Worthy children of worthy parents: sons of the Heavenly Hundred Heroes stand up for Ukraine

He married the daughter of a fallen Maidan activist

When the Maidan broke out, none of the teachers at Starokostiantyniv school were surprised that their colleague, 52-year-old Serhii Bondarchuk, a physics teacher, was one of the first to go there. The man spent all his days off in Kyiv. In Starokostiantyniv, Khmelnytskyi region, he was known as a patriot. He was the head of the city's organization of the Svoboda Association.

And when one of his friends asked: “What will happen to Ukraine? We might have to go to war” heanswered: “So, we will fight.”

He always took his wife with him. His colleagues also traveled with him. But when full mobilization to Kyiv was announced after the night of bloody confrontation from February 18 to 19, he refused to allow women to go:“Only men will go this time.”

“The last time I talked to my father was on February 19,” recalls his now 39-year-old son Volodymyr, “We agreed to meet the next day. And finally, he added: ‘If necessary, I am ready to die for the sake of Maidan's victory.’ It was a historic moment, a critical moment. He must have felt that something terrible could happen.”

On the morning of February 20, 2014, the Khmelnytskyi Hundred, which Bondarchuk Sr. had joined, split into two groups. One part was to stay and guard the Kyiv City State Administration, while the other was to go to the Maidan. Serhii immediately went to the front line.

He was carrying a wounded young man away from the shooting on Instytutska Street when he was hit. A bullet with a shifted center of gravity damaged all his internal organs and exited through the body. The man died near the Kozatskyi Hotel.

Serhii's death broke his wife, for whom he was her first love. Serhii called her “my Taniushka”, and they lived together for 33 years, “like newlyweds on their honeymoon”, she recalls. She would dedicate poems to her lover and write a book.

“I can't accept that a man who never held a weapon in his hands, only a pen to check children's notebooks, could be killed,” says Tetiana.

Their son Volodymyr says that they were able to recreate their father's every move that day — almost to the minute. But the years of court hearings and attempts to establish justice have resulted in practically nothing.

“The key suspects in the most massive murder on Maidan were exchanged for our prisoners when the trial was about to end. They ended up in Russia,” disappointed with the Ukrainian judiciary, thehero's son resigned from the post of head of the Family of the Heavenly Hundred Heroes organization, which he had headed for 5 years.

But every cloud has a silver lining: at a family reunion, he met Iryna Khomiak, the daughter of the fallen Maidan activist Viktor Khomiak. Three years after the Revolution of Dignity, they got married.

“At some point, I realized that there was a person I had been looking for all my life. The person I want to be with. Someone who shares my views, someone with whom I feel good,” says Volodymyr Bondarchuk.

They had a son, Ustym, who is now three and a half years old. The day after the man spoke to hromadske, his wife was taken to the maternity ward for the second time.

Volodymyr went to the military registration and enlistment office back in 2014, but he was not drafted into the Armed Forces then. When the full-scale invasion began, the next day he was at the Territorial Recruitment Center with his belongings. Now, as a former programmer in civilian life and as a person with a military technical education, the man performs tasks in the defense sector.

He cannot tell us about the service, only that it is related to cyber defense: “I am an information security expert.”

He says he keeps in touch with the families of the Heavenly Hundred heroes. Many of them are at war —fathers and brothers of the protesters who were killed are at the front.

Many Maidan activists died after the full-scale invasion. One of them was carrying out a wounded man with Volodymyr's father during the shootings. Volodymyr also found the boy who was saved by his father. He is also defending Ukraine in the war.

“People continue to pay with their blood for freedom. My father and other Maidan activists were the first to die for the country since its recent independence. His death shocked me. I had the same views before, but the way my father behaved on the day he died... His death was heroic. I am proud of him. He is a role model for me and many people,” Volodymyr says.

“If I have an opportunity to visit Maidan, I go. It is such a place of power! For me, Maidan has become a worldview change, a point of rethinking many meanings. There, I can talk to my father, somehow re-adjust myself, and continue to do what I need to do. The memory of my father is alive, it is always with me.”

The man recalls going fishing with his father in the village of Hubyn, where he was born. The first tackle and catches, nature, views of the Sluch River, archaeologists searching for something on the site of the princely castle, his father telling the legends of this land... And he explored it, loved studying the history of Ukraine, especially interested in the times of the Cossacks and the UPA.

