Back in Kyiv, Natalia clings to the arm of a friend, as grave diggers shovel fresh earth onto her husband’s coffin then slot a wooden cross into place on top.<\/p>\n
A photograph of Vitaly shows him smiling, posing beside a yellow sunflower.<\/p>\n
Natalia is relieved to have her husband close again where she and their daughter, Vitalina, can visit his grave safely.<\/p>\n
“[She] watches videos of him, looks at photos and she loves him very much even though they never met,” Natalia smiles.<\/p>\n
She also hopes to tell her husband soon that she’s pregnant using the sperm the couple had frozen specially at a clinic, just a few days before Vitaliy was killed.<\/p>\n
Many soldiers now do the same before heading for the front.<\/p>\n
It’s a brutal fact, but Natalia says none of Vitaliy’s soldier friends made it to his reburial, because so many of them, too, are now dead.<\/p>\n
Ukraine has paid an immense price already for four years of all-out war.<\/p>\n
Ceding land to Russia that it already controls is one thing: an option now quietly accepted by many.<\/p>\n
But Natalia can’t bear the thought of Russia taking more territory, including the town where she and Vitaly lived and were in love.<\/p>\n
She has “no doubt” her husband would have wanted the army to fight on, not concede now.<\/p>\n
“Russia may pause for a year, then there will be another breakthrough and they’ll be in Kharkiv,” Natalia says.<\/p>\n
“I just don’t believe Russia will stop.”<\/p>\n
Additional reporting by Mariana Matveichuk, Anastasiia Levchenko and Paul Pradier<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back in Kyiv, Natalia clings to the arm of a friend, as grave diggers shovel fresh earth onto…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":408524,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-408523","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=408523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/408524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=408523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=408523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=408523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}