How memorial to heroes of Russo-Ukrainian war is growing in Lviv before our eyes

"Yes, we met at the cemetery. Grief unites us. I came, crying, and Mrs. Maria came up to me, hugged me and said: ‘Don't cry, because they are doing well there’," says Oksana.

"My son comes to me all the time in my radiant dreams. I do not believe that he is in the grave, I believe that he is there, in the sky. I tell her not to cry, these are our angels now," adds Maria. She shares that Yuriy also appeared in his cousin’s dream, who was grieving for her relative — also in a light-filled dream. He asked her not to cry because "he had a dignified death."

The graves of Yuriy and Oleh are in adjacent rows, one behind the other, at the Lychakiv Military Cemetery, in central Lviv.

During the year of the Great War, almost 300 fresh graves appeared here. Until 2022, however, it was virtually an empty lawn.

A few years ago, during the warm season, people came here to relax and sunbathe. The cemetery administration even called the police, but this did not always help.

A paradoxical story

This place is now familiar to many Ukrainians from video and photo reports. Whenever top state officials come to Lviv, they always come here to honor the memory of the fallen.

Among Lviv residents, this place is known as the Field of Mars. It borders the fence of the Lychakiv Cemetery Museum and Reserve. Some people may think that the new graves have grown outside the cemetery, but it is all part of the same complex.

During World War I, this area was partially occupied by the Austrian military cemetery, where Ukrainian Sich Riflemen were also buried.

But after the Second World War, the occupying Soviet authorities destroyed it and organized a Soviet memorial instead. Among the spacious lawn in the middle of the alley are granite tombstones, under which the remains of 3,600 soldiers of the Soviet army and the Soviet punitive body NKVD are buried in underground crypts.

Just before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the Ukrainian Memorial Society erected a tall cross in the upper part of the field to commemorate the Sich Riflemen who were once buried there. It is right next to the Soviet graves.

In the 1990s, when Ukraine became independent, two sandstone crosses appeared to the right of the alley in the middle of the lawn. The remains of nearly 200 victims of the Lviv prison who were tortured and shot by the Stalinist regime were reburied here. It turned out to be a very paradoxical neighborhood — the victims practically next to their killers.

And since 2022, those killed by the Soviet regime have been laid to rest next to those killed by the latest Russian terror.

Symbolic route of Ukrainian struggle against Russian enslavement

The Lychakiv Cemetery, which has existed since the late XVIII century, has several tour routes. There is no separate tour on the topic of the Ukrainian struggle against Soviet and Russian enslavement.

From the main entrance, to the right near the Field of Honorary Burials, there is a tall monument made of black granite. This is the symbolic grave (the body was never found) of Roman Shukhevych, the main commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), who died in a battle near Lviv against an NKVD unit.

The son of the UPA commander, a political prisoner of the Soviet regime, Yuriy Shukhevych, who died in November 2022, is buried nearby in the Field of Honorary Burials. To the left of the grave is his father's liaison Daria Husiak. She passed away three months before Yuriy.

A few rows away are the tombstones of the Heavenly Hundred heroes who died in 2014 in opposition to the pro-Russian course of the then-president. And next to them is Major General Serhiy Kulchytskyi, whose helicopter was shot down in May 2014 in Slovyansk during the active phase of Russian military aggression in Donbas.

At the beginning of the main alley that leads deep into the cemetery, the view stops at a large white marble angel over the grave of Ukrainian composer Ihor Bilozir. He died in 2000 as a result of severe injuries sustained after an attack on him in the center of Lviv. The conflict was triggered by Bilozir's remark to café patrons for singing "Russian blatnyak" (criminal music -ed.).

Another Ukrainian composer, Volodymyr Ivasyuk, is also buried here on the main alley, having been found hanged in the woods near Lviv in 1979. In 2015, the former prosecutor of Lviv Oblast said that Ivasyuk was killed by "KGB officers."

The main alley of the cemetery turns to the right to another Field of Honorary Burials. It is much larger and shows the scale of the confrontation with totalitarian Russia.

The field is densely covered with granite gray crosses in the Cossack style.

