Europe
They Met at Eight Years Old, Married, and Died Together in a Ukrainian Trench
Long stories are often difficult to write and read. So, I sometimes start with a shorter version and let my readers fill in the details of a fuller picture.
The story of Taras and Olha Melster is one of them. Their lives may have started like a fairy tale, but they were robbed of their happy ending by barbaric Russian aggression.
Taras and Olha were both Jewish and met when they were just eight years old. They married at 25 and shared a life.
Like so many other Ukrainians of various ages and professions, they both volunteered for military service, in their case, on the very first day of the Russian invasion back in February 2022.
They shared a trench in a pine forest near the Ukrainian Donbas city of Sievierodonetsk. Sadly, they died in it on June 21, the first day of summer.
The way to tell a long story is to start with a short story:
Taras and Olha lived, loved, and died far too young in the name of Ukrainian freedom. They had no military experience. They were just two married people in love who couldn’t bear to be apart.
The longer story is about the life and death of not only thousands of young, poorly equipped Ukrainian soldiers but average citizens like Taras and Olha, with no training at all.
Taras and Olha had grown up in Kropyvnytskyi, a central Ukrainian city of 230,000, surrounded by wheat fields and relatively unscathed by the physical damage inflicted on many other Ukrainian cities. The couple went to college — Taras studied electrical work, and Olha studied art. After they married, he constructed websites while she founded an online decorating business.
Even though the couple had little military training and she was the only woman in their unit, they found themselves on the front lines. Their job was to hold their trench despite heavy Russian shelling and bombing to prevent the Russians from advancing at all costs. After a particularly intense Russian bombardment, the couple’s bodies were discovered next to each other, ripped apart.
They were only in their early thirties and had begun planning for a family before Russia invaded Ukraine. Instead, Olha and Taras are buried together in Kropyvnytskyi, the city where they are from.
According to Taras’ mother, they fell short of the weapons and heavy arms needed to resist the devastatingly cruel and indiscriminate Russian bombardment. She said that at one point, the couple used their own money to buy a drone. She described the heartbreak of losing her only child, saying it was “indescribable.”
“When I look at the pictures of my son with his blue eyes, I try to talk to him, and if you want to talk to my son, you can look into the sky; it’s the same color as his eyes, and you can talk to him,” Taras’ mother said.
For the longer story, click the links below:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/02/21/tuesday-hili-dialogue-416/
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/04/03/ukraine-apparent-war-crimes-russia-controlled-areas
Some Russian abuses in Ukraine may be crimes against humanity - UN inquiry finds
Reuters
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/03/world/ukraine-older-women-resilience-as-equals-cnnphotos/
