Denys Tkach is remembered by his wife, who washed his bullet-riddled body before burying him in his wedding suit, as a doting father, the love of her life. For those who fought alongside him, Tkach was a kind man and a leader. The history books may record him as the first Ukrainian soldier to be killed as Vladimir Putin’s troops swept into Ukraine on the 24 February.
The 36-year-old staff sergeant died alone shortly after 3.40am on the day of the invasion, more than an hour before Russia’s president announced his “special military operation”, his body shredded by bullets from the silenced weapons of unseen Russian assailants.
Tkach had been stationed at a military checkpoint on the outskirts of the village of Zorynivka, in the eastern Luhansk region, where Ukraine meets Russia.
Moments before losing his life, he had ordered the withdrawal of the five young men under his command, members of Ukraine’s border guard.
A handful of Russian soldiers had been spotted via thermal imaging goggles stealing towards the Ukrainians’ lightly fortified position under the cover of heavy snow. It was an advance force. Behind them, an army.
After telling his soldiers to quietly retreat, Tkach had scrambled to grab hold of the position’s sole machine gun, a last act that would earn him a posthumous medal for bravery.
At that moment, the Russians, somehow aware that they had been seen, opened fire with abandon, a cascade of bullets piercing the grey metal walls of the small hut, an old railway car, in which he had been sheltering.
The state border guard service of Ukraine has confirmed that the Russian assault on Zorynivka was the first on Ukrainian territory that morning.
Those serving around the village say Tkach was the first of the Ukrainian service personnel to die in the region. In the fog of war, little is certain, and it may be that other lives were lost in earlier clandestine raids or missile strikes, but there is much to suggest that Tkach was the first to be killed of all those in the Ukrainian military that day anywhere in the country.
“The border guards were the first to feel the treachery of the enemy on themselves and in all directions engaged in battle with the overwhelming forces of the armed forces of the Russian Federation,” a spokesperson for the state border guard said. “At 3.40am, according to the Milove department of the Luhansk detachment, Russian invaders fired small arms in the area of the settlement of Zorynivka. Ukrainian border guards were killed. These are the first losses of our brothers during the large-scale armed invasion by Russia, which the occupying country carried out on 24 February last year.”
It is the most unwanted of garlands: “the first” among the tens of thousands of Ukrainian military personnel to lose their lives in Putin’s war. It is also, perhaps, a mawkish marker. But the story of Tkach’s life and death, told for the first time by the soldiers with whom he served and the wife he loved, offers a heart-rending insight into the pain and misery that has been felt across Ukraine in the last 12 months.
He leaves behind a two-year-old daughter who will never know him, an eight-year-old son whose life risks being defined by the experience of that bloody day and a wife, Oksana, 29, who, within hours of his death, had to retrieve and tenderly clean the still-bleeding corpse of the man she loved, before dressing him in his finest dark suit for burial.
Oksana’s last conversation with her husband, four hours before his death, had been on the phone. An hour-long call during which they had discussed the plans for the upcoming second birthday of their daughter, Dominica. He had been due back from his duties the next morning at 10.30am, and they intended to buy their daughter a push car the following day, the 25th.
Instead, it would be the day of his funeral.
Tkach’s parting words to Oksana remain a torment. “See you tomorrow. I love you. I miss you.” A rare promise unkept.
Today, Oksana recalls the events from one of the three small rooms in which she lives with her children and mother, Valentyna, 55, in a ramshackle shared house on the outskirts of Volodymyr, a small city in western Ukraine.
They fled west last summer from the Russian occupation of their home village, Mykilske, 5 miles north-west of the checkpoint where Tkach was killed.
Oksana smiles at the memory of how her life had been entwined with Tkach’s from the start. “We are from the same village. I lived on one street, and he lived over on the other side,” she says. “We’ve known each other since we were kids. Of course, there’s seven years difference between us, so he knew me first, and I knew him later. Eventually, I grew up and started going to discos and stuff, and started to socialise. We were always friends. He used to take me home from school on his motorcycle, and he’d say to my mum: ‘I’ve brought your little sunshine home.’”
Their relationship only developed romantically seven years ago by which time Oksana had put behind her a failed marriage from which she had a son, Roman.
Tkach, who joined the state border guard in 2007, started to turn up frequently at the local grocer where Oksana worked, she recalls. “My colleague said to me: ‘He only stops by during your shift, he doesn’t come to see me. Don’t you think there’s something to it?’”
The couple married in Mykilske’s small church in 2018 and built a home together with a smallholding of pigs and chickens. While Roman knew from the age of seven that Tkach was not his biological father, the two were as close as could be. “He was always Dad for Roma, and Denys treated him as his own son.”
