With flowers, candles, and tears, hundreds of people came on Aug. 29 to the walls of Mykhailivsky Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv to commemorate the soldiers and law enforcement officers who have fallen in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
The monastery’s walls are covered with thousands of portraits of the fallen – creating a monument called the Memory Wall – the result of a volunteer project by military historians who collected detailed information about those who have been killed.
There are almost 4,000 portraits on the wall.
In contrast to the grand Independence Day celebrations five days ago, Aug. 29 was an unofficial day of remembrance for those killed in Russia’s war on Ukraine, which has already lasted more than four years.
The date was chosen as it was the most tragic one for Ukraine’s army – the day in 2014 when hundreds of soldiers were killed after Russian troops shelled Ukrainian military columns retreating from encirclement in the Donetsk Oblast town of Ilovaisk.
According to the official count, 366 soldiers were killed and 429 wounded during the Battle of Ilovaisk, which lasted from Aug. 7 until Aug. 30, 2014.
Eleven soldiers captured near Ilovaisk are still held by Russian proxy forces in Donbas, Oleksiy Nozdrachov, head of the Civilian-Military Cooperation unit of Ukraine’s armed forces, told the Kyiv Post.
Fifteen bodies of soldiers recovered near Ilovaisk remain unidentified, he added.
Targets for blame
As fighting raged to a peak during the battle, and Ukraine’s forces became encircled, the establishment of a “green corridor” out of Ilovaisk was agreed between Ukrainian and Russian military commanders. Even Russian President Vladimir Putin called for Ukrainian soldiers to be given safe passage out of the town.
But the columns of Ukrainian vehicles that attempted to traverse the “green corridor” came under a vicious shelling attack by Russian forces.
Four years later, activists came on Aug. 29 to the building of the Russian Embassy in Kyiv, where they installed 366 crosses with portraits of the killed soldiers to remind Putin of Russia’s war crimes. After that, they burned Putin in effigy.
The Battle of Ilovaisk changed the entire course of the war, forcing Ukraine’s army to retreat and Kyiv into a humiliating peace deal in Minsk.
Ukraine’s authorities play down Aug. 29 as it reminds them of the biggest defeat of the war, for which no military or civilian officials have been held to account so far.
No officials attended the mourning ceremonies on Aug. 29, and President Petro Poroshenko is yet to decide on whether to give the day official recognition.
“I hope those who are currently in high office will also come here next year,” said Pavlo Netiosov, a military historian, addressing the crowd at the monastery walls. Netiosov was one of those who helped recover the bodies of those killed in Ilovaisk.
Finger pointing
The General Staff issued on Aug. 28 a new analysis of the fighting at Ilovaisk, in which it once again blamed invading Russian troops for the catastrophic defeat of Ukraine’s army. It also blamed the commanders of the volunteer battalions for insisting that they leave Ilovaisk on Aug. 29, saying that the army was preparing a rescue operation that was to have taken place just a few days later.
Viktor Muzhenko, the chief of the General Staff, earlier said in an interview prepared for a documentary about Ilovaisk that the taking of Ilovaisk didn’t have any major strategic significance for the army, but “some politicians and businessmen” could have been pressing for it.
Muzhenko said that the decision to send the volunteer battalions to the city was taken after a meeting between military and police generals and volunteer commanders in Dnipropetrovsk in the office of Hennadiy Korban, who was at that moment the deputy governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.
Korban is a long-time ally of oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky who governed Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in 2014 and who sponsored the Dnipro and Kryvbas volunteer battalions that fought in Ilovaisk.
The representatives of the volunteer battalions slammed Muzhenko’s comments.
“This is a master class in how to betray one’s troops,” Mykola Kolesnyk, curator of Kryvbas battalion and deputy from Kolomoisky’s party in Kryvy Rih city council, wrote on Facebook.
Mothers’ tears
Meanwhile, the relatives at the monastery’s walls were more concerned with commemorating their lost relatives than assigning blame.
Nelia Bilenko, 67, was carrying a portrait of her son Ruslan, who was killed near the village of Pisky in Donetsk Oblast near Donetsk airport on Nov. 14, 2014. He was 30.
Bilenko pointed to the same portrait on the Memory Wall, and said her son served in a mortar unit of the 28th mechanized brigade. He was killed after his unit was ambushed, but nobody knows the exact date of his death.
She had come to Kyiv from Kherson Oblast, along with four other mothers whose sons were killed in the war.
“This day is important because of the memory – much of what happened in the war has already been forgotten,” she said.
Historians extended the Memory Wall by several sections ahead of the Aug. 29 event. At the new section, devoted to those most recently killed, many people wearing the black mourning clothes were laying flowers – a grim sign that the war is still taking its toll.
The part of the wall devoted to those killed in 2018 already has 97 portraits.
Read more about Ilovaisk here
