The Ukrainian artilleryman was ready to shove the high-explosive shell into a launcher and send it on to Russian positions – but first he had to deal with one last thing on his checklist.
“For Uman,” he scribbled on the side of the projectile with a felt-tipped pen.
Then it ducked as it roared on a fiery trajectory to the front line.
Uman is the Ukrainian city where more than two dozen civilians were killed in a Russian missile strike last month. But it is by no means the only city that Russia has attacked, and the message on the grenade was just one of many.
After more than a year of war, Ukrainians have a lot to say to Russia, and many have chosen to say it on the sides of rockets, mortar shells, and even exploding drones. Thousands of messages have been sent, ranging from the sardonic to the bitter, including one from Valentyna Vikhorieva, whose 33-year-old son was killed in the war.
“For Yura, from mom,” Mrs. Vikhorieva asked an artillery unit to write on a grenade. “Fire in hell for our children.”
Ms Vikhorieva said her son, a Ukrainian soldier, was killed by a Russian artillery shell last spring.
“I’ll never forget it,” she said in an interview. “And he will always be my boy.”
It’s more than just venting.
Charity groups and even the military have used Ukrainians’ desire to vent their anger as a fundraising mechanism – good as the messages are, it is unlikely that the Russians will ever read them. The cartridge cases, of course, generally explode into smithereens. And if they hit their target, the intended recipients may not be able to appreciate them.
But for some Ukrainians, it still feels like justice, if only symbolically, says Victoria Semko, a psychologist who works with people who endured Russia’s brutal occupation of Irpin, a suburb of Kiev.
“People are hurting because of the loss, personally and nationally,” Ms. Semko said. “It is normal for aggression to be directed at the guilty.”
The cost of the messages varies. They are essentially a mechanism to encourage donations, and people are asked to give what they can. Revenge For, one of the groups behind the campaign, says it once received a $10,000 donation. But sometimes there are no charges at all.
It’s not just Ukrainians who have paid for messages. The groups behind the campaign say people from Eastern Europe who are still angry about the long years of Soviet rule have also written. Oleksandr Arahat, a co-founder of a group that raises money for the military through the posts, Militarny, gave some examples.
There was a writer from Israel who wanted to avenge the martyrdom of a grandfather by Soviet Internal Affairs. There was the Czech who wanted to commemorate the Prague Spring of 1968, when the Soviet army crushed protests. “Russians Go Home” wrote a Hungarian denouncing the Soviet invasion of his country in 1956.
But most message requests come from Ukraine, Mr Arahat said.
One retiree, Yuriy Medynsky, 84, said he used his meager allowance to send a message not once but repeatedly in honor of his grandson, who was 33 when he was killed in fighting in the Kharkiv region in the spring of 2022.
“To Katsap hermits for Maksym Medynsky. Grandpa,” he wrote with a nickname for the Russians.
“I have in my message all the hatred I feel for Muscovites,” said Mr. Medynsky. He paid about $13 for each message.
His daughter-in-law, Tetyana Medynska, Maksym’s widow, has also sent repeated messages.
“Personally, for me, it’s a little bit of revenge,” she said. “I can’t imagine anyone in particular being killed, as they are all guilty, all the Russians who came to Ukraine. They have no faces for me. When I send money for the massage on the bombs, I feel a kind of psychological relief.”
Some have taken an ironic tone.
“When my friend got married, she asked to write her maiden name on the mortar, to say goodbye to it,” said Private Vladyslav, a soldier at a mortar position outside the city of Toretsk, in eastern Ukraine.
He himself once sent a message: “I congratulated my mother on her birthday in this way,” said soldier Vladyslav.
At that time he prepared an 82 mm mortar with a message from a comrade, Private Borys Khodorkovsky, who was celebrating his 50th anniversary at the front.
“I want those devils to know that I am here and that they feel bad,” said Private Khodorkovsky. “Psychologically I know that this mortar will hit something and that fewer of my comrades in arms will die and fewer Russians will shoot at us.”
But most of the messages are bubbling with unvarnished anger.
“For the destroyed youth,” wrote Dmytro Yakovenko, 38, a pharmacist. He has two daughters, 11 and 14. The family survived a harrowing bombing and subsequent evacuation of their hometown, Lozova, in the Kharkiv region.
“My daughters’ childhood is ruined,” he said. “I want the Russians to know why this mortar is flying their way.”
The unit that fired the mortar with a message for Mrs. Vikhorieva, whose son was killed in combat, is small. The members say they have used the money raised to sell messages to repair vehicles and have fired more than 200 personalized mortar shells so far.
“I feel uncomfortable when someone orders a message for the loss of a loved one, and I know nothing will change,” said Ihor Slaiko, the commander. “But I still sign them.”
His men dutifully write the words on the shell – then send them to the Russian lines with a bang.