"He was a partisan for the children's sake": the story of a foster family whose father was killed by the Russians

The life of the Savchenko family from Bilka, a village in Sumy Oblast northwest of Kharkiv and close to the Russian border, was divided into "before" and "after" at about 10:00, on 3 March 2022. That was when 45-year-old Mykola Savchenko disappeared.

His wife Liudmyla and their six adopted children would not discover where he went until 21 March, when Mykola was found murdered.

His body showed signs of torture, and had bullet wounds to the head and heart.

Much later, his family would find out that Mykola had been helping the Armed Forces of Ukraine by passing on information about the movement of Russian equipment convoys. This was the reason he was killed.

We came to visit Liudmyla in the autumn of 2023. She is now learning to live without Mykola; to live for the sake of the children he cared for so much. 

***

Sunday is probably the only day of the week that Liudmyla and her children have a lot of free time. On that day, amidst the children’s laughter and lively conversations, the family usually plans out the next week. Their weekday schedule is as follows: wake up at 07:00, have breakfast, get ready for school, do homework and go to extracurricular activities from 14:00 to 17:00. 

"My back is always sweaty, as I'm always on the move," Liudmyla says with a smile.

She is 55 years old. Whilst she is always smiling around her children, she lets her sadness out when alone.

"Sometimes I even think about putting them to bed early. I don't want anyone to see or hear my tears," Liudmyla admits.

She lived in this house with her first husband. After divorcing him, she bought a part of the property and continued to build her life there. 

She then met Mykola Savchenko, and remembers falling in love with him for his kind heart and hardworking nature.

"Mykola was fond of anything electromechanical. It didn’t matter what he was repairing – be it a phone, a TV, a light bulb, a socket or some wiring, it was a one-minute job for him. Every pensioner on the street would come to him and say ‘Mykola, I need you to do this; Mykola, I need you to take a look at that.’ He helped everyone," Liudmyla recollects.

When the couple started living together, the woman already had two sons from her previous marriage. Mykola took care of them as if they were his own, says Liudmyla.

"One was ten, the other was seven. We raised them and provided them with education. The younger one became a soldier and is now in tge combat zone. The older one went to Poland before the 2022 Russian invasion to find work in the construction industry, but he plans to come back to defend Ukraine," Liudmyla says.

Liudmyla and Mykola celebrated 25 years of marriage in January 2022.

"He always dreamed of being a dad"

The foster home, which Liudmyla now runs herself, is home to six children aged six to 12. The boys, Mykhailo, Oleksii and Stas, are modest and quiet. The oldest of the girls, Sonia, is shy. The middle one, Nastia, is active and cheerful, and the youngest, Mylana, is restless and emotional. 

"We have long dreamed of having children. Mykola insisted on creating a foster family. He had no children of his own, and I saw him cry on occasion because of this. He always dreamed of being a dad," Liudmyla recounts. 

When her two eldest sons grew up, the couple often discussed the idea of becoming foster parents. Finally, they decided to go ahead with it.

"My parents had six children. My husband was the only child in his family. And Mykola told me that he suffered because of this," says Liudmyla. 

The couple took Mykhailo, Mylana and Nastia Saloiedov into their family on 14 January 2021, after their mother died of tuberculosis. Mylana was three years old, Nastia was four, and Mykhailo was ten. They have different fathers.

Mykola had become a good father to these children, says Liudmyla.

"As soon as he would come home from work, the girls would be hanging onto him: 'Daddy's home from work'. Daddy would give them sweets. It didn’t matter to them if I, their mother, had already bought a kilo of sweets," Liudmyla says with a smile.

Then the couple decided to take in three more children. Sonia, Oleksii and Stas Didus were welcomed into the family in January 2022. Thus, the foster family became a "family-style orphanage", in the terminology of charity organisations.

"We didn't live a carefree life together for long. A full-scale war broke out," says Liudmyla.

Five minutes stretched into an eternity

On the morning of the 24th of February 2022, the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Liudmyla went to Trostianets, the closest larger town, to withdraw cash from an ATM. The bread shelves in the shops were already empty when she arrived at 06:00. After she returned home with a few kilograms of crackers, the family wondered what to do next.

