The funeral ceremony, such as it was, was over in less than six minutes. One by one, the soldiers filed past the open coffin where the body of Serhei Zaikovsky lay wrapped in clear plastic and covered with the battalion’s yellow and blue standard, obscuring the wounds from the tank shell that killed him.
A young blonde woman, ashen-faced and eyes vacant, fell forward across the body. One soldier caught her and led her gently outside as the coffin lid was screwed tight. Six soldiers hoisted it onto their shoulders as her howls cut through the whistling wind outside.
Private Zaikovsky, 27, was killed on March 24 in a ferocious battle to retake the village of Lukianivka, east of Kyiv, from a Russian tank battalion. He was “a rare intellectual, a scholar and a linguist,” his friend and commander, Yevgenii Vradnik, said outside the bare chapel in Kyiv Memory Park
