230 days on the front line: Hunger, friendly fire and a Ukrainian soldier missing near Kostiantynivka

On Nadiia Osadcha's wrist is a silver watch with a blue face - her favorite color, the color of her eyes. Three words are engraved on it: "Love you, kisses, bye."

They were the words her husband, Hennadii, used to end every conversation.

He said them in his final voice message, too. But this time, he added something he had never said before: "We'll talk tomorrow."

Then he left the basement of the building where his unit was stationed and went upstairs to watch for Russian troops.

The position was on the outermost line of Ukrainian defenses near Kostiantynivka, a city in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast. The 42-year-old infantryman had spent 230 days there, enduring hunger, thirst, shelling and the deaths of fellow soldiers.

On August 2, he went missing.

Seven months on one position

Hennadii and Nadiia had been together since their school years — 23 years in all. They lived near Kropyvnytskyi in central Ukraine, where Hennadii worked in construction before Russia's full-scale invasion.

Their only daughter recently turned 18.

Hennadii was mobilized into Ukraine's 100th Separate Mechanized Brigade and deployed to defend Kostiantynivka on December 16, 2025.

Before leaving home, he weighed 96 kilograms (212 pounds). After several months at the front, he had lost roughly half his body weight, Nadiia says.

The family initially feared he would be assigned to an assault unit.

"He later told me, 'The infantry gave me a little more time to live,'" Nadiia recalls, wiping away tears.

For the first 52 days, she had no direct contact with her husband. The brigade's hotline assured her that he was all right, but she did not hear his voice until February 6, when soldiers rotating through his position brought a Starlink terminal.

By March, the couple had established regular contact after troops from a neighboring unit helped obtain and deliver a terminal to his position.

"It felt like he had returned to the family," Nadiia says.

She sent him videos of her everyday life. He told her about what he was going through.

They agreed to speak every morning, but sometimes she waited until evening for a message.

Even when he said he did not feel like talking, hearing his voice meant he was alive.

The building where Hennadii's unit sheltered was repeatedly hit by Russian fire. Once, the roof and collapsed concrete slabs burned for days, making the basement unbearably hot.

The soldiers stripped off their clothes to avoid overheating, despite knowing they might be ordered into combat at any moment.

During his deployment, Hennadii reported three concussions and one shrapnel injury. At times, he began to stutter while inside the basement.

Hunger and thirst

As winter gave way to spring, Nadiia hoped her husband would finally be rotated out. But the relief never came.

Food deliveries grew increasingly unreliable.

On one occasion, the soldiers received a package containing dried fruit and nuts. Hennadii was sitting on his bed with his share when an explosion filled the room with dust, scattering the food across the floor.

He picked up the pieces, brushed off the dirt and ate them despite the sand grinding between his teeth.

He did not know when another package would arrive.

Water was an even greater problem.

Until summer, the soldiers collected rainwater. In one video, Hennadii excitedly watched water run down a sheet of plastic into a cut-off bottle.

"I never knew I'd be so happy about rain," he said. "My mouth is completely dry."

He also dismantled pipes inside the building to collect stagnant water.

June brought dry weather and increasingly infrequent deliveries. According to Nadiia, the soldiers sometimes went three or four days without food.

When a package finally arrived, it might contain 1.5 liters of water, two packets of instant noodles, three snack bars and some candy — to be shared among three men.

They ate almost everything immediately, then waited again.

In one voice message, Hennadii described standing guard and realizing that he might not have the strength to raise his rifle if Russian troops attacked.

"I had neither the strength nor the desire to talk to anyone," he told his wife.

He became dizzy climbing a few stairs or getting out of bed. Sometimes his vision darkened from hunger.

In another recording, he described scraping fat from discarded food cans, mixing it with water and salt, and eating the resulting liquid.

"It smells like meat, like canned stew," he said.

