind that wanted to absorb the world. From an early age, he used to sit next to his mother, leafing through encyclopedias bigger than himself, asking questions that even she couldn’t answer.

When he started reading, he said, „I want to know everything.” And it wasn’t just empty talk. At school, he did not learn mechanically. He had no patience for empty phrases. He would read once and could recite the lesson in detail, as if he had prepared all night. A teacher once told his father Valentin who attended the lessons: „I give him high marks, but he didn’t learn the subject matter.” He had a natural way of understanding, of telling stories, of winning people over with his presence and logic.

When the family gathered at their seaside vacation home and Igor was late, everyone would ask about him: „Where’s Igor?” He was the life of the party, the one who energized the long summer tables. Svetlana often buttoned up his shirt, saying gently, „Igoraș, son, close your soul! Cover it up!” to which he would reply, laughing, „Mom, everything’s fine.”

And it really was, because wherever Igor was, everything seemed to become simple. He liked being the center of attention, but he never sought applause. He won it naturally. People loved him. His captivating smile, his thick hair combed to one side, his serene eyes, and his candid charm made him memorable. He was cheerful, full of ideas, always ready with a joke and a solution to any problem. He knew how to help without appearing to make an effort.

When he grew up, he surpassed his older brothers, Costia and Vasia, in height. But height did not change him — he remained the same open-hearted and free-spirited person.

He had fallen in love with the sea. Perhaps because they shared a sense of freedom. Sometimes he would get on his bike and say to his mother, „I’m going to the shore to watch the sunset. When I come back, I’ll finish all my work.” And he always kept his promise.

And after work, he had a ritual—he cleaned his nails and cared for his hands with almost feminine attention. „Hey, Igor, but you’re a boy,” his mother was saying, looking at him intently. And he, with the same disarming smile, was replying, „Yes, Mom, but these hands have to hug the girls tonight.”

He was playing sports. He loved world literature, philosophy, and poetry. He wrote down his thoughts in a notebook. For this reason, Svetlana expected that, after finishing school in the village, he would study journalism. Instead, his sailor father saw him as a student at the Naval Academy in Odessa. But Igor surprised them both and chose to become an investigator.

He lasted two years at university. „Mom, this isn’t for me. I will not work in the police force,” he admitted at one point. So, at the age of 19, he enlisted in the army. He took the oath with great emotion, asking his mother to deliver the official speech in front of the soldiers.

Svetlana remembers the moment as if it were yesterday. He pleaded with the commanders and future soldiers, urging them to cultivate their best qualities during their time in the military. „Be true citizens of Ukraine. Be dignified. „And set an example for those boys who don’t want to join the army. Inspire them because military service isn’t about unwritten rules and dedovshchina. It gives you the opportunity to fulfill yourself as a person.”

Igor returned home from the army with the rank of sergeant. He got a job at a karaoke club in Odessa until he figured out what to do next. He started as a waiter and later became a manager.

On the morning of February 24, 2022, he was at home. He had arrived the day before, on his mother’s birthday. At the festive table, everyone was talking about a possible large-scale Russian invasion and the fall of Kyiv. However, no one believed this scenario. So the morning found them frozen stiff.

Igor had finished his military service a few months earlier, so he didn’t hesitate. For him, the oath was not a formality, and his homeland was more than just letters carved on abandoned walls, words written on worn-out placards, or manipulative speeches delivered from the podium.

He asked his father to drive him to the military commissary in Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi.  He was 22 years old, 1.93 meters tall, and had a charming smile and a gallant gaze. He had a big heart, too. Valentin stared at him intently. As a former soldier himself, he knew there was no way to stop him. „He would have gone on foot,” he is certain. Even his mother’s explanations that he had to wait „until we understand what is happening” did not sway him.

He enlisted voluntarily. First, he went to Chernihiv, which is northeast of Kyiv and where he had done his military service. He was tasked with training the young recruits because he had solid military training and knew war tactics, combat procedures, and battlefield maneuvers perfectly. He also knew how to instill courage in those who were about to step into the heat of battle for the first time.

