The graphic 12-second clip spread quickly across Ukraine. A Ukrainian prisoner of war, unarmed, is derided by his Russian captors, who are recording the scene. He calmly puffs on his cigarette, looks his tormentors in the face and says: “Glory to Ukraine.” Within an instant, multiple shots can be heard. He slumps dead to the ground.
The video, allegedly posted to Telegram by Russian soldiers on Monday, has led to a war crimes investigation and, within Ukraine, a battle over the identity of a man hailed as a national hero and symbol of resistance.
Two families, two battalions and two different home towns have each to varying degrees claimed the man as their own. Military authorities, to resolve the dispute, are considering exhuming a soldier’s body.
At stake is not just a posthumous medal for valour, but the pride of claiming a figure to whom mayors and cities across Ukraine are already preparing to dedicate monuments and streets.
The final verdict will not bring the prisoner back to life, but it will write his name into Ukrainian history, alongside the border guard on Snake Island who famously declared in the face of the enemy: “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.”
The Ukrainian military on Tuesday named the soldier as Tymofiy Shadura of the 30th Separate Mechanized Brigade but cautioned a final confirmation could not be made until the body had been recovered from currently Russian-controlled territory.
Shadura, to whom a Wikipedia page has already been dedicated, was born in Liubar Raion, northern Ukraine, and grew up in the village of Mala Derevychka in Zhytomyr oblast. He had turned 41 on 7 January.
According to the 30th Separate Mechanized Brigade, he went missing on 3 February near Bakhmut, where fierce trench warfare has raged for seven months, with thousands killed.
His sister, Olia, told the BBC she recognised her brother – “[He] would certainly be capable of standing up to the Russians like that,” she said – but later changed her statement, adding that she “was not collecting money on behalf of relatives due to the conflicting reports regarding the unarmed soldier’s identity”.
Some Ukrainian media and bloggers instead claimed the murdered man is Oleksandr Igorevich Matsievskyi, 42, who was also deployed to Bakhmut in November.
About 24 hours after the statement on Shadura was released, Matsievskyi’s territorial defence unit said on 30 December 2022, on the outskirts of Soledar, he and four other servicemen were engaged in a counterattack. The unit lost contact with him and it was Matsievskyi in the video.
In a lengthy post on Facebook, a well-known Ukrainian journalist Yuriy Butusov gave his reasons for believing the soldier killed by Russian was Matsievskyi, starting with a photograph taken of him 10 days before his capture.
In the picture, Matsievskyi has a large plaster on his right eyebrow, which can also be glimpsed on the right eyebrow of the man killed in the clip.
But while the Ukrainian military says Shadura’s body is still missing, Matsievskyi’s body was exchanged for the remains of Russian soldiers killed in Bakhmut in January and returned to the family in early February.
His grave is in the local cemetery of Nizhyn, north-east of Kyiv, where Matsievskyi was living and working as an electrician, alongside other territorial defence members who died in battle.
Dozens of visitors gathered to bring flowers to his grave. A young man lit a cigarette and placed it on the edge of the tombstone, as if to share with Matsievskyi the last smoke that the Russian soldiers didn’t even give him time to put out.
One year after the war began, the Ukrainian resistance still needs heroes and examples of prisoners of war to boost the morale of its troops grappling with the bloody and uncertain battle of Bakhmut.
“This soldier must have had the biggest balls in the world,” said one man. “We should dedicate a statue to him in the city,” replied an older woman.
“I think he could become another symbol of Ukrainian resistance,” said Oleksandr Kodola, the mayor of Nizhyn.“In order to commemorate the hero, there’s going to be quite a few initiatives. It could be a monument or perhaps we could rename a street after him,” he said.
Matsievskyi’s brigade said the soldier’s mother, Paraska, and his son, Mykhailo, 19, and all the men of his unit recognised him in the footage. The last conversation between Matsievskyi and his mother was on 29 December when he told her: “Mum, I will never surrender!”
When the video began to circulate, she told the brigade: “My heart was shaken again. It was my son.” She said she got a call from her grandson Mykhailo who shouted through tears: “I saw how my father was killed!”
Kodola said Matsievskyi’s body was in very bad shape when it arrived at the town’s morgue a month after his death, though his fellow brigade members said the holes in his head from the shooting were still evident.
He said the police and military had prepared the paperwork for further investigation with a possible exhumation so forensic specialists could examine if his wounds could have come from the shots in the video.
“Of course, they could find out that this hero is not Matsievskyi but a totally different person,” said Kodola. “That’s why we have to wait for the general staff of the armed forces of Ukraine to announce an official conclusion.”
In Mala Derevychka, Shadura’s home, an elder of the village said the soldier had been embraced as one of their own. “Everyone is shocked, crying. I will say that the act of Tymofiy Shadura is heroic, because he, as a hero, said ‘Glory to Ukraine!’,” said Serhiy Melnyk.
According to the people who knew Shadura, the man in video not only looks like him physically, but also in the way he smokes, his mannerisms, and in the way he stands.
Melnyk said Shadura was the oldest of a large family, five sons and a daughter, and was a subsistence farmer. He said he was not married and did not have children, and was living with his mother.
Shadura’s sister, Olia, remains cautious about claiming her brother’s identity. “I recognise my brother in that video. But if that’s not him, then I feel for his relatives, and in that case can someone help me to find my brother?” she told the BBC.
It will be weeks before the military’s verdict is delivered. But for many Ukrainians, the conclusion does not matter as there could be thousands of other heroes, soldiers or prisoners of war who, with the same courage, have looked death in the face.
“We will win,” wrote Butusov in his long post on Facebook. “Because there is no such fighter in Russia, and because Ukraine is protected by many tens of thousands of other heroes like this.”
