Talking to journalists does not come easily to retired army colonel Viktor Ovchar. Two decades as an officer in the Soviet army, followed by a third decade in the Ukrainian armed forces, taught the 66-year-old official with the Dnipro regional government to be discreet. But Viktor would do anything in the hope of saving his nephew Ivan, a prisoner of the Russians.
I met Viktor through his son Vlad (43), a volunteer with the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors. They tell me about Ivan during an air raid alert, in a pizzeria near the sandbagged regional government headquarters.
Ivan’s father was Viktor’s younger brother. He died of cancer and Viktor became a surrogate father to his nephew, their bond strengthened by the fact that both are military men.
“My nephew graduated at the top of his class from the naval academy in Odesa,” says Viktor. “They made him commander of a gunboat, the Kremenchuk.” (Kremenchuk is the city where a Russian missile killed 18 civilians in a shopping centre on June 27th).
When Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, Ivan Ovchar was a young naval cadet in Sevastopol. “The cadets were famous for singing the national anthem as the flag was lowered,” Viktor recalls.
Ivan’s wife Kateryna belongs to solidarity groups for the families of Ukrainian prisoners. They have gone to the Red Cross, to Pope Francis and European politicians. Nothing seems to happen. “The UN and other international organisations were created to make order in the world, to prevent war in the first place. They are impotent and futile. I am very disappointed,” Viktor laments.
Ivan’s gunboat was in Mariupol when the war started. Viktor spoke to him via satellite phone. “They were blocked in port and could not leave. They joined the national guards in the Azovstal steel factory. Ivan was not wounded, but he lost 30 kilos during the siege,” Viktor says.
In April, while Ivan and his crew were holed up in the steel factory, the state awarded him a medal of courage. Mariupol held out for two months, three weeks and five days. When the government ordered them to surrender on May 20th, it felt like death. Ivan was captured, along with more than 2,000 fighters.
“We believe they are being held at the Olenivka detention centre in the occupied part of Donetsk,” Viktor says. “Two men from his crew were freed in the last exchange of 144 prisoners.”
Ivan telephoned his wife Kateryna two weeks ago. “The call lasted only 30 seconds,” Vlad says. “The first thing he said was, ‘How are you?’ He had only 30 seconds and he spent it caring for his wife and his younger brother, Andriy.”
Ivan may eventually be freed in a prisoner exchange, but nothing is certain. The son of a close friend of Viktor’s was captured by the Russians and tortured to death. “It took the family 2½ months to get his body. They buried him in the cemetery in Novomoskovsk, 50km from here.”
Viktor and Vlad take me to the Alley of Heroes, a park beside the regional government building where the photographs of thousands of young men killed in Donbas since 2014 are displayed on panels.
Every Friday, the bodies of the fallen are brought to the Krasnopilske military cemetery in Dnipro. “We have so many dead and wounded. It doesn’t seem to stop,” Viktor says sadly.
“The best are dying,” his son Vlad chimes in. “The Russians send the poorest, least educated, from Buryatia [in Mongolia] and Chechnya, as cannon fodder. We are sacrificing our finest.”
