The baby tag mix-up that split two lives — and how one found his way home decades later

Maverick

1985.

In a district hospital in Khmelnytskyi Oblast, a woman gave birth to her first child. Almost at the same time, another mother delivered her fourth son. The babies were born the same height and weight. And the midwives mixed up the tags.

“That is how I ended up in a tiny village — two streets, a highway and a railway — in a family of collective farm workers. My real parents — my father, an anesthesiologist who still practices, and my mother, a therapist who is now retired — took home another child,” Yaroslav Vozniuk says with a pang of emotion. He is a lecturer at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and the father of three children.

He grew up in a family with five children: four boys and one girl. All his brothers were older. His father Ivan was a tractor driver, his mother Liuba a calf tender. The family struggled. Although they worked a plot of land, they had no pigs or chickens. The hardest times were the 1990s. His parents received their wages in grain, potatoes and milk. There was no cash. Little Yaryk would walk to his grandmother’s with a glass to borrow cooking oil because there was not a drop in the house.

What kind of toys did village children have? Smoking.

“I had a friend named Valik. I was in first grade and he was two years younger. Near our houses there was a field with gas-concrete blocks where we hung out. That is where we started smoking. Once we talked Valik’s little three-year-old sister into bringing us her father’s cigarette butts. She came home and said, ‘Mom, give me the butts because Yaryk and Valik want to smoke.’ Our mother gave us such a lesson about wanting to smoke that I did not touch a cigarette until fifth grade. Then from age 12 until I turned 30 I smoked. Later I quit again, but last year I started once more,” Yaroslav recounts.

In the village, people had been gossiping since his childhood that the youngest child was not really his mother’s. The boy stood out too much with his intelligence. He studied well and went to olympiads. Once he came to school and the teacher handed him money for the trip: “Go to the city for the informatics olympiad.” Without any preparation, he took second place. When he wrote tests, he managed to complete two versions in one lesson, and the whole class copied from him. English came to him with surprising ease, and at school events, he sang in that language.

His mother bragged about him in public: “How smart Yaroslav is.” That angered him because at home, he heard only “whore, scum, animal.” Often, a rag or even a fist would land on his shoulders.

From age 12, he mowed hay, and from 13, he walked behind the plow. When his father drank, and there was nothing to heat the house with, he would take a saw and an axe and head to the forest. He would dig up a small dry tree, chop it into pieces, put it on his shoulders, and carry it home.

Yaryk’s brothers, meanwhile, earned mostly Ds and Es in school. They were more interested in hanging out.

By the time he was about 16, the teenager clearly felt he was a maverick in this family, an outsider. He told himself that when he grew up and earned some money, he would do a DNA test.

I can choose whether to dig or not

Meanwhile, his oldest brother was killed in Russia while working abroad. After school, Yaroslav did not apply anywhere. His mother said there was no money. He gathered medicinal herbs and sold them by the bag. That is how he earned enough for the first year at Zhytomyr University. He did not study his beloved informatics because it cost 1,100 hryvnias. Instead, he chose mathematics and physics, which cost 800 hryvnias. At the same time, back in his home village, he worked as head of the club, a laboratory assistant, an informatics teacher, and studied by correspondence.

Then a computer store opened in the city, where he sold equipment and repaired customers’ broken devices. During the crisis, the owners’ business survived only because of those repairs. Yaroslav brought his earnings home. That was how he had been raised — all money went to the family. He kept only enough for his apartment and food.

When he finished university, the Yanukovych presidency had begun. There were no jobs in his field. A friend pulled Yaroslav onto a construction site.

“We jokingly called the specialty ‘I can choose whether to dig or not,’” Yaroslav recalls with a laugh.

Soon, he went from being a laborer who mowed grass, felled trees, and mixed cement to becoming a foreman.

“I learned from my father to do with my hands everything that can be learned. Once, they sent us workers to the village of Huta, to The Syniohora Resort is located in the Carpathian village of Stara Huta, in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast.Yanukovych’s hunting residence. Among other things, we had to lay granite steps to the house. The steps had turns. I mathematically calculated which angles to place where. I quickly learned to work with stone. I liked it. Later, I fixed up my own apartment: I have granite windowsills and shelves, my wife has a candy dish engraved with ‘I love you,’ and my mother-in-law has a knife with a marble handle.”

The man put together a brigade and recruited guys from his village. They gladly agreed because they knew he wouldn’t stiff them on pay.

Yaroslav continued to bring his earnings home and asked them to build a new veranda and install running water. But no matter how much he gave, the money was spent in the first month.

“And something inside me broke. If there is no point, I will spend it on myself. I dressed the way I wanted, bought a car — a used Ford Focus for $2,000. That was at age 24.”

To get to the Maidan, I earned money on the Anti-Maidan

Overnight into November 30, 2013, law enforcement officers dispersed the students taking part in the Revolution of Dignity. Yaroslav was at his parents’ house at the time. The footage of the dispersal touched him deeply.

“I decided I could not just tolerate it. I had to go. But there was no money. I had just given it to my mother for my winter stay. Where could I earn some? I heard that in the village, people were being recruited to go to the Anti-Maidan. They paid 350 hryvnias a day. I volunteered. I served that day. It made me sick to my stomach, but I stood my ground. I received the money back in the village.”