"Mykola had told me earlier that 14 people lived in his mother's cellar, which is next door, during World War II, and had installed and used a stove there. We went there, where Mykola subsequently added electric heating, a TV set and beds," Liudmyla recalls.

To make the children less afraid, her mother kept them busy; she taught them their multiplication tables, read to them and talked a lot. 

The Russian Army reached Trostyanets’ on the first day of the invasion. On March 2nd, they entered Bilka, the Savchenkos’ village, and deployed their forces on the territory of a farm. 

"We were sitting in the cellar and heard Russian equipment constantly moving down the street. The occupiers were checking houses. They came to our house repeatedly. They broke locks everywhere and took many tools...", says Liudmyla.

The family spent the nights of 2 March and 3rd in the cellar. At around 10:00, Liudmyla and Mykola went outside to prepare food and collect water; it was when Liudmyla went off to attend to the children that Mykola disappeared. Before that, he had asked to borrow her phone and walked somewhere out of sight, promising to come back in 5 minutes.

Those five minutes stretched into an eternity.

"They must have captured him in the yard... We were right there in the cellar, and he was right next to us outside our home, walking back and forth. It was already 01:00, and he was still pacing around... And our Mykhailo even said: ‘Come on, Dad, come to bed. At least sit down with us.’," Liudmyla recollects.

Only recently did she find out that Mykola was a partisan, providing the Ukrainian army with information about the location of Russian equipment and soldiers.

"He told his neighbour about it, but not me. He was often out of the house, but I thought he was just going to work. He was an electrician at the Trostyanets’ mill, which still operated through the first days of the war," Liudmyla said.

"We regret to inform you that we have found him"

As Mykola had disappeared with Liudmyla’s phone, she couldn’t call anyone to report the incident, nor could she seek help in person due to the ongoing attacks. On 18 March, she finally made it to the local doctor, whom she told about the disappearance.

"I said that Mykola had been missing for 15 days. She replied, 'If you find him alive somewhere, praise God…'", Liudmyla recalls.

Upon returning from the hospital, she saw a group of around 20 men, a green Lada Niva jeep and a power tiller near her yard. She remembers how her blood ran cold as she feared the worst: had they brought her Mykola for identification?

"It was another man from a neighbouring village. Russian soldiers captured him too, and he was brought to me for identification. Was he my husband or not? It was all so terrifying," Liudmyla says.

The next day, March 19th, a shell exploded in Savchenko's garden, damaging the house's roof and windows as well as the greenhouse.

Meanwhile, the local territorial defence forces were searching for Mykola Savchenko. He was found on the 21st of March; his frozen, tortured body lying in a ditch on a farm.

"We were in the yard, with the children sitting down to eat," Liudmyla recalls. "I saw a car arrive with a trailer. The district policeman and another man from the Territorial Defence Forces brought Mykola's body. The man said, 'We regret to inform you that we have found him.'"

Mykola had been shot in the heart and head, and his broken hands and fingers and the bruises on his body indicated he had been tortured. Liudmyla says her husband must have died shortly after she last saw him, as evidenced by his beard stubble that hadn’t had time to regrow. He had shaved on the day he vanished.

"We decided to bury him immediately. It was around 14:00, and it gets dark early in winter. After leaving the children at home with the eldest, Mykhailo, in charge, we went with the police team to the cemetery, bought candles and chose a place. I had ten metres of brocade, but there was no coffin. We buried him without it."

When the Russian military carried out an airstrike upon the village of Bilka on March 24th, Liudmyla decided to leave the village for a while and took the children to Zhytomyr for rehabilitation.

"I took all our savings – we had 10,000 hryvnias [about US$270] – and we left. We reached the city of Zhytomyr [around two hours west of Kyiv], where an American woman helped us. A pastor I knew from the city of Sumy, Maksym, told her about our family. They go to the same church. At first, he suggested that we leave the country, but I refused. I reported the trip to the Sumy Children's Service – we couldn't leave until we got permission from the head – and stayed in Zhytomyr for a month. On the 15th of May, we returned home and planted a vegetable garden," Liudmyla recalls.