“One of the first favorite books he read to me was about the ataman of the Zaporizhzhia Sich, Ivan Sirko. He supported my interest in science and sports: I did track and field, martial arts, and played volleyball since the 5th grade.

My father would come to training and competitions. He was happy to see my success in physics, and we spent a lot of time together preparing for the physics competitions. He had a great influence on the formation and development of my personality.

When my mother lost him and heard that I was going to war, she was angry at first, calling me selfish. Now she says she is proud of my decision. I think my dad is too.”

“My father taught me everything I know”

Volodymyr Kulchytskyi worked as a janitor for ten years to get an apartment. But he was creative in his work and sought joy in it: he would fill in the ice rink for children and enjoy it himself.

His workshop at the summer house was twice as big as the house itself. He knew how to do carpentry, and had skills as an electric welder and a locksmith. In the 1990s, he assembled a team of craftsmen to carry out repairs.

That's why the poster of the fallen Heavenly Hundred activists has a caption under his photo: “Jack of all trades.” And next to him is his wife, whom he loved very much, whom he called Liusichka and even found and planted Lucille grapes for her.

His wife passed away three years before the Revolution of Dignity. In January 2014, the man joined the protesters. He cooked for the boys and took care of them. The Maidan became his place — it recharged Volodymyr.

The 64-year-old man said: “If Maidan is dispersed, Ukraine will have no future.”

In those January days, he defended the barricades on Mykhaila Hrushevskoho Street with protesters. There is an archive video of those days in which Volodymyr Kulchytskyi hits a fire extinguisher.

“It's a bell for Yanukovych, who is killing our children,” theman said at the time.

A few weeks before the dispersal of Maidan, he warned: “If there is a serious brawl, if people are killed, I will take a gun (he was a hunter — ed.) and shoot back.” But he never had to.

He died on February 18 during the storming of Maidan. One of the bullets went through his chest, and the other hit him in the stomach. The security forces were given 12-gauge bullets — they can stop a vehicle, let alone a person.

Volodymyr's son Ihor was with him. Another son, Andrii, also spent that day on the Maidan, not even knowing that his family was there. He managed to get on the last tram when everything was burning.

“I had the salaries of all the employees of the company, which I had to give them. It was about half a million hryvnias. I was worried that the police would take it away. I thought my father was at home because he was not feeling well in those days. If I had known he was on the Maidan, I would have stayed,” recalls Andrii, now 50.

The guilt of the Berkut officers in the case of Kulchytskyi senior has not been proven. It is unclear who shot him because the weapon was not found. The trials are ongoing, but Andrii does not believe that they will end in anything good.

“My father raised us to be patriots, so I went to war. I knew that there would be an invasion. Two or three years before the Maidan, I said that we would not be let out of the USSR without blood. But no one believed me.”

Andrii Kulchytskyi went to the military registration and enlistment office on February 24, 2022. He came with a backpack and all the necessary things. He says that one of his motivations was to inspire his friends and social media followers to go to defend the country by his example.

First, he defended the capital with Territorial Defense, then Chornobyl, and later fought in the Bakhmut sector. He was wounded in March 2023 between Bakhmut and Soledar.

“There were two machine gun emplacements nearby — the enemy wanted to suppress them because our guys were doing a good job there. They fired at us first with mortars, then with AGS grenade launchers. I was going down from my position to the dugout when a fragmentation anti-personnel grenade exploded behind me about a meter and a half away. A fragment went 15 centimeters under my shoulder blade, almost reaching my lungs. Another one struck my helmet and got into my mug,” says Andrii Kulchytskyi.

The soldier did not immediately realize he was wounded. The hot fragment cauterized the vessels, so there was almost no blood. But two fingers could fit into the wound.

After treatment, the man returned to service, but his eyesight deteriorated due to the concussion: his retina was so injured that he began to see double, and instead of a person at a distance, he saw a gray spot. Andrii was discharged.

“I could have harmed my brothers-in-arms. Now I do more good, I volunteer: we deliver thermal imagers, cars, drones to the front.”

He recalls his father, who taught him everything he knows.

