Bestselling Ukrainian war poet killed on battlefield in Kharkiv

A UKRAINIAN soldier who had been hailed as one of the country’s emerging war poets has been killed in action.

Maxim Kryvtsov, whose first solo anthology was listed as one of the leading Ukrainian poetry publications by the writers’ association PEN Ukraine last year, died in the Kharkiv region on Sunday. He was 33.

“My dearest son will sprout violets,” his mother Nadia Kryvtsov wrote announcing his death, in reference to one of her son’s last poems.

Kryvtsov first fought as a volunteer during Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Since the 2022 full-scale invasion his ability to express in verse the ordinary soldier’s war gained him a strong following on Facebook and Instagram, and his first solo anthology was published to rave reviews.

His last poem, posted on Facebook two days before he was killed, is written from the point of view of a soldier describing his own death. “He was a man of incredible strength of spirit, incredibly bright, the kindest,” said Kateryna Prymak, a volunteer in the

Ukrainian Women’s Veteran Movement and a close friend.

“He was a man who loved everything: life, the forest, children, animals, poetry, a man who combined the incompatible: a warrior and a poet. And he was a man of incredible strength of spirit who always helped. Everyone rallied around him. He took all the cats, all the dogs in his care. He served for a long time and sacrificed himself completely.”

Kryvtsov was born in Rivne, western Ukraine, in 1990. He graduated from Kyiv national university of technology and design in 2013, but only worked for half a year before the protests began that would become the Maidan revolution.

He was drawn into the demonstrations and in the aftermath volunteered to fight in the war in Donbas, where Russia launched its first invasion.

Serving with the national volunteer corps, a unit run by the nationalist group Right Sector, and later the National Guard, he saw action in key hotspots including Pisky and Avdiivka and quickly began to write about his experiences.

He left the army in 2018 after serving a three-year term with the national guard, but continued to work with old comrades at a charity supporting veterans and a children’s adventure camp.

Last year he was one of the authors selected for Between Sirens, an anthology of war poems.

His Poems from a Loophole was published in 2023 as well and sold out. PEN Ukraine listed it as one of the best works of poetry of the year.