He then joined the newly formed 115th Mechanized Brigade, and was deployed to Sievierodonetsk.  He asked to be sent there to face the enemy who dared to attack Ukrainian soil. ‘Send me where there is meat.’ He knew war was frightening, yet he was unstoppable in his desire to be on the front line. He was brave; he had no brakes,” his brother Costia describes. Costia also enlisted as a volunteer on February 24 to defend Kyiv.

He had all these qualities on the front lines. He was calm and precise in battle, almost serene. Even while defending Ukraine in the trenches, he had respect for people and rules. „Wherever Igor was, the others didn’t have to worry. He was like a father to us, ready to give his life for each one of us,” his comrades later told his parents. „In battle, he was relaxed yet brave. If you had seen him, you would have understood.”

.

***

Igor crouches down and watches, his ears pricked up like a cat’s. His ragged breathing causes his tattooed chest to heave. He exchanges a few words with a comrade, raises his weapon above his head, and fires a burst of bullets. The barrel of the automatic gun sizzles, the weapon burning his broad palms. His sweat turns into thick sludge that settles in black layers under his watch. The Russians respond. Igor smiles, stands up slightly, signals to his colleague that it’s time to leave, and shouts loudly:

– Guys, пи**ры там (the f***ers are there – from Russian)! he exclaims, pointing in the direction from which the shot came.

He breaks away from the trenches and starts galloping alongside his comrades. It is no longer clear if they are moving forward or turning back. It is no longer clear who is shooting, nor from which direction.

They nimbly leap over the footbridge made of two iron beams.

– „What, we don’t have a war, су*а (bitch – from Russian)?” Igor snaps nervously, then raises his gun and fires.

One of the colleagues arms a grenade and throws it. They all huddle together. After the explosion, they bring the machine guns back into the deadly game, firing them jerkily. The earth seems to scream in agony from the bullets, intertwined with those of the Ukrainian soldiers, who have engaged in a dance of courage and despair.

– At ease! shouts one of them.

– Watch out, on our left! warns someone else.

Deafening booms, sharp cracks, echoes that split the air. Positions change, weapons change. One pulls the trigger while another prepares to replace him. From a side, it all looks like a scene from a video game or an action movie. In reality, the scene isn’t staged. There’s no director, no breaks, and no „Cut!”

A scared stray dog runs through the trenches, stumbling between soldiers’ legs. The Ukrainians smile reproachfully at him and push him aside, continuing on their way. The gunshots are getting closer and closer, making them feel increasingly trapped. Their powers are leaving them. Ammunition is also dwindling. The Russians are stirring. They can feel them on the back of their necks. They are less than 20 meters away.

Amidst the chaos of this Babylon, Igor remains serene. As sharp as a blade, fearless and unhesitating. As calm as deep water and as silent as an unspoken prayer. He closes his eyes for a few seconds. Then, he opens them and thrusts them into the leaden-clouded sky with all his might. Finally, he shouts decisively to his comrades:

– Back off! There is nothing else that can be done.

The soldiers separate. Some go to the right and some go to the left. But Igor stays put. He is determined to hold his ground just long enough to allow his comrades to retreat to safety. The ditch in front of him took the shape of a small funnel, which is the perfect place to thwart the Russian advance and buy time for his men. However, he does have a comrade by his side. At least for a few more moments. He crouches at the earth’s breast, like a child at its mother’s bosom.

Igor takes out the magazine and counts the remaining bullets. He swallows hard and puts it back in place. He signals to his colleague, and they both raise their weapons just enough for the barrels to rise above the trenches. They pull the triggers. The automatic guns are rattling like crazy! The Russians respond with loud booms that crack the sky and tear the earth asunder.

At one point, several grenades land in the trench’s funnel…

Blood floods his khaki pants. Muffled moans and groans, which seem to gather all the pain in the world, can be heard. Tears stream from his brown eyes, and his dry lips whisper, „Mother, forgive me.”

He can barely breathe. The pain from his broken hip weighs on his chest and pierces his life. He doesn’t have time to process how he ended up in the arms of his comrades. They drag him to the first retreat point: an abandoned barn a few kilometers away. They guessed what had happened when they heard the explosions and turned back. They couldn’t leave him in the trenches. „Yes, we took a risk for Igor,” they later admitted.

His half-closed eyes are covered by a spider web. Relentlessly, the cold hand of death awaits him. Igor no longer ignores or defies it. He hands it to her as well.