“I am also a hunter, fisherman, and mushroom picker. He instilled in me the importance of punctuality and honesty, especially in business relationships. By his example, he demonstrated the importance of love for a woman — he and my mother had such a warm relationship.

One of my fondest memories of him is of fishing with him as a kid, taking it to my mother, and cooking fish soup. We would sit together by the fire on the banks of the Dnipro or Desna. He was a good father, a real man, a decent person.”

“My father is always in my head”

Volodymyr Chaplinskyi did not have a single photo from his military service: “I don't want to keep memories of prison.”

He served in the Soviet Union somewhere in the swamps, eating birch bark out of hunger. He really wanted to live in a democratic Ukraine and kept saying that he was not a slave or some cattle.

His 29-year-old son is also Volodymyr. He recalls that he was just a small, naive child when Yanukovych was elected president. His father must have second sight:“You can't get such people out of power.” He warned that “there will be a lot of blood”.

After students were beaten in 2013, Volodymyr Chaplinskyi, an electrician at the Obukhiv Cardboard and Paper Mill, told his wife Svitlana: “This should not happen. It's time to get off our knees.”

He told his son:“History is being made, and we have to be in its epicenter. Books will be written about this someday.” And every weekend during the winter he went to the capital to the Maidan.

He didn't join any hundred. At first, he was on his own, but later he made friends and met fellows on the barricades.

“At first, my husband was on duty in the open air near a barrel. Then, together with the guys, they set up a tent, which they called 'Steam Locomotive Anarchy'. There were no commanders there, all decisions were made collectively. It was his place,” Svitlana recalled.

In January, a stun grenade exploded near him. He did not go to the hospital to avoid arrest. He kept talking about “titushky”: “They will not bring me to my knees”. He sincerely believed that the Maidan would win and the country would change.

On February 18, the family saw Volodymyr Sr. for the last time. Leaving the apartment, he said: “The spare car key is there, I paid the fine.” When asked why he said that he replied: “It's like I'm in a war”.

The same evening, Berkut officers burned their tent and drank the champagne that the Maidan activists were about to open after the victory.

Chaplinskyi Sr. was killed on February 20. He was 44 years old.

“There is a detailed 40-minute video where you can hear my father's voice. He is running down Instytutska Street and asking people: ‘Where are the wounded, where are the wounded?’. He hid from the shooting behind a tree. A few minutes later he was mortally wounded. The bullet hit him in the neck, in the carotid artery. He tried to get up, they called medics to him — they were going to sew him up, but he was bleeding out of his mouth... There is another detailed video of his last moments...” Chaplinskyi Jr. recounts that day.

No one has yet been punished for the murder of the hero. But his life and death became decisive for his son. He went to war.

“When the invasion started, I thought that I would rather have a gun in my hand when they come to kill me than stay at home and wait for something to happen. Now many of my friends, my uncle, and my cousin are also fighting. These are all the people I want to shake hands with after the war is over, without hesitation. And of course, I am here because of my father. He is my role model,” the soldierexplains his motivation.

For a little over a year, he performed tasks in a volunteer territorial community formation, and for three months he has been in the Armed Forces.

He recalls his childhood, when his father used to do twine and karate, and loved exercises with nunchakus. He wanted his son to do martial arts.

“He showed me tricks, but I wasn't interested,” Volodymyr laughs. “We also drove cars with together — he loved cars and participated in BMW races, but that was also far from my interest. But we spent a lot of time together and traveled a lot around the country. He wanted to show its beauty. My father was especially fond of Lviv.”

The summer before the Maidan, a father and son went hiking in the Carpathians.

“It was my first hike, and heart-to-heart talks with my father about everything, and nothing gave me a lot. He tried to find an answer to any of my questions. I am grateful to him for this close bond between us. We used to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. on the computer together — it was a single-player game, but we played it together. For the books he gave me to read. For teaching me honesty.

Once my father worked in Cyprus for several years to provide for the family and took my mother and me for the summer. He showed us a lot of things. For example, we went down to a sunken ship on a submarine.”

Chaplinskyi Jr. misses his father very much:“His phrase ‘Hello, Vovunia!’ that he used to say every evening when he came home from work. The way he used to ring the doorbell. Every person does it in their own way. I can reproduce how he did it. I haven't lived much in the world, and sometimes I really want to call him: to ask him how to do this or that. I miss him. He is always in my head.”