Actress tears up army rulebook to give grieving families closure
At a cemetery in Kharkiv, a priest stands over a coffin. Inside the open casket is a man too young to die. Nearby, a slight woman in military fatigues stands with her head bowed, the only mourner present to say goodbye to Oleg Viktorovych, a Ukrainian soldier who died in a Russian artillery attack.
As the priest swings a censer of burning incense over the casket, she videos the scene on her phone, zooming in on Viktorovych’s name engraved on a waiting wooden cross. She messages the video to his absent relatives – his parents, who live under Russian occupation, and his wife, who fled to Germany as a refugee.
The 38-year-old soldier, a senior lieutenant in one of the Ukrainian army’s anti-aircraft regiments, can only give her pseudonym, “Moon”.
She did not know Viktorovych but is attending his funeral because of a unique responsibility that fell upon her when war broke out in February.
As an actress and self-confessed “very emotional” woman, Moon has taken it upon herself to upend the rule book on the military’s respectful but unsentimental treatment of the dead and their grieving relatives.
Instead, she carries out the task with what she calls “feminine empathy” – even standing in as a representative for the bereaved when they cannot be there in person.
“Normal military people can’t show this emotion. If a general or a military bureaucrat calls a family to tell them this news, it’s brusque and emotionless,” she explains.
“Because I’m a woman who can feel, and families can see that I feel, I can deliver the empathy that they need to accept this news.”
The former actress, who performed at Kharkiv’s Shevchenko theatre and on Ukrainian television, abandoned her life in the limelight in 2015, when she signed up as a volunteer soldier in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the separatist conflict in the Donbas.
Her latest role is one she was forced to play from the first few minutes of this new, full-scale war.
At 5.45am on Feb 24, Moon’s unit, positioned on the outskirts of Kharkiv in north-eastern Ukraine, was hit by Russian artillery. “We were completely unprepared,” she recalls in a café in Kharkiv months later. “Many of my friends died.”
Suddenly, with normal procedures in tatters, Moon realised that she wanted to do things differently for those who might die in the future.
What started as a self-appointed role is now an official task she fits in alongside her main fighting duties, under the authority of the regiment’s “moral and psychological” commander. Moon could not say how many men are in the unit she is responsible for, but she has already overseen the posthumous care of more than 15 of her fallen comrades.
On paper, little about this process has changed. Moon gathers information about the circumstances of the soldier’s death, calls the bereaved family, deals with the paperwork and takes the body from the morgue to the funeral, which she attends as a military representative.
But what makes it different, she says, is the genuine emotion she brings to proceedings.
“I’m grateful to my acting career and its emotive side that has helped teach me how to deliver empathy,” she says.
While grief-stricken mourners would be unlikely to cry in the arms of a stiff military bureaucrat, Moon will often embrace the relatives when she delivers the devastating news of a death. “It’s normal for them to be hysterical, everybody is stressed and shocked. Some are aggressive. I don’t mind,” she says.
With peroxide hair cut into a pixie crop, high cheekbones, bright blue eyes and a heartfelt hug for everyone she meets, Moon’s warmth and vitality is an unlikely harbinger of death.
But she knows her appearance and personable presence is also partly what comforts grieving relatives, particularly those who cannot attend their son, husband or father’s funeral, and who like to think that a beautiful young woman accompanied them on their last journey into the ground. “They are grateful that their loved ones were with me, and yes, it’s because I’m a woman who looks young,” Moon says.
She is also unafraid to stray from the military playbook in order to accommodate families’ wishes.
Viktorovych, for example, was displayed in an open casket at his funeral. “It’s normally a strict bureaucratic military rule that it cannot be an open casket, but I judge each situation individually because it’s very important for the families,” Moon says.
The most difficult part of the job, she adds, is witnessing their suffering. “The dead person is dead, he doesn’t feel pain – he lives in another world. But it’s very painful to see how the relatives experience suffering. Their lives will not be the same.”
One funeral, for a soldier called Yura, whose bride-to-be, Dacha, was Moon’s close friend, sticks out in her mind. “When we buried Yura, Dacha didn’t cry, and I saw that her life had stopped,” Moon recalls. “Yura had died and half of Dacha had died too. It was terrible. I saw a dead body in the coffin and I saw a dead soul looking at it.”
Who is it hardest to break the news to? “Mothers,” she replies without a moment’s hesitation. “They don’t want to believe this information.”
Despite the emotional toll of this proximity to grief, Moon is determined to continue her work and hopes that other military personnel elsewhere in Ukraine will be inspired to follow her example.
“I do worry about myself, I am a very emotional woman and it’s very difficult for me to see relatives’ suffering,” she says. “But I know I can be like a medicine, an anaesthetic for their grief.”
As she talks in the café, her phone rings. It’s her commander; another soldier has died, and she must take the body to his family the next day.
“I don’t know why this job came into my life,” she says as she gets up to leave. “I can’t change anything, but I can help as much as possible.”