Ukraine's Armed Forces liberated the town of Trostyanets’ on 26 March 2022. A year and a half later, on City Day in September 2023, Mykola Savchenko was posthumously awarded the badge of honour for heroism and courage.

"He joined the partisans for the children's sake, to give them a chance to live. He was fearless. But now he is gone, and I am alone with six children. It is very painful," the woman says, holding back tears.

I constantly saw him in my dreams for about a year

The rural cemetery is not far from Savchenko's house. Having left the children to the elder son, Mykhailo, Liudmyla agrees to visit her husband's grave with us. She comes here often. She talks by Mykola’s grave, telling him the news as if he was still alive.

Liudmyla asked us to leave so she could be alone with her husband for a few minutes. Afterwards, we continued our conversation.

"Sometimes I go to the garden, and out of habit, I say to Mykola, 'Take a shovel and let's go to work,'" Liudmyla told us, wiping tears away.

For the man's grave, she chose a photo of him smiling. She notes that he was like that in life. The epitaph reads "Tortured brutally by the Russians". The woman explains that the wording was chosen so no one would forget the price of the struggle for victory.

Lyudmila mentioned that for about a year after Mykola’s death, she often saw him in her dreams, where he was dressed in a white suit.

"He comes into the house and sits down silently. At that point I wake up, walk around, and have to come to terms with the fact that I can’t do anything. He’s gone."

We stick together

Until recently, Liudmyla’s youngest son, who returned from the frontlines on military leave, supported her and her other children. But now he is back to active duty.

"We collected the documents needed [for him to have legal grounds to stay and not to go back to war], [confirming] that we are now on our own, that he helped us, indeed. But they still took him [back to military service]," says Liudmyla Savchenko.

She devotes all of her free time to her children, and isn’t employed outside of the home. Officially, Liudmyla is a mother-as-teacher.

"We lack a lot of things. Our family is big, and I am the only provider. For example, we spoke to the local authorities about acquiring a van to transport the foster children, as our four-seater car is too small for all seven of us, but that didn’t come to fruition. There are also holes in the roof of our house from the shell that exploded in our garden," Liudmyla noted.

The family receives social assistance from the state, which the woman applied for half a year after she took in Oleksii, Stas and Sonia. They receive nothing more.

"We aren’t entitled to any additional assistance", she explains.

The mother takes the children to the Trostyanets’ Children’s and Youth Palace, the local community centre, every day, and sends them to English lessons at a private school twice a week. Lyudmila says they are enthusiastic about their studies.

"Mykhailo took up woodcarving. I persuaded Stas to study painting. Liosha (short for Oleksii – ed.) and Sonia now do origami. Milana and Nastia started vocal and dancing lessons, then decided to try beadwork, and Sonia also joined them," Liudmyla said proudly, discussing her children's activities.

The girls go to school in person, whereas the boys have mixed education, attending school some days and studying online on others.

Today, Liudmyla’s greatest dream is to raise her children the way Mykola would have wanted, each of them decent and responsible. She says that her children are always helpful and supportive.

The family grows vegetables, apples, pears, quinces and apricots and keeps livestock. Everyone has their household responsibilities - Liosha takes care of the goats and dogs, Mylana helps wash the dishes, Sonia is in charge of the chickens, Misha watches the rabbits shops for supplies, and Stas tends to the sheep.

"Life is tough for us after Mykola's death, but we stick together. The children understand that I am there for them, and they understand that they are there for me." 

Time flies in the Savchenko household as we converse, discuss memories and play games with the children. Liudmyla sees me off with a hug, and gives me some apples she collected in her garden with the help of her children. Having and caring for them, she says, is what she lives for.

You can support the Savchenko family with a donation. To contribute, please donate to the following banking card number: 5168 7456 1241 0172 (L. O. Savchenko)

The article has been prepared exclusively for Ukrainska Pravda by the Memorial remembrance platform, which recounts the stories of civilians and Ukrainian soldiers who have lost their lives to the Russians. If you wish to contribute, please fill in this form to submit a memoir for a fallen soldier or this one for a civilian victim.

Khrystyna Dovbnia for Ukrainska Pravda. Zhyttia

Translation: Tetiana Buchkovska and Myroslava Zavadska

Editing: Benjamin McBride and Ivan Zhezhera