In the center of the field is a column with a sculpture of the Archangel Michael at the top. He holds an oak branch in his left hand and a sword in his right. They symbolize glory and courage. This is part of a memorial dedicated to the soldiers of the Ukrainian Galician Army and the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen. The remains of Plast founder Oleksandr Tysovskyi, the first commander of the Sich Riflemen Mykhailo Halushchynsky, and UGA colonel Dmytro Vitovskyi are reburied in the granite wall behind the column, and the president of the West Ukrainian People's Republic Yevhen Petrushevych is buried in the chapel next to it.

Below the memorial is a dense row of stone graves. Victims of the communist Soviet regime who suffered for their pro-Ukrainian position and members of the OUN-UPA are buried here.

On the right, in similarly dense rows, are monuments over the graves of Ukrainian soldiers who died in the military confrontation with Russia in Donbas since 2014.

By February 2022, there were 66 graves of fighters for independence in the modern Russo-Ukrainian war. Back in February-March 2022, 37 soldiers who died after the full-scale invasion were buried nearby. There are no monuments on their graves yet.

When the space on the field ran out, and the great war was just unfolding and it became clear that it would last for a long time, Lviv decided to continue burying soldiers on the Field of Mars.

New sad history of Lychakiv Cemetery

It is 8 a.m. on a frosty, windy, and snowy day in mid-February. The rhythmic sound of a tram passing by a maternity hospital in the central district of Lviv is complemented by the hum of municipal vehicles.

Across the street, in a thick snowstorm, a small tractor clears snow from the pavement in front of a large snow-covered clearing where more and more graves have begun to grow since April 2022.

Many people, cars, and buses are waiting here again today. There will be five funerals for Ukrainian soldiers.

Five pits are being prepared for them. The cemetery workers are fussing around the excavator and cursing at us for trying to film the process. A middle-aged man gets out of the cab of a tractor clearing snow and apologizes for swearing at his subordinates. It is the director of Lychakiv Cemetery, Oleksandr Dmytriv.

"There are no available hands, everyone is busy preparing for the burials," Oleksandr explains why he is personally clearing the snow.

Until February 2022, there was another director here, but on the first day of the Great War, he and Oleksandr went to the military registration and enlistment office. The director was mobilized. He asked Oleksandr, who worked as a tour guide, to look after the cemetery for a few months. But the war dragged on, and Oleksandr is still in charge.

Due to the lack of workers, he sometimes has to personally help lower coffins into the pit. This happens when a procession with three or four fallen heroes arrives at the same time.

"I would love to hire more employees, but when people hear that they have to register for military service, there are no volunteers," he explains.

Not only Lviv residents are buried at the newest military cemetery, but also those who served in Lviv military units or whose families were forced to leave their homes and settle in Lviv. There are up to 60 graves of "outsiders" here. Among them is Oleh Moroz, who was awarded the Hero of Ukraine star from Mykolaiv. His mother and sister settled in Lviv last year.

There is also a fighter from the now-occupied Berdiansk. After being wounded, he died in a hospital in Lviv. Almost no one attended the funeral. Because the family, including his wife and children, still cannot leave the occupation. So the director asked us not to take pictures of the cross with his name on it, so as not to create problems for his family.

"There are five or six graves where relatives do not come to visit. Here is the grave of a classmate of my father's cousin. He was a former employee of the military enlistment office, then he was mobilized and died. He has no close relatives, except for a great aunt," says Oleksandr.

14 of Dmytro's acquaintances are already buried here in the ground. These are people from different walks of life, but all of them were united by the war and heroic death.

Oleksandr is always present at all funerals in Lychakiv, so he actually works seven days a week. He says that he tries not to show emotion during the funeral, but when there are children crying for their father, he sometimes cannot help but burst into tears.

He knows all the relatives of those buried on the Field of Mars. He even received calls from the soldiers' relatives asking if he was okay when he was unable to attend the joint prayer for the dead, which takes place here every last Saturday of the month. On that day, Oleksandr had a memorial service in another place for his own father.

Our conversation at the top of the new cemetery is interrupted by a call from the gravediggers, who ask us to come back to show them where to dig the third pit with the excavator. Three coffins are to be brought here in four hours. In the next three hours, there will be two more burials.

It is difficult to hold a ceremony for five soldiers at the same time. There are simply not enough hands. The only thing that saves us is that such group funerals in Lviv are not every day.

But when the funeral is postponed for several hours due to missile attacks and they have to bury four or five soldiers at the same time, Oleksandr Dmytriv calls for help from friends who have nothing to do with the cemetery but come to cover with soil the graves of the heroes anyway.