Life had become harder over the last year. While Tkach had not been involved in any fighting after Russian-backed separatists declared the independence of Donetsk and their home region of Luhansk, tensions were high. In recent months, he had considered leaving his job. “I had a whole farm to take care of,” says Oksana. “I had three calves, 15 pigs, chickens, ducklings, all that, plus a vegetable garden, that’s pretty big, you know. That was a lot of work for me, and Denys understood how hard it was for me. And he, even if he had a day off, would get called to work, to a training exercise, or something, and lately, with Russia it was every God-given day that he got called in. So, it was very hard.”
Oksana suggested he sign up for one final year, knowing that her husband would hate to be stuck at home. He signed a new contract in January. “I told him, let’s give it another year, and hope the situation improves. But overall he liked it. He always went on border patrols, so he spent his days walking the border, and you know he was a hunter, a fisherman, he loved the outdoors, it was perfect for him. Whenever they sent him to do desk work, to do paperwork, he’d say: ‘No, please, I’d rather walk round-the-clock, I want to be outside.’”
The fortnight before Putin ordered his troops into Ukraine, had been particularly difficult, however. The couple barely saw each other and so when Tkach had a day off on the 21st, he suggested a family dinner. “He said: ‘Let’s grill shashlyk [skewered meet], pick up your mum, and have her over.’ He’d always bring her over. He just brought everything into the house, what we needed to grill, it was about 5pm, when he got a call that everyone was being summoned, got his things quickly and went all the way to his base.”
Tkach returned at 1am when everyone was asleep to get a little rest before his scheduled shift on the 22nd, seven hours later. “In the morning, we made some food, and I packed his bag – because he was going to be there for two days, I packed him some sandwiches to take with him. We said goodbye, love you, and he left.”
The couple, as was their habit, would speak on the phone throughout the next two days. Their final call was around 11pm on the 23rd, shortly before Tkach was due to take a four-hour break in the hut. All was calm. Beyond the issue of Domenica’s birthday present, Oksana needed to buy a gift for a teacher, and they mulled over the mundane logistics of the school pickup and drop-offs.
“We talked of going shopping in the district town or maybe somewhere bigger. There was no indication of anything … I don’t know what he knew or didn’t know at that point – he didn’t say a word about anything unusual. He was very calm.”
Sitting alongside Tkach in the hut as he had finished the call at midnight was 21-year-old sergeant Artem Umanets.
The two chatted. Tkach mentioned that he planned to take 2 March off to celebrate his daughter’s birthday. Then they settled down to get some sleep, while their colleagues took their turn to patrol outside.
It appeared like any other night – until it wasn’t.
At around 3am, news came through on the radio to the hut that unidentified armed men had been seen on Ukrainian territory in the region.
“Denys made the decision to keep watch until further orders,” recalls Umanets. “While we were observing we detected a group of people moving in our direction and Denys made the decision to move to our positions.”
Tkach told the men to retreat one by one. He would follow once they had all moved further back.
As Umanets took his turn, running in the dark, heart thumping, the rifle fire began just behind him, bullets fizzing through the air. The war had begun.
“They did not take any particular aim, just showered us with fire, the hut, everything that was there,” says Umanets. “I could only see sparks when the bullets ricochetted.”
Patrolling in the village, 300 metres behind the checkpoint, staff sergeant Oleksandr and a junior colleague could not hear the bullets shot from silenced weapons. But the local dogs could and began to bark.
“I said to my junior, something’s not right. And he said: ‘What’s not right?’ Right after that, someone spoke through a loud speaker, and we heard them clearly, two times: ‘If you lay down your weapons and come out with your hands in the air, nothing will threaten your life.’”
Oleksandr called his commander. The response was chilling: “Boys, leave Zorynivka, it’s under fire.” The two soldiers ran for their lives.
Back in Mykilske, Oksana had been woken by the hysterical cries of her daughter in the cot next to her. It was 4am. “I’d never seen her like that. I tried to comfort her, I didn’t know why she was crying so much. And as I’m trying to comfort her I hear the windows rattle and I realise, this is war. And I don’t know what to do. I have to comfort the baby, or should I call my husband, where should I run, what should I do? Thank God, the baby calmed down, she didn’t go back to sleep but she lay on my arm quietly and I started calling Denys.”
It was the most desperate of times, panic was rising. “I must have dialled him five times, and he didn’t pick up. I knew my mum would be up, because she has cows, she gets up early to milk them and stuff. I could hear she was upset as well about everything, and she started to comfort me right away, but I said: ‘Mum, you understand if he’s not picking up he’s already gone’. I could feel it. Mum tried to comfort me, she said: ‘He is a hunter, he knows the land, even if they have to retreat, he would know where and how, he just can’t answer at the moment.’”
Oksana then called her husband’s commander, who insisted that all those at the border had retreated and were safe. But she could not be convinced.
