Valentyna Panova lost her husband to this war. In the first days of the full-scale invasion, long-haul trucker Volodymyr Panov tried to reach his family. Early in March 2022, he was on the Zhytomyr Highway. He was walking along the section near Kyiv where Russian military shot no less than 27 people and wounded 5.

Valentyna remembers her husband’s call. He managed to say he was being shot at. He was asking where he could pass through safely. He never got in touch again. The singed body of Volodymyr Panov, along with three other bodies, was found by the roadside after liberation. They were put together with tires tossed on top of them. The forensic examination results showed that Volodymyr died from a head gunshot.

Valentyna also almost lost her son in the early days of the invasion. He joined the village’s territorial defense. The boys ventured on a highly risky raid: stripping the Russian militaries’ KamAZ of weapons! But they had no such luck with their second raid. They came across the occupiers’ recon team who fired at them.