While his family was resting, he quietly gathered all his work tools — angle grinders, rotary hammers, drills. Without telling anyone, he set off for the capital. The money he earned was enough for gasoline one way. His mother kept calling and, when she heard where her son was, she scolded him. Not because of politics — because of the money.

Once on the Maidan, Yaroslav started by making sandwiches. Then he ended up in the 14th self-defense company. He lived on the Maidan. There, he met a girl who did not know where to find shelter. He told her to stay close so no one would hurt her. When a piece of cobblestone hit him between the shoulder blades, Oksana treated him. In 2015, they got married.

She watched her son from afar

Yaroslav’s real mother felt from the moment her first child was born that something was wrong. The boy would not take the breast and was nervous. The young woman kept repeating, "He is not my child." Her father, an authoritative figure in the family, reassured her: “Come on, what are you saying! This is your son. Look, he looks like his grandfather.” The woman believed him.

The boy, name changedMykyta, grew up anxious. He studied poorly and did not finish school. His father asked teachers to at least put Cs on his certificate. He got the son a job and then a place in elite military units. But Mykyta never lasted long anywhere. He quit everything. He even served time in prison for theft. His younger sister, on the other hand, studied well and now works as a teacher.

When Mykyta turned 16 and was being registered at the military enlistment office, they took his blood for analysis. The result surprised everyone and made the parents suspect this was not their child.

The woman had access to the archives and learned that on that day, another woman had given birth alongside her. The boy who was probably her son was named Yaroslav. When social media appeared, she found him and followed his life without revealing herself. She waited until the Maidan — until she sent him the photo of two men. One was Yaroslav’s biological father, the other Mykyta. And Yaroslav looked so much like his father, just as Mykyta looked like his blood brothers.

“The parents did not want to interfere or destroy the ‘family idyll.’ When they told me this during our meeting, I cried these big tears,” he says, measuring half a finger. “If you only knew how hard my life was.”

Long identical noses, big ears

By 2014, Mykyta had already known for several years that he was not their biological son. He had overheard his parents talking. Now they rarely communicate. He left after a big quarrel.

Yaroslav, however, decided it was finally time to meet his blood family. They still live in the same small town in Khmelnytskyi Oblast where they lived 40 years ago.

“I arrived, and my mother and sister ran out to meet me,” he recalls tenderly. “My mother hugged me, and I felt she was so close. Immediately I felt calm. Everything settled in my soul and the anxiety disappeared. During that meeting the word ‘Mom’ escaped my lips for the first time. And my sister hung on my neck. She is so small, below my shoulder-height.

We talked for a long time. My father was on a business trip, so we connected by video call. We sat in front of our phones and laughed for a long time at how similar we were: long identical noses, big ears, the same voice, the same way of joking. Both then and now, when we talk, I often feel tears coming. Students know me as balanced and serious, even strict. But my parents, these relationships — they touch me deeply.”

His real father immediately introduced his newly found son to his circle. In the hospital the nurses were amazed: “You cannot tell you apart.” The doctor walked around proudly, saying: “This is my son.”

Yaroslav’s father very much wanted him to take his last name. But the son refused: “I grew up as Vozniuk. My wife is Vozniuk and so are my children. When they grow up and know everything, let them change their last name if they want. I will not object. I will even help with the paperwork.”

It took Yaroslav a long time to decide to tell the parents who raised him the truth. He understood the family would take it hard. And that is exactly what happened. His mother Liuba cried and repeated: “You are mine, you are ours.” When they told his father, who was lying after a stroke and could not speak, he cried.

The parents never got to see their biological son Mykyta. Both passed away: the father in 2019, the mother a year later.

“The collective farm took their health. To hell with it,” Yaroslav sighs. “They worked hard all their lives.”

His relationship with Mykyta did not work out. They turned out to be too different.

But Mykyta did come to the newly formed family in the village. He helped install a monument on the grave of the deceased father. The brothers (whose lives had not turned out well; they do not work and get by on odd jobs) accepted him as one of their own. But there was trouble with their sister. Mykyta got her into debt: he started a business, dragged her into it, and disappeared. She had to pay back about 15,000 hryvnias ($340) for him. Now he does not contact the brothers either.

A new story. A happy one

Yaroslav left the construction work to which he had given about eight years and went to the Mohyla Academy, first as head of the laboratory at the informatics faculty. He proved himself. The dean encouraged Vozniuk to work in engineering. Today Yaroslav Ivanovych is a lecturer who teaches courses in digital electronics. In addition, he works in an IT team as a cybersecurity analyst.

It has already been 13 years since he learned who his real parents are. They have wonderful relations and call each other almost every day. All three grandchildren (Yaroslav has two boys and a tiny Solomiia, who was born in March this year) were born after this story had become part of the past. Only Yaroslav’s wife Oksana, during each of her deliveries, told the story to the midwives, who assured her: “That will not happen to you.”

“When my village parents were still alive, I used to say that I was the richest person: I have two mothers and two fathers. I feel warmly toward my entire family. At some point, all the puzzle pieces came together, and I understood my place in this world.

I am grateful to the parents who raised me: my father taught me to work with my hands, my mother taught me to love family because it was instilled in us that family is sacred. I am grateful to the other parents for giving birth to me and for the support and advice they give: I can call and talk.

My father recently helped me find parquet for the apartment. Oksana’s parents (they are in the United States) helped us buy housing. Her mother is flying in April for Solomiia’s christening. I am a happy man,” Yaroslav says with a smile. “I have what I always dreamed of. I am among my own.”