At 6am, Oksana woke up Roman, put some warm clothes in a bag should they not be able to return to their home, and threw down some food for the animals. They drove to Oksana’s mother’s, 4 miles, away in their 1991 model white Lada, her husband’s pride and joy. There she phoned her sister, Svitlana, 35, who lived closer to the border. Oksana was determined to get to her husband despite the protests from the family. “My sister said: ‘There’s Russian machinery and equipment going down the roads, let’s wait a bit.’ But I said: ‘I’ve waited too long already, if no one wants to go with me, I will go myself, I’m not afraid of anything any more.’”
Oksana left the children with her mother and picked up her sister along with two male friends for support, and made the short drive to where her husband had been stationed. A whole convoy of Russian fighting hardware was looming towards them but the fighting forces were unperturbed by the little white Lada going in the other direction.
Approaching the checkpoint, Oksana pulled up to the side of the road, by a barrier. Even before she got out of the car, Oksana could see a body by the hut. And she knew. “I ran, of course I ran. They tried to hold me back. Especially since the people with me could see there was an armoured vehicle there, and people, Russians, behind it.”
She got to her husband, collapsed on to him, trying to stir him back to life. The body was already stiff. Every part of him was assaulted by bullets, even his fingers were broken. Blood was smeared across his face. “I don’t understand how you could put so many bullets into a single man. Everything around was covered with bullet cases, the asphalt around him, and the railway car was all shot-through.”
A couple of Russians tentatively peeked out at them from behind an armoured vehicle but they neither said a word nor approached the desolate woman. “I wanted to scream at them that they had murdered my husband.” The two men travelling with Oksana and her sister went to the local village and borrowed a trailer for the body. She remembers nothing of the drive back.
“By the time we pulled up at home, the head of the village was there, and other people, everyone expressing their condolences, asking what needed to be done. And I didn’t know; I told them I wasn’t prepared for this at all.”
It was 10am. After an hour, the crowd of people dispersed. Those who remained lifted Tkach from the trailer and brought him into his house. He would have to be buried quickly. The war was raging all around them. Oksana’s sister brought some friends to help, along with a woman who was experienced in preparing bodies for burial. The memory of it is unbearable. “We washed him. He was all covered in blood, and at first I thought we’d have to do a closed coffin because even his face was shot. But then, once we washed him, it was just blood, his face was intact. It was very hard. He kept bleeding from his wounds as we tried to dress him in a suit. We plugged each bullet hole with cotton wool, and tried taping it up with scotch tape, but the blood kept coming and coming and coming.”
The next morning at 5am, Tkach’s parents arrived to see their son. Then Oksana had to drive the body 80km to a coroner before returning for a short funeral in her home, and burial in the local graveyard, 500 metres from the house. “I remember my sister was all over me, saying: ‘Take this, take this.’ And I kept telling her: ‘Quit trying to drug me, I want to be in my own mind, I want to remember everything.’”
The priest suggested she say some final words. She broke down by the body: “Why did you leave me? What should I do next without you?”
Oksana could not face telling her son. By accident or design, a 17-year-old cousin broke the news to Roman while she was away from him at the funeral. “I wanted him to remember Denys as he was.” She desperately wanted to be reunited with her son but when that bittersweet moment came after the wake it was devastating. “He hugged me and we started to cry.”
It has been the toughest of times. She decided to leave the village in August, selling all her furniture to pay for places in a minivan going west, after realising that her children would have to attend a Russian school. It would be a perilous four-day drive but Oksana could neither bear the acceptance in Mykilske of the Russian occupation nor the Kremlin’s narrative of events.
Tkach’s own commander and one of those who was with him at the checkpoint on the 24 February have stayed in the village, submitting to Russian rule. On seeing her husband’s former superior on the streets there, walking with his six-month-old daughter and wife, Oksana admits to having had dark, murderous thoughts of revenge. “I believe he is to blame for everything. Because he didn’t warn them, he didn’t call them back from the post.”
Perhaps, most upsetting, her husband’s own parents and his sister, have moved to Russia and today even question whether it was not the Ukrainians who killed their son. “At first people were very upset, like: ‘Why are the Russians here, what are they doing? But then before the month was out, I can’t believe it, people were happy with the new authorities, and supported them, and said they’d been liberated. All the young people, everyone who was against the Russians had left right away. Later, even his parents started to say to me: ‘Are you sure it was the Russians that killed him? Maybe it was the Ukrainians?’ That was intolerable to hear.”
Oksana has heard from those who served with Tkach that they believe he was the first Ukrainian soldier to die in the full-scale war. She picked up his medal for bravery. How does she feel a year on about this tragic footnote in history? “I feel pain,” she says, “I feel lost.”