A gentle breeze picks up and caresses his silver cheeks.

At dusk, two soldiers stop at the Burduja family’s gate. His mother looks at them in dismay. Just the day before, her son had posted a photo of himself and his friend Andriuha on Instagram with the caption, „My bro.” I think they need my husband, she concluded for a moment, except that he had offered to fight since February 24 and they had refused him, arguing that he was no longer the right age…

With stony faces, the soldiers advance and begin to stammer a memorized speech. Suddenly, a strong wind blows and heavy raindrops begin to fall. The sky darkens, the sun disappears, the yard fills with water, and the former German village collapses amid the mother’s desperate cries…

The father watches the turbulent waves of the Danube undulate beneath the twilight sunset from a ship sailing on the river. It’s just as he’s known it for years—playful, sincere, and untamed. He thinks about how much it resembles his younger son. Suddenly, the wind wraps him in its soft arms…

The older brother holds a submachine gun in his strong hands. He guards the gates of Kyiv. The wind caresses his tanned face. An inexplicable urge to call his mother overwhelms him. He takes out his phone. He presses the button and hears terrifying screams on the other end. He doesn’t need words anymore to understand what happened.

.

***

The silence of the Bazarianka village cemetery is often broken by Svetlana Burduja’s sighs and prayers. For three years, the woman has held her younger son’s cold cross to her chest. He gazes serenely and vividly from the gravestone. His fist is clenched to his chest as he understands that he gave his life for beloved Ukraine.

Svetlana caresses him. She cries. Then, looking at him intently, she puts her hand to her mouth, revealing a pain that terrifies you. Then, she hugs him again and starts crying. She cannot accept that he is dead. And the longing… It gnaws at her from the inside like a fungus.

Their love was evident in every gesture, requiring no words. „We understood each other with just a glance. We were on the same wavelength. „No matter how far away he was, Igor knew that I was waiting for him with an open heart,” Svetlana sighs, wiping the dust off the monument.

Every memory is like a dagger in her heart, because she can no longer touch them, but can only call them from the other realm, like shadows that answer her with his playful voice:

– Hello, is this the best mother in the world?

– Igor, come on, no lyricism, just say what you want…

„That’s how our phone conversations always started.”

Not a day went by without Igor telling her how much he loved her. He always attended to her needs without her having to ask. And she had a childlike joy when he surprised her with small gifts. He once bought her a mouse for her laptop. He saw how she struggled when working on projects, but he didn’t say anything. The next day, he simply put the mouse on the table.

Memories go back even further. Igor was attentive to her even before he matured. She still remembers the summer before fifth grade. They had to travel to Odessa to buy him a tracksuit and boots for school. She entered his room early in the morning and leaned down to kiss him. He felt it and grabbed her by the neck, squeezing her with all his childish strength. „He held me close to his chest and said, ‘Mom, I’ll grow taller over the summer, but you should buy yourself a nice dress’.”

Svetlana is breathing heavily. She takes a deep breath as if trying to fill a void. „Damn the war!” she says mournfully, as the Ukrainian flag flutters amid the silent crosses of the cemetery, swaying in the wind and bearing the names of those who will never return.

Once, while working at the club in Odessa, Igor told her that he urgently needed to see her and couldn’t explain any further over the phone. Svetlana didn’t need to be asked twice. She was in town in less than three hours. Igor waited happily for her at a restaurant. He talked to her for two hours about this and that. She listened attentively the whole time, even though her heart was pounding. She kept expecting to hear one of the many frightening scenarios that had crossed her mind, but she didn’t interrupt him. It was only at the end that she eagerly asked him:

– Igoraș, dear, how can I help you with this whole situation?

– Mom, you’ve already helped me. You came, he replied, his face lighting up with a smile.

In the three years since Igor passed away, the woman has come to understand beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is watching over her from beyond this world, just as he always has—with love, care, and the patience of a son who carries his mother in his heart wherever he may be.

„I can smell him. I can smell his scent. He is always beside me when I go to bed. After the funeral, her husband left for sea. I was home alone when I heard the shower running. Rationally, I knew it was just a problem with the water pressure, but deep down, I knew it was something else: he had come home to bathe. And on the plane… Whenever I fly to visit my son, Vasia, in France, the plane is full. Yet, the seat next to me is always empty. If they’re not signs, then what are they? You don’t need to understand them with your mind. You understand them with your heart.”

