After her younger brother was killed in November fighting Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, Anna Birzul spent two days stricken with grief. Then she sprang into action, penning a petition asking President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to award 29-year-old Bohdan Krotov the highest military honour, Hero of Ukraine.
“We buried him on the 26th, and already on the 27th I had written it,” said a tearful Birzul, 35, standing at Krotov’s grave in a Kyiv cemetery. A portrait of the combat medic, smiling, hung beneath a fluttering Ukrainian flag that featured his Interior Ministry unit’s insignia.
Birzul’s petition is one of at least 2,000 submitted, usually by a relative or a friend, since Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion calling on Zelenskyy to honour a fallen soldier with the award. Fewer than 400 service members have been named Hero of Ukraine since the war began, many of them posthumously, for valorous acts such as helping thwart enemy advances.
The petitions, introduced in 2015 as a platform for popular appeals to the president, are not a formal part of the nomination process for the award, which was established in 1998.
When Ukrainian troops were fighting a lower-intensity insurgency by Moscow-backed separatists, appeals were registered sparingly.
Now, new petitions appear almost daily from grieving widows, mothers and children – first on the president’s website, then splashed across social media – and have become a common ritual in a war that has rallied the nation but shows no signs of abating.
They offer a window into the collective trauma Ukrainians are living through, and underline how virtually every soldier who is killed in battle is seen as a “hero” for helping to defend the country from invading forces.
The government does not disclose its losses, but Western intelligence services have estimated that tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have been killed.
Source: eNCA
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