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A crowd of mourners lit torches and intoned a military chant to honor a Ukrainian medic and a soldier who fell in love on the frontline and died together in a Russian shell attack.
Valentyna Nahorna, whose call sign was Valkyrie, volunteered as a medic at the start of the war in Ukraine.
She and Daniil Liashkevych, known as Berserk, fell in love just a few months ago, their friends and comrades say, but it helped them endure the war. They both worked in the 3rd Assault Brigade, and were killed Nov. 4.
Their funerals were held on Friday at Kyiv ’s crematorium, a cavernous and grimly modern building often used for funerals of the war dead.
Those gathered gave the chant that Ukrainian soldiers learn by heart when they first start training: “Burn with fire, life-giving, the weakness in my heart. Let me know no fear, nor doubt.”
Kostyl, who like many Ukrainian soldiers agreed to be identified only by his call sign, said meeting Valkyrie helped Berserk emerge from a dark time in his life.
“He finally had a soulmate who also wanted to fight with him and be as close to the war as possible, But this was their last time together, and no one is safe from that,” Kostyl said.
Dvyetshnik, a 3rd Brigade soldier who knew the medic better than her soldier companion, described her as fearless and willing to learn anything.
“If Valkyrie was very sincere in her emotions and thus added a beautiful chaos, Berserk was a real warrior,” he said. “They were a perfect complement to each other.”
In Ukraine
In Ukraine military bloggers on Friday reported that Russian forces were moving closer to capturing a major town on the eastern front in the war in Ukraine as part of their drive westward to capture all of the Donbas region.
Bloggers on both sides reported that Russian forces had entered the village of Sontsivka and were advancing from the northwest on the city of Kurakhove.
Ukrainian authorities made no acknowledgement that the village had fallen into Russian hands, while noting that fighting on the eastern front was heaviest around Kurakhove and Pokrovsk, a major logistics centre to the northwest.
“The Kurakhove direction and the Pokrovsk direction are the most challenging right now,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address. “The military command and brigade command are working on strengthening positions.”
Ukraine‘s General Staff made no mention of the village, saying that Ukrainian forces had repelled 18 of 32 Russian attacks near Kurakhove and 19 assaults near Pokrovsk.
