Waiting for Serhiy

His attempts to escape the Russian siege were unsuccessful. He and his fellow Ukrainian Marines were surrounded, dozens of kilometers from friendly lines. They were running out of food and water. Some panicked, others quietly resigned themselves to what would happen next.

Then, about a day later, Serhiy Hrebinyk, a senior sailor, and his comrades emerged from their last hiding place in the sprawling Ilyich iron and steel plant in the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol. He quickly sent a message to his older sister: “Hi Anna. Our brigade surrenders into captivity today. Me, too. I don’t know what will happen next. I love you all.”

That was April 12, 2022.

Nearly two years later, on the second anniversary of the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Serhiy, now 24, remains in captivity as a prisoner of war, held somewhere in Russia. His family is in purgatory, trapped between that day in April and the present.

The initial panicked flood of phone calls and visits to the Red Cross, the Ukrainian army and local officials quickly subsided; The official proof of life took months. The war dragged on and now the Hrebinyks, like thousands of other Ukrainian families with relatives in captivity, wait.

“Life has changed, of course. Almost every day is filled with tears,” Svitlana Hrebinyk, Serhiy’s mother, said this month from her living room.

The wait is as much the Hrebinyks’ war as the war audible from their home in Trostyanets, a city in northeastern Ukraine. Their modest one-story home is not far from the Russian border, where they can sometimes hear the whine of drones or the echo of distant explosions.

They spend the days as best they can until Serhiy comes home. Svitlana often goes to church with her two daughters, Anna and Kateryna. They pray for his return and good health. Anna and Kateryna wake up every day and search messages on Russian channels on Telegram, hoping to see him on the edge of a blurry photo or in a video. Their father, Ihor, monitors Facebook groups, where volunteers share updates about Ukrainian prisoners of war.

“Sometimes I think maybe this has happened to other people,” says Svitlana, 48. “And then I ask, ‘Why Serhiy? Why did he have to be captured?” the Ukrainian government said 3,574 Ukrainian soldiers had been in captivity since November.

April 12, 2022 was a beautiful day on the outskirts of Trostyanets, 420 kilometers northwest of Mariupol. The sun was up. De Winter had finally withdrawn, as had the Russian occupiers of the city after the Kremlin’s failed attempts to capture the capital Kiev. Just two weeks earlier, Trostyanets had been liberated by Ukrainian forces after a short but intense battle that damaged the hospital and destroyed the train station where Svitlana worked for 26 years.

But in the south, Russian forces were ending their brutal siege of Mariupol.

“There was a feeling that the war would soon be over. And then the message came. I read it and was speechless,” Anna said this month, sitting next to her mother. “We all started crying.”

More than 1,000 Marines from the 36th Brigade were captured in Mariupol, the Russian Defense Ministry announced the next day, April 13. About a month later, the Russian siege of the city ended when the last Ukrainian defenders finally surrendered.

Anna, 27, sent a message, but her brother was gone, stripped of his warrior belongings. His term as a prisoner of war had begun.

“Serhiy, we love you,” she sent. “Everything will be fine.”

Nearly two years after Serhiy’s capture, the Hrebinyks trained themselves to tolerate his absence by establishing a routine, but that was certainly not the case in those first weeks as they frantically searched for him.

The day after Serhiy surrendered, Russian news clips showed the captured Ukrainian marines from his brigade, their uniforms dirty and disheveled. The family searched the images frame by frame until they saw a partially invisible face, with raised hands and half-bent arms, a family trait. It was Serhiy, they thought.

“This is it,” Anna remembers saying. As proof, they sent screenshots of the video and his passport to a national coordination center. Three months later, the Ukrainian government called the Hrebinyks to say that the Russians had confirmed that Serhiy was in captivity.

Serhiy’s path to the army was unlikely. At school he was an average student. He played football, wrestled and went fishing – often with grand plans for a mighty catch, only to return with only enough for the family cat. Serhiy largely stayed out of trouble, said Olha Vlezko, 51, one of his former teachers. She spoke warmly of him.

Serhiy smiled a lot. In his early teens, his face was boyish and round, with inviting dimples and a mop of brown hair. And he rarely spoke to his siblings about the war in the east that started in 2014, let alone fought in it.

He was mobilized in 2019 for a year of military service that most Ukrainian men must complete. Then, unbeknownst to his family, he signed a contract with the army six months later. His hair became shorter, his cheeks sharper and clearer. But in one military portrait, Serhiy still looked like a child in his uniform, holding a Kalashnikov rifle that seemed a bit too big.

“I was sad, of course,” sighed his father, Ihor, 51, as he recalled when Serhiy signed the contract. “He was still young then. Why did he go to serve?”

On February 23, 2022, the day before Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Serhiy was a tank mechanic with the 36th Marine Brigade and was aiming to move up the ranks. He had spent time on the front lines on the outskirts of Mariupol as Ukrainian troops fought Russian-backed separatists there and was used to the sounds of battle. Serhiy, then 22, suddenly looked much older on the eve of a much bigger war.

“When we called him on February 23, there was no expression on his face,” Anna said. “We tried to cheer him up, but he showed no emotion. He already knew there would be war.”

What happened after Serhiy’s capture on April 12, 2022 remains murky, but the Hrebinyks have managed to piece together a rough timeline from social media posts and conversations with Ukrainian soldiers released in prisoner swaps. These transfers have been released more than 3,000 Ukrainians so farbut were rare at best and were suspended for much of 2023. Nevertheless, two exchanges this year have given the family hope that Serhiy could be released sooner rather than later.

One released prisoner, a Ukrainian marine who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect those still in captivity, said he was captured along with Serhiy. The Marine’s legs were injured by gun and mortar fire while attempting to break the siege.

He was Serhiy’s friend, he said, and during their last days of fighting, the 22-year-old from Trostyanets shared what little rations he could with his wounded friend.

“He brought crackers, cookies and canned food and asked how I was feeling,” the Marine said. “He helped me.” After surrendering, the two were taken to Olenivka, a prison in Russian-occupied Ukraine, where they were thrown into an open barracks room along with about 90 other prisoners. They slept on whatever they could find. They talked about cigarettes, home and food.

And they waited.

Serhiy was taken for questioning and returned, but was transferred to another prison. Masked men took him out of the cell. “He said goodbye to me, and that was it,” the Marine said.

A second Ukrainian prisoner told a different story to the Hrebinyks. He had met Serhiy in another prison, in Kamyshin, a city on the Volga in western Russia. There, the story goes, most of the prisoners had contracted tuberculosis, which is common in Russian prisons, but Serhiy had avoided the disease. Instead, he suffered the abuse meted out by his captors.

The information was useful, but the most concrete update came on February 26, 2023. It was a video posted on Telegram of a Russian volunteer visiting Ukrainian prisoners. In it, Serhiy, wearing a black-collared shirt, stares at the camera with his hands on both legs. His head is shaved and he looks worried, as if he is afraid of forgetting the script he is about to recite.

“Hello mom, dad, sister, sister. I’m fine. I am in Russian captivity. They don’t hit me, they treat us normally. I have nothing against the Russian Federation. We get food three times a day. I have enough. Good portions. I hope to return home soon. And we will be fine,” he says before the video ends.

It was the last time the Hrebinyks saw him, and time has passed since his capture. Anna had a son and married. His grandfathers died. Svitlana again occasionally works nights at the train station, and Simba, a gray cat, joined the family.

“We haven’t seen it for so long, so this video helps us a bit,” says Anna, who sometimes watches it before going to bed. “Every day we wait, and sometimes we imagine what it would look like if he walked through that door.”

Daria Mitiuk And Natalia Ermak reporting contributed.