Hennadii also told his wife about soldiers at a neighboring position who, desperate for water, had reportedly consumed stored urine. According to his account, two of them subsequently died. Hromadske could not independently establish the circumstances of those deaths from his account.

Why supplies could not get through

In a written response to hromadske, the 100th Separate Mechanized Brigade said supplying positions near Kostiantynivka had become extremely difficult because of Russian advances, infiltration behind Ukrainian lines, attacks on logistics routes and widespread use of drones.

Neither vehicles nor unmanned ground systems could reach Hennadii's position. Food, water and ammunition had to be delivered by drones, which could carry only limited quantities.

Strong headwinds and the distance to the position sometimes caused delivery interruptions lasting two or three days, the brigade said.

It acknowledged that delays in water supplies may have occurred but said these would not have lasted for extended periods and were caused by serious operational obstacles.

The brigade said it devoted substantial resources to logistics, including more than 2,000 FPV drones and 100 larger drone systems annually, with much of the funding raised outside centralized military supply channels.

A fatal mistake in the fog

One morning, thick fog covered the area around Hennadii's position.

The soldiers had been ordered to fire if they spotted anyone approaching, as Russian troops frequently used foggy weather to launch assaults.

Hennadii saw someone moving toward the building and opened fire.

The person fled and stepped on a mine in the surrounding minefield.

Only afterward did the soldiers learn that the wounded man was Ukrainian.

They were instructed over the radio to call out a particular call sign. The wounded soldier answered.

Hennadii and his comrades brought him into the basement, applied a tourniquet and an emergency bandage, and tried to save him.

He died about 15 to 20 minutes later.

Before his death, the soldier managed to indicate Russian positions on a map and explain that his radio battery had died, leaving him unable to tell his commander where he had become lost.

The man belonged to the brigade's third battalion, while Hennadii served in the first.

In voice messages to his wife, Hennadii expressed anger that the neighboring battalions had not coordinated the soldier's movements.

The brigade offered a different explanation.

It said the soldier had moved without orders or permission from his command, which therefore had no information about his movements and could not alert the neighboring unit.

As a result, the soldiers at Hennadii's position identified him as an enemy combatant.

The incident weighed heavily on Hennadii.

"He told me, 'He basically stepped on something I had planted,'" Nadiia recalls.

The dead soldier had reportedly spent 10 months on his position and was finally being withdrawn.

"He could have been home soon," Hennadii told her.

A rotation that never came

By June, Hennadii had begun telling Nadiia that he no longer believed his unit would be relieved.

"We're going to stay here," he said.

The brigade explained that Russian drones, mined routes and the deteriorating situation at the front had initially made rotations difficult and eventually rendered them impossible without exposing replacement troops to what it described as unjustifiable risks.

It said rotations had therefore been suspended to protect soldiers' lives and health.

The brigade also pointed to footage showing that Hennadii's position had a relatively secure shelter, sleeping bags, furniture and space to rest — conditions it described as better than those at many other front-line positions.

But Hennadii never received the rotation his family had hoped for.

In his final voice message, he told Nadiia that he was going upstairs for guard duty.

"All right, sweetheart. Kisses, love you, bye. We'll probably talk tomorrow. That's it. Pray that I survive tonight. Kisses, love you, bye. See you in the morning."

After that, Nadiia's messages remained unread.

Three days later, on August 5, the brigade informed her that her husband was missing.

According to the brigade, Hennadii disappeared on August 2, between 11:39 a.m. and 11:55 a.m., after his position came under artillery fire.

The military unit said it had taken all possible measures to determine his whereabouts, but the efforts had been unsuccessful.

For Nadiia, the absence of an answer has left her suspended between hope and grief.

"They simply cannot find him," she says.

"You live in uncertainty, between two worlds. On one side, you hope and want to go on living, thinking and dreaming that he'll return. On the other, you imagine that he has died. How do you go on without him?"

Reporting by Diana Butsko for hromadske.