In Ukraine, families scramble for news of their POWs
Kateryna Hryshyna said goodbye to her husband, Sasha, three days before the Russian army invaded Ukraine, as he left to join his unit. “This is probably the last time we see each other,” the beekeeper-turned-soldier told her. He said it with such calm certainty it triggered a torrent of tears.
That sense of foreboding proved well founded. Sasha barely survived the cataclysmic battle for Mariupol in May. “At one point he told me he is going crazy, that he couldn’t take the sight and smell of dead bodies anymore,” recalls Ms. Hryshyna as her son and daughter play in a chilly city park. “The shelling was constant. Dogs were eating bodies.
“Then he just disappeared.”
To the best of her knowledge, he is now a