The last time she returned from France, she landed in Romania. The bus to Odessa left from the station at midnight. It was a cold late evening. A deserted station, a foul smell, and a heavy silence. The homeless people bustled about while she was all alone. She was shivering when she suddenly heard the wheels of a suitcase. It was a girl who was also going to Odessa.

„She looked at me for a long time and asked, ‘Are you Svetlana?'” I froze. Igor met the young woman in 2021. She told me that she had come to the club with her boyfriend, Sasha. Igor told them, „I’m not psychic, but I can tell you two will end up married.” And it came true! After finding out that Igor had died, Sasha immediately asked her to marry him. She recognized me from the photos Igor always showed his friends to brag about me. He sent someone to the station so that I wouldn’t be alone.”

In the case of Jenea, one of the two friends with whom Igor fought in Sievierodonețk and waited for a taxi to go home, the sign was even harder to bear when he changed his mind and went to fight in Bakhmut. The young man returned to the battlefield without hesitation after attending Igor’s funeral. „He died on the same day as Igor, but one year later. On August 16, 2023. The tank he was in was hit directly by a shell. It’s so hard for me to live with all this,” Svetlana laments.

With tears in her eyes, she looks from Igor’s monument to Alexander’s. „After Igor died, Vasia, the middle son, wanted to enlist to honor his memory. Costia was already at the front and insisted on staying to defend Kyiv. I told them, „I’ve already buried two boys. No one goes to war anymore.”

After returning home from the cemetery, she enters his room, which she has turned into a sanctuary. She takes refuge here, among photographs, icons, candles, books, diplomas, QR codes, and drawings of Ukrainian girls, to sit quietly and talk to him. „Tell me, Igor, how is it there with you? I know you’ll get along everywhere.

Igor left behind a quiet yet powerful legacy. His mother found pressed flowers, part of a herbarium they had made together, in a book forgotten on the shelf. On a piece of paper hidden between the pages of another book, he wrote: „You don’t even know how much I love you.” He left her a note before the war. They had just spent all night celebrating his twentieth birthday with the boys in the yard. He knew that his mother hadn’t slept a wink because of the noise. „He washed the dishes, swept the floor, tidied up, and left this note.”

Now, Svetlana writes poems for him and posts them on social media. She wanders along the seashore, intently gazing at each sunset, seashell, and wave that washes over the sand. She grabs her bike and rides to the shore where Igor used to spend his evenings seeking inspiration for new verses. She photographs every heart-shaped cloud, caresses every bud, and collects every raindrop in her palm. And she is always attentive to signs. „This is the only way I feel close to him.”

Valentin, his father, has not coped with the death of his youngest son, either. With fists like tree stumps, he wipes the tears from the corners of his wrinkled eyes. He sits at the table in front of the house. Behind the table stands a picture of Igor that is identical to the one on his funeral monument. He can’t stop thinking about his last meeting with Igor.

In July, he visited him in Dnipro, where Igor had stopped before heading to defend Bakhmut. Spending time together made him realize how much his son had matured. „In the sunlight, you could already see gray hair at his temples.” After they had eaten together, Igor fell to his knees, kissed his hand, and asked for his forgiveness for all the mischief he had caused.

The man’s heart tightened as if it were gripped by a vise. He sensed what was about to happen, because Igor had never knelt down before. „This war… I have everything. We lack nothing. The only thing missing is my son.”

Igor Burduja died at the young age of 23 near Opitne, a village on the outskirts of Bakhmut. He was buried on August 24, 2022—Ukraine’s Independence Day—in his hometown in the Odessa region. He was laid to rest alongside his grandparents and an older brother he never met.

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Editor’s note: To write this article, we watched hours of footage shot by Igor on the front lines, including the Battle of August 16, 2022. He recorded it without suspecting that it would be his last. We also looked through hundreds of photos from his personal archive and analyzed hundreds of comments on social media. We talked for hours with the soldier’s family, relatives, and friends to paint the most accurate picture of the events in the young hero’s life.

Special thanks to  Tetiana Bodnar for helping prepare this material.